Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Dean Acheson, Vyshinsky, Robert Schuman and Ernest Bevin, were seated in an inward-facing square. Acheson’s aide, Lucius Battle, described Vyshinsky as ‘sinister, tight, gaunt, with the beadiest eyes I have ever seen’. Bruce was most impressed by Schuman: ‘What a fine man he is, sympathetic, direct, intelligent.’ Dean Acheson was rather fond of the ebullient Bevin. Years later, he told Lucius Battle that he infinitely preferred being called ‘My boy’ by Bevin than ‘Dean dear’ by Anthony Eden.
    The proceedings at the Palais Rose were almost unbearably tedious. After Vyshinsky had talked for forty-five minutes in Russian, his speech had to be translated by a member of the Soviet delegation into English, and to make matters worse, this interpreter was utterly incompetent. At one point Lucius Battle turned to Chip Bohlen and asked: ‘Haven’t they got a better interpreter than this?’ Bohlen, a fluent Russian-speaker himself, replied: ‘Everyone in their delegation speaks better English! This is the water torture, designed to drive us all crazy!’ The Americans soon installed their own interpreter, who translated while Vyshinsky spoke. ‘The Russians went on with their English translation,’ remembered Battle, ‘but at least it gave us forty-five minutes to talk and plan, while the Russian interpreter droned on.’
    Dean Acheson, ‘after a steady four and a half hours at the Council’, acknowledged that ‘his ass was tired’. As light relief, the Bruces took him and Luke Battle to the Monseigneur, with its ‘dozen violinists, a cellist, a pianist, a harpist and heaven knows what other players’. But although the choice of this White Russian establishment had never been intended as a political statement, it almost turned into one when Acheson became very exuberant on champagne and rose to his feet.
    ‘I want to drink a toast to the Berlin airlift,’ he announced.
    ‘Luke, make him sit down!’ ordered Bruce, afraid that matters might get out of hand. If a journalist was present and word got out, the Communist press would have a field day.
    ‘But how?’ asked Battle, looking up at his towering boss.
    ‘Pull him down by his pants.’
    Battle heaved, as instructed, and the Secretary of State dropped back into his seat with surprise, but without a diplomatic incident.
    Even if Bruce could play little effective part in the Conference of Foreign Ministers, he soon found that the power of the American ambassador in France was very great, almost embarrassingly so, now that the importance of economic aid was finally appreciated. In striking contrast to the aloofness which de Gaulle had shown his predecessor, French prime ministers came to consult him even over the composition of a new government. At the same time, Bruce did what he could to restrain Washington’s compulsion to direct affairs. On Friday, 10 June, exactly a month after the strategy meeting on France, he was against putting pressure on the French to grant Indo-China unrestricted independence. He felt it could only provoke them into a more obstinate frame of mind.
    The reason for the ambassador’s power was very simple. After a late lunch at the Travellers’ the previous Monday, 6 June, Bruce had returned to his office to work on a speech for the next day. The telephone rang. It was Maurice Petsche, Queuille’s Minister of Finance, asking him to come round for an urgent meeting. Bruce agreed. The reason was not hard to guess. ‘As usual,’ he noted in his diary after seeing Petsche, ‘there is a financial crisis, and the government wants to borrow 80 billion francs.’
    Bruce admired Petsche for his courage in the face ill-health – ‘his ankles are swollen, his face is purple’ – and for his refusal to give in to members of his own party who objected bitterly to his stand on taxes and agricultural prices. Petsche’s character, shamelessly original for a politician, appealed to Bruce. When Petsche remarked that his Prime Minister, Queuille, was ‘an adorable man’, Bruce observed in his diary: ‘that term would seem odd if one of our Cabinet officers were to apply it to a President’.
    The Bruces were also amused by Petsche’s contempt for the dietary advice of doctors. Evangeline Bruce remembers a lunch where Petsche, explaining that he was on a special regime, was served an ungarnished truffle the size of a small fist as his entrée. His health was so bad that his friends expected his death at almost any moment,