Which Direction?

In a second-floor bedroom of Washington's Blair House, Leon Blum put on his blue & white striped pajamas, settled down to read Franc,ois Rene de Chateaubriand's Atala, American Indian romance told of the days when "France possessed . . . a vast empire stretching from Labrador to Florida, from the shores of the Atlantic to the remotest lakes of upper Canada." Now France's imperial glory was gone, and her aging but active special emissary, only ten months out of a Nazi prison, had come to the shores of the former colony to plead for aid. "Man," Blum read, "always goes from grief to grief."

President Felix Gouin this week described the U.S. as "the power which possesses the most considerable financial and industrial means." Blum would soon find out if the U.S. was willing to use those means for its avowed aim of reviving world trade. Major French wants were a loan of $2 1/2 billion and a bigger share of German coal production (France's present allotment: about 10%). These, argued Blum, were essential if France was to take her place as a strong nation.

President Truman's proposed $7 billion limit on foreign loans and stiff Congressional opposition to foreign lending were the obstacles Blum faced. But Washington observers thought France might get up to three-quarters of a billion through the Export-Import Bank.

"Yelling on the Fairground." Blum was helped not a whit by Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, who tactlessly made explicit what everyone knew was implicit in the Blum mission--the contention that unless France got U.S. aid she would likely turn to Communism. Said Bidault: if France does not get a big loan "we would almost inevitably be compelled to organize our economic policy in other directions." The world knew "other directions" meant Moscow-ward.

The rightist Parisian daily Epoque angrily accused the foreign minister of "torpedoing" Blum's "most delicate mission." Said L'Aurore: "This is not public diplomacy. This is yelling on the fairground. . . . Bidault talks to the Americans in a manner best calculated to upset them--by threatening blackmail." Bidault hastily said he had been misinterpreted.

A fair wind was already blowing from "other directions." At Odessa on the Black Sea, ships took on the first carloads of 500,000 tons of grain the Russians had promised to France. Communist Leader Maurice Thorez was busy telling his countrymen about Russia's beneficence. A Courrier de Paris cartoon showed Blum as a gloomy war bride bound for the U.S., surrounded by sympathetic French girls saying: "Poor thing, her G.I. doesn't want her any more." Russia was not above trying to win Marianne on the rebound.

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