TEACHER, BANKER, P.M.

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32016, 17 June 1969, Page 15

TEACHER, BANKER, P.M.

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) PARIS, June 16. Mr Georges Pompidou, who becomes second President of the Fifth Republic in succession to General de Gaulle, has been successively a teacher, banker and Prime Minister. He spent the whole of his 25-year political life in the shadow of the general, serving him in a number of positions before becoming Prime Minister in 1962. But the astute, 57-year-old politician, who played the leading role in helping General de Gaulle through last year’s May-June upheaval, differs considerably in style from his former political master. During the election campaign he increasingly put himself forward as a man who would be President of all the French, keeping to broad Gaullist traditions but maintaining his own outlook on domestic and foreign policy. For years, the public image of Mr Pompidou has been of a genial man rarely seen without an American cigarette hanging from his lips, a cultured expert on French poetry who likes to mix in artistic circles and take his holidays at St Tropez before deciding that the Riviera resort was not in keeping with the dignity of his position. But now Mr Pompidou is aiming to establish himself as a leader of France above partisan politics. Credited with having one of the most brilliant brains in France, Mr Pompidou rose to the political heights without having served an orthodox political apprenticeship. He was almost unknown to i his own countrymen in 1962 when President de Gaulle

asked him to form the second Government of the Fifth Republic, succeeding Mr Michel Debre as Prime Minister. He took office at the age of 50, without having been a member either of Parliament or of the official Gaullist Party. He had not even been a municipal councillor. He remained Prime Minister for six years and three months, longer than any other post-war head of Government in France. Towards the end of this period, students’ unrest and workers’ strikes developed into France's worst domestic crisis in 10 years of Gaullist rule. But Mr Pompidou steered the Government through it and in June, 1968, led the Gaullists to a landslide election victory, enabling them for the first time to govern on their own, without allies or supporters in the National Assembly. A few days after the election, to the surprise of most people, General de Gaulle called not on Mr Pompidou but on Mr Maurice Couve de Murville, who had served under Mr Pompidou as Foreign Minister and Finance Minister, to form a new Government.

But observers said the general left open the possibility that Mr Pompidou might one day be President by expressing the hope in his exchange of letters with his outgoing Prime Minister that “you will hold yourself ready to accomplish any mission and assume any mandate which one day the nation might entrust to you.” Mr Pompidou, a courteous but iron-willed man who likes good food and wine and entertaining company, comes from the Auvergne region. His forebears have the reputation of mixing peasant frankness and cunning. He was born in a small village, Montbouif, in the Department

of the Canal on July 5, 1911. Son of a schoolmaster i father and of a schoolmistress i mother, he could read before t he was four. < A brilliant scholar, politics s were far from his mind when < he emerged first from France’s toughest competitive t examination at the top school 1 of literary studies—the 1 Ecole Normale Superieure. ] He settled down to preparing < boys for their matriculation in Latin and Greek. 1 But towards the end of i 1944, a friend on General de ( Gaulle’s staff called him to i handle questions of national < education for the general. < Mr Pompidou stuck to Gen- 1 eral de Gaulle through the years in the political wilder- i ness. He accepted the post of i director-general of the Rothschild’s bank in 1956 after i General de Gaulle repudiated 1 any further connections with i the Gaullist political move- i ment of that time. f

While a banker, he composed an anthology of French poetry and wrote an introduction which is regarded as a classic of scholarship and style. He knows 10,000 lines of poetry by heart. When General de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, Mr Pompidou became his “Directeur de Cabinet,” his chief private political secretary and confidential adviser. After becoming Prime Minister, 'Mr Pompidou quickly gained the respect of experienced Parliamentarians. His personal prestige and influence steadily grew and he became a skilled debater in the National Assembly. He and his smartly-dressed wife have a son, Alain, who is studying medicine. Mr Pompidou has in his office a signed photograph of the general inscribed with a very rare tribute—-“ Mon ami pour toujours” (My friend for ever).