In the House of Commons, Clement Attlee, leader of the Opposition, had just gravely accepted Foreign Secretary Eden's announcement of the Southeast Asia agreement. Suddenly, from the farther end of the Labor front bench, burly Nye Bevan came scrambling over his colleagues' feet to reach the dispatch box. Almost stepping on Attlee's toes physically, as he was in fact politically, Bevan flatly defied his party's leader. The Asia agreement, he cried, was "a surrender to American pressure," and it "will be deeply resented by the majority of people in Great Britain." The agreement was framed, he went on, "for...
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