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The Resistance Man. Mansholt, a farm-bred fellow who spends his free time sailing his flat-bottom Dutch fishing boat, has never retreated from a fight. He became a wartime resistance hero during the German occupation, later was The Netherlands' agriculture minister before moving to Brussels as a Common Market vice president in 1957. An impassioned Eurocrat, he has repeatedly tangled with Charles de Gaulle's government, which blocked his nomination for the Common Market presidency in 1967.
At least part of Mansholt's program, particularly the assault on some surpluses, is likely to be adopted in one form or another fairly soon. The deeper structural reforms will have tougher going, especially in West Germany, where farmers tend to be more backward and conservative than anywhere else in the Common Market. Meanwhile, the plan received a major boost last week, when eleven of 13 Common Market commissioners voted to approve it. Though potent farm groups and individual governments have yet to be persuaded, many European officials were agreeing, at least in private, with what Mansholt was saying aloud.
* F.D.R.'s Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, speaking of critics who thought that pigs should not be killed until full-grown, remarked: "They contended that every little pig has the right to attain before slaughter the full piggishness of his pigness."