Bitter Attack On Policy Of U.S. President

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28133, 23 November 1956, Page 13

Bitter Attack On Policy Of U.S. President

(Rec. 9 p.m.) NEW YORK, November 21

One of the most bitter attacks on United States foreign policy was published today in the •‘Reporter” magazine, a middle-of-the-road fortnightly, which said that the Eisenhower’s administration’s “peacemongering” had bought the United States closer to war than at any time since 1945 and was delegating too much of its authority to the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr 11ammarskjold.

The views were set out in a leading article, written by the magazine’s outspoken Italian-born editor, Max Ascoli.

He made his criticism in a concluding paragraph in which he said:

“After a Presidential election—and after such a victory for Mr Eisenhower —warnings of the dangers ahead, and sermons on what can be done to avoid them, are of little use.

“Yet two alarms must be sounded because there are two facts that cannot be hidden. This Administration with its peace-mongering, has now brought us closer to war than at any time since 1945, and with its passive middle-of-the-road , policy at the United Nations, it is endangering the best hope mankind still has for peace. ’ The leading article said that, immediately after his re-election, President Eisenhower gave new evidence of his inclination to delegate his leadership, not this time to a member of his team, but to Mr Hammarskjold. "The cause of peace has no more resourceful and dedicated servant than this Swedish intellectual,” the article said.

“But the appallingly difficult tasks he has assumed can be made thoroughly hopeless if the major democratic nation passes on to him the burden of its most critical decisions. “This kind of lazy over-confidence can destroy not only Dag Hammarskjold, but the organisation of which he is the head. “Our Government foredooms Dag Hammarskjold to failure or ridicule by attributing to him unlimited capacity to fix universal troubles, and it smothers the United Nations by massive reliance on it.

“The President and the Administration spokesmen scarcely let a single day go by without stating emphatically that our foreign policy has no other theatre of operations than the United Nations and that all our major diplomatic decisions must be subjected to the test of a vote in the General Assembly.

“Our nation’s diplomacy is decided according to the returns of that lottery.”