Signs Of Change In U.S. Policy

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28490, 21 January 1958, Page 15

Signs Of Change In U.S. Policy

[Specially written for the NZ .PjI. by

FRANK OLIVER]

(Rec. 8 p.m.) WASHINGTON, Jan. 19. While President Eisenhower’s reply to Marshal Bulganin was a long way from the British view, it is becoming increasingly clear that America is not at all averse from talks with Moscow—provided they are carried on by someone else. Mr Dulles simply does not want to do the talking. The President’s letter was not a triumph for Mr Dulles but seems to rest on middle ground between what Mr Harold Stassen urged and what Mr Dulles would have said had the reply been left to him. Mr Stassen is the only member of the President’s official family who seems to think with Western Europe when it comes to trying .to deal with Russia. But none the less it is being both thought and written in the United States that the United States and Western Europe are getting together on the question of negotiating with Moscow. Mr Dulles seems to represent one form on isolationism. He prefers to talk only with the (reasonably) upright and just and to isolate himself from the sinners, hence his inflexible attitude towards both Soviet Russia and Communist China. Not until they throughly repent and acknowledge their sins can they be spoken to as man to man but only addressed in general terms of admonition from the lofty platform of the righteous. "Softened His Approach’' At least this has seemed to be his attitude for some time. Now it is said in Washington that he has softened his approach a little and that if Moscow is ready to end its boycott of the United Nations Disarmament Committee he would be ready to discuss an agenda for an eventual East-West conference, not a summit conference but at the Foreign Ministers’ level. In the meantime, it appears the

United States Administration is perfectly .willing to have London and Bonn carry on unpublicised diplomatic talks with the Russians on the related problems of unification of Germany and the suggested nuclear-free zone running down Central Europe. If real progress in such talks is made it will undoubtedly be welcome, but America doesn’t want to participate* in such conversation yet. This change of attitude since the States Department's label of propaganda was put on the Bulganin, letter the minute it arrived may be due to several things. It is clear that the State Department attitude of a few weeks ago was scarcely in tune with public opinion. This opinion has of course never been so sharp as in Western Europe. Western Europe knows it is in the firing line if real trouble breaks. America as a whole is not . yet conscious that it also will be in that position once Russia owns a stock of operational intercontinental missiles. Another factor is that a battle for leadership is now under way. For three months now the cry in and out of Congress has been for leadership but it is obvious that little has been forthcoming. Then, two days before the President delivered his State of the Union message, the Speaker of the House, Mr Sam Rayburn, delivered, in effect, his own State of the Union message. He always has a press conference before Congress opens but this usually is off the record. This year he put it on the record. He said, in effect, that Senator Lyndon Johnson and himself would take command and tell the Administration what to do. Then Senator Johnson went even further in indicating that he would te)l the Administration what should be done. "Congress Must Take Over" Mr Rayburn fired the third gun in this battle when he told a television audience from coast to coast that Congress must take over the nation’s leadership to meet the Russian challenge. The executive, said Mr Rayburn, should exercise leadership and propose a bold and well-reasoned programme but "if it fails to do so, Congress .should do it. I think that is the case and we intend to do .it” he said. All this is a little unusual but it is now clearer than for a long time that the United States is going to get leadership from one place or the other, the White House or Congress. And this seems to have gratified many who feel that the lag in leadership has been as bad as, if not worse than, the lag in missiles. Certainly it does not seem unfair to suggest that these developments had something to do with the reply to Marshal Bulganin and that they made what might be called a Dulles reply an impossibility Press Comments A noted columnist in the New York “Herald-Tribune,” a man who has found singularly little wrong with the Eisenhower Administration to date, declares flatly that Mr Dulles misreads the public mind about negotiating with Russia. He thinks that the Congressional response to the President's State of the Union message means.— “The American people want negotiation with the Soviet however tenuous the prospects of getting anywhere.” He believes with Mr Dulles that there are dangers in negotiating but says there are dangers in not negotiating "and the time may well be at hand when these are the greater dangers.” Similarly the "New York Times” sought to persuade the President that America wanted to answer the Soviet proposals with proposals at least as bold and imaginative as their own, that it is high time to call an end to the cat-and-mouse game in which the Soviet always plays the cat and the West the mouse. The call for leadership tn America does get louder and more insistent and the processes of democracy promise to produce it in Washington—if not at one end of Pennsylvania avenue then al the other.