Eisenhower Considering Attending U.N. Assembly

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29292, 25 August 1960, Page 22

Eisenhower Considering Attending U.N. Assembly

(/V.Z. Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK, August 23. President Eisenhower was considering attending the forthcoming United Nations General Assembly, his chief delegate there, Mr Henry Cabot Lodge, disclosed today.

He made the disclosure at a New York lunch given by the United Nations Correspondents’ Association to bid him farewell. Mr Lodge has resigned his post, effective on September 3, to campaign for the Vice-Presidency of the United States on the Republican ticket. Mr Lodge said he did not know “yet” whether the President would definitely attend the Assembly, which is due to open on September 20. “It is being considered, but a decision has not been made,” he told a questioner. The Soviet Prime Minister Mr Khrushchev already has indicated that he is contemplating heading his delegation. Mr Lodge’s answer today was seen in the United Nations quarters as being more positive than the President himself had been so far. At a recent White House press conference, Mr Eisenhower did not rule out the possibility of attending the Assembly if Mr Khrush-

chev was there and if the President thought any useful purpose would be served by his own presence in New York.

Mr Lodge said in a speech to the correspondents that the United Nations operations in the Congo constituted the “most advanced and sophisticated job it has ever undertaken.’’ He said it had won a great deal of well-merited prestige for its work in the Congo because it had filled a vacuum. “Obviously, if you have a great vacuum it is only too easy to have a lot of countries protecting their own interests becoming involved and then there could be a danger of war,” he said. In the Congo, the United Nations had prevented war and laid the foundations for law and order, sound administration and economic development. Mr Lodge said he believed that countries coming to independence were going to look more and more to the United Nations for the help they needed. He said the world organisation should step up and expand its programme of providing skilled men to new nations—staff who had “no axe to grind and no ulterior motive. “I think that more and more the United Nations is becoming the best hope of small countries which wish to maintain their independence,” he said.