SUMMIT TALKS

Press, Volume C, Issue 29526, 30 May 1961, Page 13

SUMMIT TALKS

Kennedy Has Quiet Day

(NZ Preu Aun.—Copyright)

HYANNISPORT (Massachusetts), May 29.

President Kennedy celebrated his forty-fourth birthday at his summer home here today on the eve of his momentous talks with President de Gaulle in Paris and the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Khrushchev, in Vienna.

A big birthday party was planned by Democratic leaders in nearby Boston tonight to acclaim Mr Kennedy, who was expected to speak on his new venture in personal diplomacy.

The President, according to official sources, will go into his meeting with Mr Khrushchev with three main objectives.

They will be: (1) To try to salvage deadlocked nuclear test ban talks. (2) To size up the Soviet leader, and <3l To make it clear to him that the United States did not intend to bend to Soviet pressure. The President arrived here early yesterday morning and spent a quiet day at the heavily guarded seaside house stirdying documents briefing him on the Paris and Vienna talks.

Mr Kennedy will go to New York tomorrow to meet Mr David Ben-Gurion, the Israel: Prime Minister, and address a Cancer Fund dinner.

His wife. Jacqueline, will fly to New York from Washington tomorrow afternoon to join him for the European trip. They are due to leave New York in an Air Force jet on Tuesday night.

The President’s state visit to Paris, which is to include exchanges with President de Gaulle on France’s desire for a greater voice in Western

strategy, wiU begin on Wednesday with a ceremonial parade from Orly airport to the Quai d’Orsay Pessimism Republican leaders have expressed pessimism and doubts about Mr Kennedy’s meeting with the Soviet leader, the Associated Press said. Senator Everett Dirksen. the party's leader in the Senate, declared in Chicago last night he feared that the President could blunder the United States into war with Russia.

Speaking to a group of Republican officials, he said Mr Kennedy had a “frightful fear’’ of war and would not deliberately provoke an armed clash with the Soviet Union. “Yet. notwithstanding this, he could blunder into a war,’’ he said.