FOREIGN RELATIONS: Out of Bounds?

"I have received intimations," said Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at his news conference last week, "that there might be some interest in my view's about foreign policy in the coming campaign." To satisfy this interest, Dulles had prepared a statement about the extent to which he thought foreign policy should— or should not—become a 1956 campaign issue. Debate on foreign policy, said Dulles, "should be welcomed so long as it is constructive and conducted in such a manner as not to endanger our nation. It needs to be remembered that those hostile to the U.S. and its ideals are not going to take a vacation so that we here can safely concentrate on a domestic political battle . . . Our nation will need the same bipartisan unity which in the past has given authority, vitality and much success to our foreign policies."

The Question Marks. Dulles' remarks came against a freshening wind of Democratic attacks on the Republican Administration's conduct of foreign affairs. Leading the critics are the three top candidates for the Democratic nomination for President. In Chicago, Adlai Stevenson recently warned that the U.S. foreign-policy situation "is more perilous than it has been since Korea." Said he: "Certainly we must have learned by now that peace and security cannot be had for the asking, or by slogans and tough talk, or by blowing alternately hot and cold, rash and prudent." Added Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver: "In the conduct of our foreign policy, the Eisenhower Administration has in a large measure been a failure." Cried New York Governor Averell Harriman: "By the time the Republicans took office in 1953 they were utterly incapable of carrying on a coherent and consistent foreign policy geared to the needs of the century . . . The Summit conference in Geneva was a great Communist victory."

As the campaign season warmed up, such criticism was inevitable. So, too, was the Republican reaction, which consisted mostly of insisting that foreign policy, as a bipartisan matter, should be placed out of bounds to partisan political debate. Thus both President Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon praised as an example of high statesmanship a recent plea by Georgia's Democratic Senator Walter George for a continued "nonpartisan American foreign policy." Republican Harold Stassen, returning from three weeks in Europe, wore a pained expression as he said that Stevenson's criticisms have "raised and stirred up question marks all over Europe." The Europeans, said Stassen, "have known that the Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy is bipartisan. Therefore they are puzzled and perplexed by Mr. Stevenson's recent voice of strange dissent to our policy."