THE AMERICAS: United We Stand

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In Rio de Janeiro this week U.S. diplomacy faces its first severe test since World War II came to the Americas. It is a test that may spell victory or defeat in the war. For as Japanese diplomatic treachery on war's eve cost the U.S. the first round of the Battle of the Pacific, so a setback at Rio might well lead to discord in the hemisphere, Axis inroads, even defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic.

More than a year ago, in Washington, President Roosevelt gave to visiting Latin American military men the words of Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers as a maxim of hemisphere defense: "One for all, all for one." This week, as the top diplomats of the 21 American Republics arrived in Brazil for the war's third conference of American Foreign Ministers, that maxim was uppermost in the minds of all.

The Welcome. It was under the shrewd hazel-grey eyes of an able, forthright realist, Brazil's Foreign Minister and the Conference's administrator, Oswaldo Aranha, that the delegates began assembling in Rio. In fine fettle, Aranha snapped orders to painters, rushed completion of a new five-unit air-conditioning system, supervised the refurbishing of crimson satin wall coverings and rich Aubusson rugs in the Itamaraty Palace, Brazil's Foreign Office. He conferred daily with President Vargas, with taut, ascetic U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery and with a stream of other diplomats, some of whom left the Palace with fresh paint on their coattails.

Later, when the 46-man U.S. delegation headed by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles arrived in the middle of a heat wave, Aranha was ready and waiting. Three times the 42-ton Clipper circled the lavender hills around Rio's bay. At the airport 2,000 Brazilians cheered themselves hoarse, knocked down one lone man who started to boo, trampled over gaily uniformed grenadier guards. Before leaving Washington the supposedly icy Mr. Welles had kissed his wife good-by with the tenderness of a lad going off to the wars. Now the Rio welcome must have touched him as much as a lad coming home.

Donning fresh white linens, Mr. Welles joined others from the Americas in presenting credentials to Foreign Minister Aranha, paying a courtesy call on President Vargas. He talked with early Argentine delegates. He had a look at the site of the coming meetings—historic Tiradentes Palace, named for Brazil's revolutionary hero, a dentist (tiradente means "tooth-puller") who was hanged by the Portuguese 150 years ago and his body quartered and sent in brine as a warning to all parts of the country.

Mr. Welles, calm, cool when the action set in, confident of the support of the overwhelming majority of the other delegates and the countries which had instructed them, was determined to put through his program—complete rupture, diplomatic and commercial, with the Axis.

As he undertakes this task, Sumner Welles will be helped by his thorough understanding of the four delicately balanced springs of policy in the intricate mechanism of Pan-American relations.