THE CONFERENCE: On the Love Seats

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Secretary Stettinius last week let newsmen inspect the penthouse where he and his Big Power colleagues called the tune for the San Francisco conference. The apartment, atop the Fairmont Hotel, had been lent to Mr. Stettinius by wealthy Mrs. James Leary Flood, whose fortune originally came from the famous Comstock Lode (Nevada gold, silver). The facilities included a superb view of San Francisco's hills and bay, four bedrooms with bath, a circular library with a blue ceiling, and two love seats, upholstered in green, where Viacheslav Molotov and his consultants sat during the Big Power meetings.

Mrs. Flood's guests had a fifty-fifty week. On the main business of the conference—the drafting of a charter for a world organization—the Big Three statesmen and their Big Four partner, China's T. V. Soong, made astonishing progress. On the symbolic, overshadowing issue of Poland, the Big Three had to admit an appalling failure.

The contrast was instructive. When the Big Powers concerned themselves solely with the structure and interplay of world power, agreement was always possible. When they concerned themselves with the morals of power, agreement seemed easy in the preliminary stage of words (i.e., the Crimea declaration on Poland; some of the charter amendments approved last week). But when they got down to cases on such issues, the deep differences between the Soviet Union and its principal allies came nakedly to the fore, and agreement was difficult if not impossible.

The hope of the world organization was that it might postpone at least some of the conflicts, build a structure strong enough and flexible enough to bridge the chasm. How to reconcile this objective with the new U.S. and British toughness toward Russia gave Messrs. Truman, Stettinius and Eden plenty to think about.