JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES: SECOND THOUGHTS ON GENEVA

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JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES

The New York Herald Tribune's COLUMNIST ROSCOE DRUMMOND:

THERE is an important political postscript to be written out of the summit conference at Geneva. Have the Russians been able to persuade President Eisenhower to run in 1956? I am sure that he is nearer today to decision to stand for re-election than he was before he sat down at the conference table.

This conference put in train a series of big-power negotiations which will take two to four years to complete and which may determine the shape of the peace for a long time to come. If it is true—and I think it is—that Mr. Eisenhower will seek a second term only if he's convinced that through another four years in the White House he could make a contribution to peace peculiarly his own, then Geneva produced new factors which, far more than theoretical arguments, could be decisive. After the hardest days of the Big Four discussions, Mr. Eisenhower appeared more full of zest, more rested, more tranquil than I have seen him in many months. Why? Because he was doing the thing on which, above all else, his heart and mind are set: to try to set the world on the pathway to better peace and to build an unpassable roadblock in front of a possibly hydrogen war.

Scripps-Howard Foreign Editor Emeritus WILLIAM PHILIP SIMMS:

THE United States and the West today face the most hazardous period since the end of World War II. Russia never has been as dangerous as she is right now. At this moment, even the best-informed can do no more than guess at Russia's real intentions. Everybody is saying: "Russia has changed." And so she has. Until a few weeks ago her face wore a perpetual scowl. Today it is all smiles.

But why? Nobody outside the Kremlin can say for sure. But there is every reason to believe her real, ultimate objective remains the same as always—to set up a universal Communist dictatorship run from Moscow. She thinks she can make better progress by concealing her bloodstained bludgeon under a pile of olive branches and trying the more subtle art of poison. By lulling the West she can revert to her early plot to gain control of the world by infiltration, through her fifth columns and similar subversive agents trained in Moscow.

By adopting a "new look" she can more easily beguile our European allies into believing Soviet Russia is more sinned against than sinning. She thus can elbow the United States out of the Eastern Hemisphere, dismember NATO, neutralize Western Europe, and put across her fake peace-and-disarmament plan which, once completed, would leave her mistress of the world.. Such is the peril. Fortunately, President Eisenhower sees it quite clearly.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE:

WE think that the principal result of the European sojourn has been to fortify Mr. Eisenhower's political position immeasurably. People are disposed to credit him with sincere and decent instincts, and if he accomplished nothing that is visible, at least he managed to extricate himself from a conference with the Russians without getting trimmed. In view of the performance of his predecessors, this is a feat that is not to be despised.

London's anti-American NEW STATESMAN AND NATION :