THE NATION: What Can You Do?

To get four U.S. airmen back from Hungary, the U.S. swallowed its pride and paid the kidnaper's price. The nation suffered a sense of angry shame and outraged honor. But there seemed to be no other course. President Harry Truman, boarding his plane for Christmas in Independence, was asked whether the U.S. intended to pay the ransom. Somberly, he countered: "What can you do?"

There seemed to be no constructive answers. Diplomatic and economic sanctions, vigorously applied, might still force Russia's outlaws to forswear their barefaced ransom racket, but the immediate problem was to liberate the men ignominiously held by Hungary. And so the U.S. paid, got its people back, and wondered what to do next.

Along the Korean battlefront last week, the U.N. truce negotiators struggled with the same kind of question, phrased in slightly different form. The Panmunjom talks and the stalemate of the armies went on (see WAR IN ASIA). In Korea, the free world asked: "What should we do now?"

As 1951 drew to a close this week, Secretary of State Dean Acheson cast up his accounts for the year and looked ahead to 1952. The best he could offer was a small, tentative note of optimism qualified by a grave warning: "It seems to me ... that we are better off than we were a year ago . . . But there are no grounds for complacency . . . The outcome in the contest between a better future and a return to the Dark Ages is still undetermined."