National Affairs: Foreign Policy Debate

Long before the 1952 campaign began in earnest, Democrats from Harry Truman down were saying that foreign policy should not be an issue. That attitude was based on the contention that the Administration's policy is 100% correct, and that to argue about it would give aid to the Communists. Last week the Democrats' dream of silence about foreign policy lay shattered and broken.

The full-fledged battle on foreign policy was touched off in Dwight Eisenhower's speech to the American Legion's national convention (TIME, Sept. 1). Eisenhower said that there was no way to live peacefully with Communism "until the enslaved nations" have the "right to choose their own path."

Liberation? John Foster Dulles, Ike's chief foreign policy adviser, promptly expanded on this theme. Under the Eisenhower policy, said Dulles, the President would refuse to make any deal which recognized the Soviet Union's permanent right to control the captive peoples. Instead, the U.S. would encourage the spirit of resistance behind the Iron Curtain, and private U.S. organizations would help to integrate the resistance movements and would provide supplies.

Although the Democratic platform calls for liberation of the Iron Curtain countries, Democratic orators cried out in horror at the Eisenhower-Dulles position. A war-provoking plan, they cried. Harry Truman saw no hope of improving on Harry Truman's policies. He said: "There is no way to do more than this without using force. To try to liberate these enslaved people at this time might well mean turning these lands into atomic battlefields."

Adlai Stevenson leaped into the fight (TIME, Sept. 8). At Detroit-surrounded Hamtramck, he said that Eisenhower's statement led to "speculation here and abroad that if he were elected, some reckless action might ensue in an attempt to liberate the peoples of Eastern Europe from Soviet tyranny." He added: "I tell you now that I will never fear to negotiate in good faith with the Soviet Union, for to close the door to the conference room is to open a door to war."*

John Foster Dulles fired back. It is "absurd," said Dulles, to suggest that Eisenhower was proposing war or "wholesale insurrection by unarmed slaves . . . There are countless peaceful ways by which the task of the Russian despots can be made so unbearably difficult that they will renounce their rule. That was shown in Yugoslavia. Prolonged unwillingness to try new methods in solving international problems is ... endangering our own safety as Russian conquests are being consolidated against us ... General Eisenhower's policies are the true peace policies . . . We can trust the man who won peace, rather than the man who lost it."

Prevention ? This was where the debate stood last week as Eisenhower came to Philadelphia. After the warmest welcome of his campaign, he rose before a cheering audience to deliver his first major speech on foreign policy. He first took up the warmongering charge: The U.S., he said, should "aid by every peaceful means, but only by peaceful means, the right to live in freedom. The containing of Communism is largely physical and by itself an inadequate approach to our task. There is also need to bring hope and every peaceful aid to the world's enslaved peoples. We shall never be truculent—but we shall never appease . . .