UNITED NATIONS: Mission to Moscow

Trygve Lie, Secretary General of the United Nations, has talked recently with President Truman, Prime Minister Attlee and Premier Bidault. This week he was flying to Moscow in high hopes of conferring with Generalissimo Stalin. Inside the Kremlin, he would try to take a first step toward ending the Soviet boycott of U.N. over the China question, by proposing a top-level meeting that might somehow break the present stalemate in the Security Council. This in turn might ease other international tensions. "The world," Lie said earnestly, "must try again to bring the cold war to an end."

If that meant basic agreement on fundamentals between the Communists and the free world, Lie had no chance. If it meant working out compromises on some specific questions, it was worth a try.