THE PRESIDENCY: No Invitations, Please

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In thinking about the post-Stalin upheavals in Russia, Dwight Eisenhower has one advantage over the host of diplomats, pundits, dopesters and intelligence experts who try to figure out what it all means. The advantage: from World War II days he knows personally bluff, tough Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, now grown mighty as No. 2 man and Defense Minister in Khrushchev's new "flexible" regime. Last week the President showed how much this "old soldier" relationship —and its possible usefulness in promoting world peace—weighs on his mind.

In response to a reporter's question at his midweek press conference, Ike casually agreed that an interchange of meetings between Zhukov and his U.S. opposite number. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, "might" be useful. "Marshal Zhukov and I operated together very closely [in occupied postwar Berlin]," said Eisenhower. "I couldn't see any harm coming from a meeting between the two Defense Ministers, if that could be arranged."

Necessary Caution. Recalling his tortuous postwar discussions with Zhukov —a "confirmed Communist" but an "honest man"—Dwight Eisenhower went on: "One evening we had a three-hour conversation. We tried each to explain to the other just what our systems meant . . . to the individual, and I was very hard pufe to it when he insisted that their system appealed to the idealistic and we completely to the materialistic, and I had a very tough time trying to defend our position because he said: 'You tell a person he can do as he pleases, he can act as he pleases, he can do anything. Everything that is selfish in man you appeal to him. and we tell him that he must sacrifice for the state . . .' "

Asked by the New York Times's James

Reston if he meant to imply that democracy was more difficult to defend than Communism, the President patiently explained: "Look, Mr. Reston, I think you could run into people you have a hard time convincing that the sun is hot and the earth is round . . . Against that kind of belief you run against arguments that almost leave you breathless. You don't know how to meet them."*

Despite the difficulties, the President said in answer to another question, "There is nothing that I wouldn't try experimentally ... to bring about better relationships as long as we observe this one very necessary caution . . . You must not have meetings that, by their very holding, by their very occurrence, give rise to great hopes which, if unrealized, create a great wave of pessimism."

Bloody Recollection. Ike's cautious opening of the door to a Zhukov-Wilson conference—he shied away from any hint of personal involvement—blossomed into international headlines, provoked widespread, mixed reaction. Montana's Mike Mansfield, Democratic whip in the Senate, urged Ike to go farther, meet Zhukov face to face; such a meeting would "weigh heavily in the President's fav.or. I'm certain that the President would not be taken in." Western diplomats leaked worries that Ike's friendly remarks about Zhukov, suppressor of the bloody Hungarian revolt, might kill a U.S.-sponsored United Nations resolution condemning Soviet brutality in Hungary, might unduly alarm U.S. allies fearful of bilateral U.S.-Soviet negotiations.