National Affairs: Week of Words

The U.S.'s formal decision to go to the summit with the U.S.S.R.—a public U.N. Security Council session rather than a private smoke-filled room—came out of a week of tangled interchanges and conflicting pressures, which began with one of the crudest letters a President of the U.S. has ever received. Russia's Dictator Nikita Khrushchev flatly accused President Eisenhower of delaying a summit parley because Eisenhower did not want "a peaceful settlement" in the Middle East, was in fact preparing "fresh acts of aggression ... to confront the world with an ever-increasing extension of the military conflict."

Khrushchev's real net: he was turning lukewarm about a chiefs-of-state meeting at the eleven-nation U.N. Security Council—"You know very well ... it has not decided anything so far"—instead preferred private talks. Khrushchev's guest list: the U.S.S.R., the U.S., Britain, France, India, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. Places to go: New York, Paris, Vienna, Geneva, Moscow.

"We are ready for another early date and would like to receive a clear answer," he wrote. "I would like the earliest reply to this message, Mr. President."

Out of Disarray. The U.S. chose not to bat its reply back by return mail to Red Square, instead considered Khrushchev's letter carefully, probed for weak spots. The problem: the letter plumped into a scene of disarray of Western allies, of disagreement about important details in official Washington. France's De Gaulle was holding out for his private parley, all but refusing to come to the U.N. at all, and trying fruitlessly to rack up a new continental "third force" under French leadership (see FOREIGN NEWS). At home there was pressure from State Department elements and congressional Democrats for a "more positive" approach to the U.S.S.R. that usually involved concessions to placate neutralist opinion. The Pentagon, on the other hand, was restless lest the diplomats tie the U.S.'s hands—and the very real strength of the deployed U.S. Armed Forces—by agreeing to negotiate too much and to make unnecessary concessions: "We've got 'em by the tail. Don't let 'em go." But Secretary Dulles, at one of his ablest press conference performances, did his best to define some needed guidelines.

"I believe," said he, "that a [summit] meeting held under proper [U.N.] auspices would, on the one hand, dispel the false allegations that there is aggression being carried on by the U.S. or by the United Kingdom in the Middle East. It would, on the other hand, I think, show the danger of indirect aggression, which has been so often condemned by the U.N. Thereby it might tend to stabilize the political situation which in turn would make it easier to develop economic programs for the benefit of the people . . . There is no use getting into the details of economic projects if the [Middle East] governments are going to live under a constant threat of indirect aggression, assassination and the like." Though he was pressed from half a dozen different directions, Dulles notably refused to recognize Russia's right to negotiate on any point save aggression in the Middle East.