Judgments & Prophecies, may 2, 1955

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DECISION NEEDED ON DEFENSE OF QUEMOY

GEORGE MEANY, president of the American Federation of Labor, addressing the Washington meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

OUR Government must stop beating about the bush on the Quemoy and Matsu issue. We call for full frankness with the American people and our allies. If our military leaders think these islands are expendable and their loss will have no dangerous consequences for our ally [Nationalist China]—the strongest ally we have in Asia—and for our country and the common cause, then let our Government leaders frankly say so and put an end to the uncertainty as to the future of these islands.

But if, in the best judgment of our military experts, these islands are strategically vital to the security and freedom of our nation—without which there can be no freedom or security for any free nation anywhere in the world—then let our political leaders have the courage to tell that to the American people and convince them to take all necessary measures to help safeguard these islands for the sake of our own best national interest and our stake in world peace.

At any rate, let us stop this game of guessing. If we gear our foreign policy to the counting of ballots in 1956, then we and the rest of the free world will be falling into the worst pitfalls of appeasement. Our country cannot afford petty politics and bitter partisanship in its foreign relations. The Communist enemy, regardless of any momentary change of tactics, regardless of any treaty the Kremlin may sign, is bent on conquering the entire world—the United States not excluded—and remolding it in the form of the totalitarian dictatorship and slave economy imposed on the people behind the Iron Curtain in Russia, Rumania, Outer Mongolia and on the Chinese mainland.

LOYALTY PROGRAM TROUBLES ARE DIMINISHING

University of Chicago Professor EDWARD SHILS, editor of a special issue of the BULLETIN or THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS on the federal loyalty-security program:

SIGNS of light are beginning to break through the long unrelieved darkness of our loyalty-security policy. The Administration has announced specific changes in procedure and organization which might make its measures more just. Congress is discussing the establishment of machinery to survey our entire loyalty-security policy in a comprehensive way which will have more regard for justice, liberty and security than previous policies have shown. There are now grounds for hope that the hounding of dissidence, innocent of treason, will come to a halt.

The loyalty-security program should not be dismantled and discarded. Naturally, there is no danger of this at present—the danger lies at the opposite extreme. It should be retained, concentrated and improved. It should be retained because there is danger of espionage which is active and persistent. It should be concentrated and improved because, at present, the American security system flings its net too widely and indiscriminately, because it confuses the need for security, which is real, with the need for protection from subversion, which is negligible, and because it makes demands for maximal loyalty which are neither necessary for security nor admissible to the idea of freedom.

IKE SHOULD DECLARE NEW PEACE PROGRAM

The 19-paper SCRIPPS-HOWARD chain: