Nation: The Quiet Man

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Banked Fires. The chief bond between them now is need—for Johnson plainly needs Rusk's savvy. U.S. politicians have proclaimed a month-long "moratorium" until the Johnson Administration gets oriented, and there is similar talk of a "lull" in foreign affairs. Rusk and Johnson ignore the talk, remembering that Kennedy thought he would have six months to get on his feet, but had to cope with Laos, the Bay of Pigs and Khrushchev's Berlin ultimatum before his Administration was five months old.

"The book of world issues is thick," says one State Department man. "They're going to require decisions." Everywhere the new Administration looks, there are banked fires that could crackle into life at any moment. In the Mideast, the Arab states threaten war if Israel goes ahead next spring with its planned diversion of the River Jordan's waters. In Laos, the fighting between the Communist Pathet Lao and the neutralists could flare any time. In Brazil, runaway inflation threatens the nation with chaos. There are incipient crises in Chile and Haiti, Cambodia and Malaysia, and a shooting war in Viet Nam.

Lesson for Lyndon. An immediate problem is the sorry state of the Atlantic Alliance, with all its attendant problems—the survival of NATO, the future of the proposed multilateral nuclear force, the existence of tariff walls between the Common Market and the U.S. Since mid-October, the U.S., Britain, West Germany and Italy have changed their leaders, a point that Charles de Gaulle, now the senior Western statesman in point of tenure, has not overlooked. A cartoon in the satirical French Weekly Le Canard Enchainé shows Pupils Erhard and Douglas-Home seated before Schoolmaster De Gaulle as Johnson, in short pants, enters the classroom. "Sit down, Johnson," says De Gaulle. "I am going to repeat for you the lesson I have been giving to your little comrades."

To repair the damaged Alliance, Johnson hopes to hold bilateral talks in Washington next year with Erhard, Douglas-Home and De Gaulle. But the French are already beginning to hint that since De Gaulle was just in the U.S., Johnson ought to visit Paris—presumably as a pilgrim to the Delphic shrine.

Overshadowing all else is the question of Johnson's approach to the Communist bloc and the related issues of Cuba and Berlin. Moscow's first reaction to Kennedy's death was one of near panic, caused in part by plain ignorance of Johnson's views, in part by fear that the association of Kennedy's accused assassin with far-left causes would touch off a violent reaction in the U.S. and freeze the tentative thaw that Kennedy was encouraging. Anxious to size up Johnson in a face-to-face meeting, the Russians have already begun pressuring for a summit, possibly next spring in Stockholm. For the moment, Johnson wants no part of it. Neither does Rusk, unless some progress is made on such specific items as the opening of consular offices in several U.S. and Soviet cities or the establishment of air routes. But the British, who seem ready to go to the summit every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, are all for it.