Foreign News: Mission Accomplished?

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"Jaw, jaw is better than war, war," Sir Winston Churchill once said. This maxim last week guided one of his successors in office, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, as well as the crowd that welcomed Macmillan home from his unsuccessful mission to Moscow.

The British had at first been hurt, angered and resentful at Khrushchev's "toothache snub" of Macmillan, and at the brutal cold-war speech Khrushchev delivered in Macmillan's temporary absence from Moscow (TIME, March 9). Learning of the world's displeasure at his remarks. Khrushchev had jauntily waved them aside as "only an electioneering speech."* In the final days of Macmillan's visit, the Russians turned mellow again. "You know our point of view, we know yours," said Khrushchev to Macmillan as they parted.

Not by Force Alone. The British credited Khrushchev's change of manner to Macmillan's unruffled stand. The British have always insisted that they are good at this kind of talking, and Macmillan, fighting flu internally and Nikita's slings from without, went through his ordeal with unflagging style. In private he firmly conveyed to the Soviet leader the danger of misunderstanding the West's determination to remain in Berlin. In public he answered Khrushchev's call for a non-aggression pact by proposing that "our disputes should be settled by negotiation and not by force." In the final communiqué his aides put in a few words, which the Russians did not bother to object to, in favor of discussing a "thinning out" of troops along the Iron Curtain. This was designed to take some of the steam out of Labor's election-year drive for "disengagement" in Central Europe. Without reading it, the two chiefs of government rushed through the signing of the final communiqué. When Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd remonstrated, Khrushchev replied: "Time is money. We have officials for reading the texts."

The most telling talking Harold Macmillan did in his ten days in Russia may have been the eloquent little speech he delivered in Moscow, at Soviet invitation, to a TV audience estimated at 10,000,000. First suavely complimenting their country on having become the world's "second industrial power in total industrial production," Macmillan delivered the jolting information that "we in Britain still produce twice as much as you per head." Listing some recent achievements of "our little island" (radar, jet engines, penicillin, the first telecasts), he told his listeners in words artfully designed to contrast their lot that "since the war we have built over 3,000,000 permanent homes. Most of these outside the centers of town are separate houses, one for each family, and have a garden."

"The Gospel," said Macmillan, "says man cannot live by bread alone. We believe that man has a spiritual destiny also. Every individual should have freedom to develop his personality. On this foundation our whole political system is built.