Stimson Musee

Stimson Musee

For the first time a U. S. Secretary of State called on the Secretary General of the League of Nations last week, but this historic coming of the Mountain to Mohammed was shrouded in a fog of qualifications and quibbles.

Secretary of State Stimson, modest as a jack of diamonds traveling incognito, insisted that in clasping Sir Eric Drummond's hand he did not do it as Secretary of State. He had not even come to Geneva as Chief of the U. S. Delegation to the Disarmament Conference, he said, but as a simple U. S. delegate.

"I am not taking [Chief Delegate] Hugh Gibson's place!" cried Delegate Stimson when further pressed upon this nice point. "I am just going to help when and how I can."

Polite Sir Eric then said that he had not shaken the Stimson hand in his role as Secretary General of the League of Nations but in his other role as Secretary General of the Conference. In the strictest legal sense the clasping last week was therefore a case of two other statesmen.

"Hire a Palace." Carrying to its refined conclusion the technique of putting over important business deals at lunch, Statesman Stimson always hires at every big conference which he attends the most palatial estate which can possibly be hired, preferably a mansion some miles out of town like his own "Woodley" in Washington. Last week, having taken Mrs. Stimson to Europe on the svelte, palatial Ile de France, and brought her to Paris on a private railway car, he set her up three miles from Geneva as the Chatelaine of the Chateau de Bessinge.

Into raptures went the Press: ". . . superb situation . . . uninterrupted view of snow-clad Mount Blanc ... on the other side, from a terrace, one looks down on Lake Leman. . . ."

Inside the Chateau de Bessinge self-styled "Delegate" Stimson made himself at home in Louis XVI salons set out with slightly rusty suits of armor suggesting a museum. All the Louis XVI furniture, according to a spokesman for the Swiss real estate agent who leased the Chateau de Bessinge is upholstered in genuine Gobelin tapestry.

To the very first business lunch at the Stimson mu see last week came Sir John Simon, British Foreign Secretary, who makes no bones about the fact that he is Chief British Delegate.

What Chance Success? On his way to Geneva, Mr. Stimson had conferred in Paris with Premier Andre Tardieu. Because France goes to the polls next month and the U. S. election looms, these two statesmen found it best to make no statement of what they told each other to their publics.

In Geneva the Disarmament Conference remained deadlocked upon Premier Tardieu's plan to equip the League of Nations with an international police force-- a plan anathema to President Hoover, as everyone knows. Therefore knowing Swiss pulled long faces, called Delegate Stimson "the American Undertaker come to bury the Disarmament Conference." But Chief U.S. Delegate Hugh Gibson had presented to the Conference last week a spirited rehash of the "real disarmament" which President Hoover would like to see achieved.

Mr. Gibson declared that "the following weapons are of a peculiarly aggressive value against land defenses: tanks, heavy mobile guns and gases, and as such should be abolished."

Promptly the British, Germans and Italians backed this U. S. proposal but simultaneously it was hamstrung by French and Japanese opposition.

"It is amusing," sneered Pertinax, pungent Paris publicist, "that America, thinking of its naval aircraft carriers, took care not to insert bombing planes in the list of offensive arms to abolish."

Decorously Le Temps, echoing the French Government's official view, observed, "It would be inadvisable to seek to disarm those powers, like France, for whom, because of their geographical position, land forces constitute the principal guarantee of security, while nations which are relatively safe from invasion and hold in the control of sea power their best guarantee, should continue to dispose liberally of the most formidable offensive armaments."

In Washington, cables stating that Delegate Stimson has carried to Geneva a plan for "hemispheric disarmament" caused Acting Secretary of State William Richards Castle to raise his eyebrows slightly and observe, "I do not recognize that phrase."

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