Looking the Other Way?

In Washington last week, Russian Ambassador Constantine Oumansky was all over the place. Short, garrulous, dapper in his white suit, white shirt, white shoes, he was trying to make up in two days for his two years of isolation after the Hitler-Stalin pact--and doing a good job of it.

He talked with the press, showed himself in public, and most important, he conferred with Sumner Welles. When he emerged, both men wore the forced, puckered smiles of acute pain that go with diplomatic friendship (see cut).

State Department bigwigs, who eat protocollops for lunch every day, enjoy the measured suggestions, the firm reproofs, in Walter Lippmann's column. But last week Pundit Lippmann wrote something that hit the whole Department, the White House and various unofficial advisers on foreign policy. He said that the German-Russian war had caught the White House and State Department looking the other way. "They have been acting as if they had been caught unprepared and were now compelled to improvise. They should not have been caught unprepared. . . . There was room for doubt as to which [Hitler] campaign--the British or the Russian--would come first, and good reason for supposing that Joseph Stalin might find a way to appease Adolf Hitler so that Britain would be attacked first. But a diplomatic policy should have been planned and prepared for either of these eventualities. ..." Official U.S. answers to such charges: U.S. policy is shaped to meet immediate needs, on an hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute basis; if Stalin and Hitler should make peace as suddenly as they made war, the U.S. would deal with that crisis as it came up. This passive attitude was exactly what Pundit Lippmann complained of.

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