Mission from Britain

The big, weather-beaten Liberator bomber which had taken Winston Churchill to Moscow, Casablanca and Turkey eased down on Washington's airport last week, bringing Britain's handsome, faultlessly groomed Robert Anthony Eden on his second visit to the U.S. The first time, in 1938, he was temporarily out of public life in protest against Chamberlain appeasement--he came to make little speeches, lay wreaths and inspect CCC camps. This time, as Britain's Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and Churchill's heir-presumptive, he came on urgent and secret business.

At the British Embassy, where he will live, Anthony Eden's first act was to ask for a glass of orange juice, almost unobtainable in England. He found it delicious. Next day he held a press conference in the Embassy's decorous ballroom, sitting with the tall, bony, high-domed Ambassador, Lord Halifax. Eden, in his inevitable dark suit, looked younger than 45; he grinned youthfully when Lord Halifax called him "old boy." Correspondents found the Foreign Secretary cautious in the fullest diplomatic sense. He hoped that some day it would not be "headline news" when leaders of the United Nations drop in on each other.

That night Anthony Eden had dinner at the White House with his good friend, John G. Winant, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, and Franklin Roosevelt. Over coffee and cigars they talked well into the night.

While in the U.S. Anthony Eden will have the run of the White House, will confer with Wendell Willkie, Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff, Chinese Foreign Minister T. V. Soong. He may make one formal speech, perhaps in Maryland (over which his great-great-grandfather, Sir Robert Eden, once ruled as colonial Governor), plans also to visit U.S. war plants, military and naval establishments.

Significance. The agenda for Eden's discussions may include postwar rehabilitation and food distribution, recognition of governments, European refugees, Anglo-American relations with Russia, closer cooperation among the United Nations. Said Anthony Eden: nothing is excluded.

But at the top of Anthony Eden's list, underlined, surrounded by exclamation points, stands the foremost, crucial problem of United Nations diplomacy--Russia. Everything else on the list is for spare-time discussion; unless Eden leaves with a full agreement on Anglo-U.S. relations with Joseph Stalin, his mission on the whole will be a failure, although perhaps not of his making.

Ever since June of 1941, when Russia became an unexpected ally, the U.S. has stepped gingerly around the great diplomatic complications, has spoken of it in doubletalk, has tried to pretend none existed. The British have signed a 20-year Treaty of Alliance with Russia.

The facts which must some day be faced: 1) at the peace table, Russia will be entitled to as loud a voice as either Britain or the U.S.; 2) Russian Communism, as a system of government, is obnoxious and fearsome to a vast majority of Britons and Americans; 3) regardless of their sentiments toward Communism, Britain and the U.S. must get along with Russia in the postwar world--or prepare to fight another world war some day.

Last week, just before Anthony Eden arrived in Washington, the influential London Times published a set of significant recommendations for British, U.S. and Russian collaboration in foreign policy (see p. 15).

This declaration was a blunt warning: Britain and the U.S. must soon come to a real agreement with Russia, else the old suspicions between Communism and the capitalist democracies may wreck the peace.

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