Harry Fixed It

They asked Harry Hopkins to do one more job. Roosevelt's sick, sad and weary friend was about to leave Moscow, after making arrangements for the next Big Three meeting, when President Truman got in touch with him. Secretary Stettinius had told the President that the San Francisco conference was deadlocked on interpretation of the one-power veto. Could Harry fix it with Stalin?

Harry unpacked his bags and fixed it. Once again, Horseplayer Hopkins cashed in on the best dark-horse wager he ever made--his historic 1941 bet that the Russians could hold the Germans.

After talking things over with Hopkins, Stalin told his delegation head, Ambassador Andrei A. Gromyko, to go nine-tenths of the way toward agreement. The U.S., Britain, China, France readily traveled the other tenth, and the conference surmounted its worst crisis.*

Russia lost "face," but allayed world suspicion by accepting an interpretation broadening the Yalta veto formula (which Franklin Roosevelt had proposed in the first place). Under the agreed interpretation, any one of the Big Five keeps the right to veto any formal investigation or action by the new world organization's Security Council. But no one member can veto simple discussion of an issue, as Russia had previously wanted. Discussions in the Security Council will be permitted whenever any seven of the eleven members so vote.

Australia's Herbert Vere Evatt still clamored that the Big Five had "steamrollered" the veto issue. But Big Power spokesmen pointed out that five out of the six small nations on the Council could exercise a veto, too--if they stood together.

*The New York Times's Anne O'Hare McCormick deplored the press's tendency to play every conference disagreement as a "crisis." She blamed it on the presence in San Francisco of inexperienced reporters and delegates who "found it hard at best to drum up daily interest in a drafting job." Her verdict: "There has been far more agreement than disagreement at San Francisco."

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