"It May Work"

Every day since UNO's General Assembly opened Jan. 10, two or three hundred Britons have lined up on the narrow curb opposite Westminster's Central Hall. They stand there, watching and silent, as the delegates come & go, waiting for something, asking the simple questions that all men ask. Peace or war? Want or plenty? Or, more likely in Westminster these days: "What's up, guv'ner? Those blokes getting anywhere?"

This week these blokes will be asking themselves: did we get anywhere? One of them, an angular little man from one of the little countries, as shy of quotation as he is great in diplomacy, said: "Perhaps. Perhaps we did." He looked down at his pale clasped hands and said: "We might have failed, and we didn't. We know now that it may work."

New Responsibility. Thus spoke a worn man from a worn country, who knew the old League in the years of its disillusion. Now he was almost willing to believe that this new league might be good enough and strong enough for a world in social and atomic revolution.

This session could have failed. The favored cliche when it opened was that after all it was convened only to adopt rules, approve budgets, organize. But, even without the more explosive matters which surged up later, these were testing tasks. Performing them, the General Assembly and its committees proved that they could be true world forums, free in debate and capable of decision. The world's will to feed the hungry, require in trusteeship a new sense of responsibility toward the weak, and in the new Economic and Social Council to see UNO take on real jobs for real ends, turned out to be an effective will. Things got done.

Frank Ferocity. But it was in the Security Council that UNO's great promise--and great, as yet unmastered dangers --emerged. The very arm of UNO which everyone expected to be a fatally throttling arm turned out in its first tests to be UNO's strength.

A quality so simple that it was almost unreportable made this true. The Council, in four great sessions, was a place where little powers could speak up to big powers, and where big powers could speak to each other, in words for all the world to hear.

Nothing that passed, nothing that was said at the last, "disastrous" Council of Foreign Ministers in London last year equaled in frank ferocity the exchanges in the Security Council between Messrs. Vishinsky and Bevin. When the bitter anger of the Foreign Ministers' meeting had seeped out to the world, men's hope for themselves and for UNO all but vanished. But, at these public meetings, when Ernest Bevin turned upon the pallid Russian and Vishinsky turned upon the West's great defender, the effect was good, healthy and hopeful.

Rumpled Cordiality. The cards were put face up. Curtly but calmly Vishinsky spoke of "the new outbreak of Fascist terror" in Greece and the use of British troops there as "a danger to peace and security." As mild in manner, Bevin was even rougher in words. In Greece, he said, Britain "could have done as was done in Rumania by Mr. Vishinsky--put in a minority government. . . . The danger to the peace of the world has been the incessant propaganda from Moscow against the British Commonwealth and the incessant utilization of the Communist Parties in every country in the world as a means to attack the British."

A couple of hours after these outbursts, Bevin went to a party at the Soviet Embassy. Jolly as a rumpled, just-fed bear, he backslapped Vishinsky and horsed him around for the photographers. Vishinsky loved it; never was there a more eloquent manifestation of that everpresent, always-pathetic Russian longing to "belong." A little later Bevin came upon Vishinsky and Iranian Ambassador Seyed Hassan Tagizadeh in close, genial conversation. Bevin chortled: "That's right, boys, make peace now." Said Vishinsky, smiling: "We'll make such a good peace that you'll bring it up at the Security Council."

But peace was not to be made at a party. This week they came back to the Council forge to hammer out understanding. Vishinsky called Bevin's reference to Communist propaganda "a cold breath of the unhappy past." Bevin used the word "lie." Finally Russia offered to drop her demand for Council action if Britain would withdraw her troops from Greece as soon as possible.

Galling Integrity. The results were not yet conclusive--by good luck and good will, the Council so far had avoided that point of final decision, certain to be reached some day, when the as yet untried veto would enter. But that point had not been evaded at the cost of either integrity or action. The Council had been able to act, in a fashion galling to proud Russia, and to survive.

It would be the world's loss if the world failed to grasp the meaning and quality of those hours in the plain, episcopal meeting room at Church House, hours in which man's will to peace advanced--however tentatively--to new ground.

Never would the language of headlines --"Battle," "Blast," "Bevin Denounces" --convey their meaning and quality. What happened there was a compound of many things:

P: The thin, halting yet lucid voice of the Iranian put his grubby little country's case to the mighty ones;

P: Vishinsky, speaking intensely of the dignity and honor of the Soviet State, enduring assaults which in another scene and time might be calls to war, and always sitting, fondling a pencil, his chin, the papers before him with incessantly moving hands;

P: Bevin, a brown hulk between his Russian adversary and his American friend, Stettinius, staring down the line of his cigarette at the table, or when he spoke as no diplomat in his time had publicly spoken, revolving his great, unhandsome head as though it were a vocal beacon;

P: Little Koo of China, slight Van Kleffens of The Netherlands, playing the keenest minds there upon all that passed, and at times doing their sage best to quiet the storm when storming had done its turn;

P: The Egyptian, Dr. Abdel Hamid Badawi Pasha, seldom speaking, always aware that within the morals and fires of the debate a great contest for Eastern empire was on between the Briton and the Russian;

P: Bidault of France, paling and almost visibly sweating when the Laborite Briton thundered for decisions which would anger the Communists of Paris;

P: The floodlights, beating upon the councilmen and, ranked behind, the rows of professional diplomats, some of them lost in horror at this new, clean, open thing;

P: And, over all, a sense that history was at the table where the eleven sat.

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