Indispensables of Peace

Senator Arthur Vandenberg, home from the UNO conference in London, was well aware of the feelings of his fellow delegates, of gloom on the one hand, of trepidation on the other. He decided that it was past time for someone to speak out.

The speech, before his respectful colleagues in the Senate, was brief. It was a statement of a nation's sense of pride and justice. It was a challenge to the Administration, Russia, the world and the U.S.

Will UNO Work? The onetime rabid isolationist reaffirmed his faith in a United Nations: "I do not share the melancholy pessimism heard in some quarters." Some phases of the London record, of course, were disappointing: "I confess that in this first meeting of the United Nations I missed the uplifting and sustaining zeal for a great, crusading, moral cause which seemed to imbue the earlier Charter sessions at San Francisco." He had sensed "a tendency to relapse into power politics ... to use the United Nations as a self-serving tribune rather than as a tribunal."

But "in 37 days the United Nations turned a blueprint into a going concern. Fifty-one nations, spanning the gamut of race, color, language and tradition, had to concur. They did--with ultimate unanimity. How long and with what travail would it have taken Congress to complete a comparable task?

"Words which would have been fighting words in other days were the substitutes for guns and swords. Here the frankest imaginable discussions were taking place--eye to eye. Here the contestants shook hands at the termination of the jousts."

The Riddle. There were danger spots. The Middle East was one. It seemed to Vandenberg that Vishinsky was "less interested in helping Lebanon and Syria than he was in baiting France and Britain --less interested in peace at this point than he was in friction." Candidly, then, Vandenberg faced the question: "What is Russia up to now?"

"It is of course the supreme conundrum of our time. We ask it in Manchuria . . . eastern Europe . . . Italy . . . Iran . . . Tripolitania . . . the Baltic and the Balkans . . . Poland . . . Canada . . . Japan. We can ask it sometimes even in connection with events in our own United States.

"It would be entirely futile to blink the fact that the two great rival ideologies--democracy in the west and Communism in the east--here find themselves face to face with the desperate need for mutual understanding. ..."

As for Arthur Vandenberg, he believed that harmony is possible--if: "the United States speaks as plainly upon all occasions as Russia does; the United States just as vigorously sustains its own purposes and its ideals as Russia does; we abandon the miserable fiction, often encouraged by our own fellow travelers, that we somehow jeopardize the peace if our candor is as firm as Russia's always is; we assume a moral leadership which we have too frequently allowed to lapse.

"The situation calls for patience and good will, but not for vacillation."

Where Shall the U.S. Stand? Said Vandenberg: "There is a line beyond which compromise cannot go. ... But how can we expect our alien friends to know where that line is unless we reestablish the habit of saying only what we mean and meaning every word we say?

"I have the feeling it is the only way. I have the feeling it is the best way to win Soviet respect and Soviet trust. Respect must precede trust, and both are indispensable to peace. . . .

"Here again is a clear call to America always to act in its traditional character for liberty and justice.

"The United States has no ulterior designs against any of its neighbors anywhere on earth. We can speak with the extraordinary power inherent in this unselfishness. We need but one rule. What is right? Where is justice? There let America take her stanch"

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