More Blessed to Give?

In the streets of Athens these days, people hail each other with a new greeting: "Yassou Truman"--(Health to Truman). But along with such exuberant gratitude for the U.S. President's promise of aid, some Greeks think they ought to beware of Americans bearing gifts.

The Greek Government itself, suddenly saved from ruin, was getting cocky. It liked U.S. assistance, but not the proposed U.S. supervision of that assistance. The crux was a U.S. plan to clean the Augean stable of Greece's economy, and, specifically, the U.S.'s intention to control what kind of goods the notoriously inefficient Greek Government ought to buy with the U.S. loan. Premier Demetrios Maximos and Foreign Minister Constantin Tsaldaris, in an interview with the New York Times, pointedly expressed their hope that the U.S. would restrict itself to an "advisory" role. In the past, the Government had persistently ignored any such advice offered by Britain, had imported picture magazines, chocolate, cosmetics and combs (now there are enough combs in the country to keep generations of Greek heads perfectly coiffed).

As he saw growing U.S. resentment of his attitude, Maximos hastily declared that he had no objections to import controls. Meanwhile, encouraged by the U.S. promise, the Government started an all-out offensive against the Communist-led guerrillas in Macedonia and Thessaly, throwing in an estimated 60,000 troops, naval and air units.

"We Won't Buckle Under." Uneasy gratitude was even more pronounced in well-off Turkey, which could afford pride more easily than Greece. There still was overwhelming sympathy for the U.S.; in a square at Izmir last week, Democratic Party Leader Celal Bayar was making a cautionary speech on the U.S. loan, when the S.S. Exchester let out a mighty whistle blast in the nearby harbor. Bayar interrupted his speech, turned toward the ship and saluted the U.S. flag, while his audience did the same.

Said one Turkish editor: "We know that Truman and Vandenberg are battling for us and humanity. . . . But we must achieve democracy in our own way." Said a businessman: "Your dollars won't make us knuckle down any more than Russian threats." An aging Turkish intellectual summed up the situation confronting the U.S.'s new foreign policy: "It is difficult to give gracefully, and even more difficult to receive gracefully."

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