Low-Pressure Diplomacy

On the sunny terrace, in the gaudy bar and up & down the slippery stone corridors of the Hotel Quitandinha, delegates gossiped, shook hands, lobbied and told stories. The tanned and grey chief of the U.S. delegation was hardly seen in public. Yet, despite his efforts to push Latin leaders to the forefront, George Marshall dominated the Rio Inter-American Defense Conference.

Vatican Praise. His only speech was brief, and competed with the distraction of a visit by Evita Peron. But his forthright explanation of why the U.S. has to put economic aid to devastated Europe ahead of help to Latin America, his emphasis on the individual as opposed to the state, won helpful praise from the Vatican, mollified the Latins, and marked a Rio turning point.

Afterwards, the conference adopted the plan of Mexico's hard-working Foreign Minister Jaime Torres Bodet to postpone discussions of hemisphere economics until a special conference to be held next year, probably at Buenos Aires, and after the Bogota Conference. Having made this decision, the delegates amiably steamrollered (15-5) the proposal of Cuba's Guillermo Belt, who had campaigned for a treaty clause barring economic aggression.

George Marshall was still out for quick adoption of a strong hemispheric treaty. He breakfasted at 8 at his private Petropolis villa on the Rua 7 de Septembro, and by 10, having read the dispatches from Nanking and Athens, was conferring with his aides in his yellow-&-green Suite 200 at the Quitandinha. Ambassadors William Dawson and Walter Donnelly were acquainted with every Latin American problem, and Donnelly seemed to know every Latin delegate. Bill Pawley was sharp on Brazilian angles. Shrewd Norman Armour, onetime Ambassador in B.A., understood the Argentine way of thinking. Arthur Vandenberg's practiced eye never wandered off the high policy line.

Latin Liking. The Secretary got home for a 2 o'clock lunch and a quiet 7:30 dinner. For exactly one hour after dinner, unless there were guests, he played Chinese checkers with Mrs. Marshall.*Then he retired. At week's end he lunched in Rio with President Dutra. Another day he turned up unexpectedly at a Quitandinha horse show named in his honor "The General Marshall Trials." Mrs. Marshall bought him a bag of popcorn. He handed it right down to two small boys who had been staring at Irm for all they were worth from beneath the box railing.

Like Cordell Hull before him, Marshall made the rounds of the Latin chiefs of mission. The Latinos liked him. Said Peru's slim Foreign Minister Enrique Garcia Sayan: "He has gone far beyond the needs of diplomatic good taste." Flanked by Armour and Donnelly, Marshall paid a visit to Quitandinha's Suite 400, the rooms of Argentine Foreign Minister Juan Bramuglia. The Argentines served beer, whiskey, potato chips, but the abstemious Marshall took nothing. When he left, an Argentine said: "The conference is all fixed now."

Argentine Concession. But later in the week, at the midnight deadline for filing treaty drafts, the Argentines handed in one of their own--a treaty for the use of force against aggressors from outside the hemisphere, and nothing but "pacific" measures against aggressors from within.

"An armed alliance against the rest of the world," snorted Senator Vandenberg. "It will not do. It would cease to be a regional arrangement." Within 36 hours, the Argentines were making concessions.

Perhaps the success among the other republics of George Marshall's low-pressure diplomacy would still win a strong treaty and, as he said last week, "demonstrate to all the world that . . . nations who really want peace can have peace."

*In China, last year, she taught the game to Chiang Kai-shek.

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