Until the Dust Settles

Smiling wryly, Secretary of State Dean Acheson opened his press conference last week by quoting Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII:

An old man broken by the storms of state

Is come to lay his weary bones among ye.

Give him a little earth for charity!

For three days, virus X had slowed up the new Secretary. His job also gave him occasional chills and fever.

On the healthy side, Acheson had helped polish the final draft of the North Atlantic pact. It now pledged the U.S. to defend Western Europe with armed force, if necessary--reserving to the U.S. the right to determine when such action was "necessary." Acheson felt that this compromise was forthright enough to reassure Western Europeans, while worded properly to reassure Senators, who didn't want to surrender their Constitutional right to declare war. Norway was all set to climb aboard. Even Denmark's Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen, who thought the U.S. was trying to hustle him through the gate, indicated that the Danes might be willing to step aboard now of their own volition.

The question of China, however, gave the new Secretary a chill and a high temperature. Fifty-one Republican Congressmen had written to President Truman, demanding clear answers to specific questions on current U.S. policy towards China. His bright yellow dispatch case bulging with documents, Secretary Acheson took his weary bones up to Capitol Hill for a closed session with the Republicans. When it was over, the Secretary, like Cardinal Wolsey, needed a little earth for charity. Minnesota's tireless Walter H. Judd, onetime China medical missionary, who believes that the U.S. could still save China from the Reds if it only tried, had taken a short aim on the Secretary of State. Said Judd: "U.S. policy could almost be expressed in four words: first, aid to China was 'unnecessary,' then 'undesirable,' and then 'too late.' Just what is being done? What are we going to do?"

Acheson coolly responded with the frankest description so far pinned on the U.S.'s wavering, feckless China policy: "Wait until the dust settles." That Mi-cawberism, which Dean Acheson had inherited when he took office, was not enough for Walter Judd. He blamed the U.S. for consistently undermining Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. Acheson countered that the Chiang government was corrupt, that U.S. military supplies inevitably fell to the Communists without a real fight. Then Judd assailed the State Department's long effort to sell China a coalition government. Said Judd: "The Chinese knew then, and it took us a long time to learn, that coalition with Communists means the death of the government." After an hour and a quarter of it, Acheson's icy diplomatic composure failed him. His face flamed, then whitened. He picked up his papers, stuffed them into his case and snapped: "We are not getting anywhere." That was how the Republicans felt about it too.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.