Symbol of What?

Spain's Dictator Francisco Franco, international pariah, seemed to be making progress toward getting back into the community of western nations. In the U.S. Senate last week, several members let it be known that they were ready to let bygones be bygones. Nevada's Democrat Pat McCarran started it by asking: Why should the U.S. not give Dictator Franco the same recognition it gives Dictator Stalin?

What set McCarran off was a U.N. debate over restoring full diplomatic recognition to Spain. The Soviet bloc wanted the two-year-old ban continued; most of the Latin Americans wanted it lifted, and so did some U.S. delegates. But Delegates Eleanor Roosevelt and John Foster Dulles were for continuing the ban. Result: the split U.S. delegation was told to abstain from voting.

To McCarran this artful dodge seemed just another way of keeping Franco in the doghouse. He was convinced that Franco had never been as black as he had been painted, anyhow. "How can we do better than to make an ally of a country which has carried the war against communism for the past quarter of a century?" he asked. Besides, suggested McCarran, getting down to business, the U.S. might be able to sell Spain some surplus cotton.

No Sale. Republican Floor Leader Kenneth Wherry leaped to that suggestion: "Figures handed me show that the U.S. has lost the sale of more than 300,000 bales of cotton. That number of bales could have been sold to Spain during [the past] two years." Added Texas' Tom Connally, chairman of the Foreign Relations

Committee: "I have never seen any logic in maintaining diplomatic relations with Russia, for instance, while refusing diplomatic relations with Spain ... I do not approve Spain's form of government. Neither do I approve Russia's form of government."

The Republicans' Arthur Vandenberg agreed. "I have never felt," he said, "that extending ambassadorial recognition was in any sense an approval by the United States of the governments of the countries to which it was extended. If that were the case, there are about a half-dozen embassies I would like to see closed now."

No Freedom. Next day Secretary of State Dean Acheson tried to explain to his press conference just what the official U.S. position was. In a long and ambiguously worded statement he implied that the U.S. was largely deferring to the attitude of Western Europe. "The fact of the matter was," he declared, "that a government was established in Spain which was patterned on the regimes in Italy and in Germany and was, and is, a Fascist government and dictatorship . . ." Point by point, he ticked off the Western democracies' indictment of the Franco regime. It denied the writ of habeas corpus, the right of trial by jury, the right of religious liberty, the right of free association.

Acheson admitted that "this question of whether or not ambassadors, as distinguished from charges d'affaires, are in Madrid is a matter of no real importance at all." What gave the question importance (which it seemed to have, Acheson added wryly, "because it arouses a great deal of emotion both in this country and in other countries") is that recognition has become "a symbol of something else." If recognition had been withdrawn in the first place as a symbol of disapproval, then restoring recognition would inevitably be taken as a symbol of approval of Franco.

No Interference. Why, then, didn't the U.S. vote the way it believed in the U.N., instead of merely sitting by? The answer, said Acheson, was simply that the U.S. wanted the Western Europeans to do the deciding for themselves. "American policy is to try to bring Spain back into the family of Western Europe," he explained. "You have to convince the Spaniards that they must take some steps toward that end, and you have to convince the Europeans that they have to take some steps . . . Therefore the policy of the American Government is one which I am quite sure is calculated to please neither group of extremists in the United States--either those who say that we must immediately embrace Franco, or those who say that we must cast him into the outermost darkness."

Obviously, though Acheson did not put it so bluntly, the State Department would just as soon send an ambassador back to Madrid. But that didn't mean that the U.S. loved Franco any better, or wanted him in the North Atlantic Treaty.

And this week the U.N. took the State Department off the hook by voting to keep the ban on Spain.

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