"A Time Will Come"

On the flat stretches of Flushing Meadows, fanned by autumn's first cool breezes, the red and yellow dahlias nodded cheerily. So did Andrei Vishinsky. "I," beamed the Soviet Foreign Minister on his arrival, "am optimistic by nature."

The glow seemed to spread over the whole General Assembly on its opening day of firmly fixed smiles and heavy hand-pumping. Delegates exchanged greetings with an almost perfectly uniform ritual: strong right-hand clasp, affectionate left-hand pat on the back. The official nurse, on duty just across a corridor from the General Assembly Hall, dispensed only one headache powder the first day (to a Chilean delegate).

White Horse. Within 24 hours, Vishinsky broke the splendid spell. At the steering committee's first meeting, he bitingly scorned a proposal to establish a modest 300-man guard for U.N. "I can see Mr. Lie on a white horse leading his forces against the forces of a sovereign nation, carrying a blue flag on which are the words 'United Nations.' Let us be reasonable, gentlemen . . ." The crowded committee room resounded with politely appreciative laughter.

Then Vishinsky hurled one of his surly, sweeping innuendos: "A time will come when vengeance will be wreaked against those who violate the charter, and their instruments will be turned against them." Nobody found this very funny.

Black Array. The fagade of banalities, already cracked, soon crumbled. Next day, Assembly Chairman General Carlos P. Romulo of the Philippines, a neat, brisk figure always dressed in immaculate black, was presiding with proud relish when he got the news of the year. A U.S. correspondent passed him a note: "President Truman has just announced that Russia has the atom bomb. Amen." Trygve Lie, at Romulo's side, scribbled a quick reply: "If true, it makes the U.N. all the more indispensable." Then he sat back to await Andrei Vishinsky's scheduled address.

In the buzzing tenseness following Washington's atom-bomb announcement, Vishinsky's speech lacked even the bang of an old-fashioned blockbuster. It was sparked with the standard vituperation. The peace-loving U.S.S.R., cried Vishinsky, was "ready to answer . . . blow for blow" any threats of "the black array of warmongers" in the West. He called on the Assembly to 1) condemn Anglo-American warmongers, 2) impose an "unconditional prohibition of atomic weapons and . . . rigid international control," and 3) call upon the Big Five to sign "a pact for the strengthening of peace."

Smiling Vagrants. The peace-pact talk, as the U.S.'s Warren Austin pointed out bitterly, was window-dressing: Moscow had spurned the U.S. offer for such a pact over Germany three years ago. The atomic-ban talk, as Britain's Ernie Bevin bluntly put it, was stupid; again & again, the U.S. had proposed genuine international control by a U.N. atomic-energy commission, and a vast Assembly majority approved the U.S.-backed plan (TIME, Dec. 20). But the Russians, while piously asking all nations to take the pledge and outlaw atomic weapons, 1) insisted that the U.S. chuck its whole stockpile before anything further was done about control; 2) flatly rejected a stringent system of international inspection.

There was only one thing new on the Russian merry-go-round as it wheeled around to the same old tune: it had one rider less than before. The old East-West split of 53-to-6 had now become 54-10-5. The vagrant vote came from the grinning, youthful-looking Yugoslav delegates who sat in the row behind Vishinsky, seeming to rejoice in their freshly asserted break from Mother Russia.

Somber Spirits. One of the Assembly's grimmest moments came when Dr. T. F. Tsiang, representing Nationalist China's crumbling government, rose to speak. Said he: "During the past two years, while the dike from the Persian Gulf to Scandinavia was built against the flood of Communism, the Far East has been inundated . . . Can the United Nations maintain its prestige . . . by ignoring what has taken place in my country? . . . I appeal to the General Assembly to be brave enough to embrace the vision of one indivisible world and not to retreat to the false illusory security of half a world."

While most delegates would agree with Trygve Lie that the U.N. was more than ever "indispensable," none seemed to know what would make it less ineffectual. Delegates could face their problems only in the somber spirit of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson's opening speech to the Assembly: "To the extent that we cannot solve them today, we must endure them."

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