Difficult & Distant

Two events of deepest portent reverberated in the news. One was the still undigested fact of Russia's atomic bomb. The other was the shutdown in coal and steel, foundations of the nation's industry and its economic wellbeing. But the U.S., which had often been accused of reacting too violently to disturbing news, seemed to be accepting both events with almost studied indifference.

Washington was as calm and unhurried as if neither had happened. The White House had announced its intention of letting labor and management sweat it out; few Congressmen even raised their voices on the subject of the Russian bomb.

Defense officials stuck to their original line: this isn't anything we haven't anticipated. Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray took his vacation as scheduled; other top defense officials went off for the usual routine dinners and speeches across the country.

Beneath the official calm, there were some barely discernible stirrings. Federal Mediator Cyrus Ching called in his assistants for new strategy meetings to see if anything further could be done about the steel strikes. In the State Department, Counselor George Kennan set to work imagining himself in the Kremlin, trying to guess how the new bomb would influence Stalin's thinking and plans. Connecticut's Senator Brien McMahon called AEC officials to closed sessions of his Joint Atomic Energy Committee and talked vaguely of "more bucks" for the nation's atomic program.

But in the main, official Washington went on at its pre-bomb, pre-strike pace. So did most of the plain people of the U.S. Though men were clubbed and shot at, though thousands were already out of work, the nation's industrial troubles hadn't yet really begun to hurt and the issues were hard to understand (see below). Besides, most people were confident that somehow or other everything would be peacefully settled.

They were just as confident that somehow or other the nation's defenses would be adequate to cope with Russia's bomb. Anyhow, that too was something to worry about later on; the possible personal consequences were hard to visualize. It took a while, especially in the heat of the baseball pennant races and the cool beauty of the early autumn, for the full meaning of either situation to sink in.

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