Steady On

"In the old days," said Secretary of State Dean Acheson last week, "a man who held my office used to write out, in beautiful script, instructions to a Minister . . . and those instructions were put on a sailing ship and they took weeks to cross the ocean. And the American Minister who received them put on his black knee breeches and he walked to the palace or the foreign office and he read what his Secretary of State had written, and that was the United States speaking.

"Now," said Acheson with a sigh, "all that is changed." He had only to glance at his leather-bound log of the week's business to know just how much it had changed. The log was crammed with slam-bang protests, denunciations and propaganda broadsides from Iron Curtain countries, and the U.S. replies, just as forceful, bouncing back with the speed of rockets. At week's end his docket of urgent communications looked something like this:

THE CASE OF THE NAVY PRIVATEER. Dispatched: a carefully weighed charge that the missing four-engined Navy patrol bomber, because of the known facts of its flight plans and its slow speed, could not have been over Russia's Baltic territory when the Russians said it was. Hence it must have been shot down or crippled by

Soviet fighters over the open sea. Demanded: punishment for the offenders and indemnity for loss of ten U.S. lives and property. Received: (three days later) a flat Soviet refusal, which insisted that the plane was not a Privateer but a "B29 Flying Fortress," and had been caught taking pictures over Latvia. The State Department went to work on another note repeating U.S. demands.

The temper of U.S. reaction was shown in Congress, where both houses unanimously voted posthumous decorations for the Privateer crew members. And the hollowness of the Russian accusations seemed to be established further by the finding of a second rubber life raft, of the type issued to the Privateer, picked up by a Swedish ship in the Baltic. The raft showed evidences of having been blasted on the water by high-powered airborne projectiles.

CZECH COMPLAINTS. Dispatched: a demand for a Czech government apology to 40-year-old Katherine Kosmak, U.S. employee of the U.S. Information Service in Prague, who swore she had been pressured by Czech police to marry a Czech fellow-worker and renounce U.S. citizenship. Received: a brusque note demanding 1) the recall of U.S. Press Attache Joseph Kolarek for "inducing" Czech USIS employees "to spy and gather news"; and 2) the closing of the two USIS offices because they are spy centers and spread "hostile and aggravating and false news." Dispatched: a reluctant compliance (since international law is on their side), along with a counterdemand for the shutdown of the Czech consulate in Chicago by May i. Noted: on its last day the Prague USIS office gave away 15,000 books and brochures to 3,000 Czechs who jammed in all day, despite secret police outside.

TROUBLE IN TRIESTE. Received: Russian charges that the U.S., France and Britain are stalling on naming a UN governor for Trieste (see FOREIGN NEWS) so that they can build up bases in that pivotal area of the Adriatic. Replied at press conference: nonsense.

The rising frequency of protest and reply clearly indicated a hotting-up of the cold war, but that did not necessarily indicate the greater likelihood of a hot war. Lesser incidents than these, if anyone wanted war, could obviously provoke one.

"We must not forget," Dean Acheson told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "that it is we, the American people, who have been picked out as the principal target of the Soviet Communists." But though he thought the situation serious, he did not see war in sight.

To this Harry Truman, avowed optimist, added a conditional postscript as he chatted in the officers' mess at Fort Benning, Ga. The world could escape "that third one," said he, so long as an armed U.S. pointed the way. "I believe in preparedness to prevent hostilities in the world at large," he declared. "It took us two wars and 30 years to find out that our place in the world was one of leadership. Now we want to maintain that leadership for peace and the welfare of the world . . . and I am just as sure as I stand here that eventually sanity is going to come to the world."

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