Mr. Stalin, Meet Mr. Truman

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS (367 pp.]--Ellis M. Zacharias--Putnam ($3.75).

Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, 60, U.S.N. (ret.), would be the first to agree with his publishers' estimate of him: "America's greatest intelligence expert." His first unblushing bid for the title was Secret Missions (TIME, Dec. 23, 1946), a postwar expose of U.S. naval intelligence in which it didn't take much reading between the lines to guess that Intelligence Officer Zacharias had been a live brain awash among saltwater boneheads.

The admiral's new book, Behind Closed Doors, is boldly subtitled "The Secret History of the Cold War." In spite of side-of-the-mouth assurance that much of this is inside stuff, most of it is available to any Washington newspaperman who can get a few weeks' leave of absence.

Like everyone else, Annapolis-trained Zacharias is aware that Russia is committed to world domination, that Stalin is letting his Communist parties throughout the world carry the ball for him, that patterns of conquest have been laid down for most of the world's areas. Unlike most nowadays, he thinks that a Truman-Stalin talk "can settle the grave controversies between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S."

Should such a conference fail, Zacharias offers a list of suggestions which are either pretty obvious or pretty sure to precipitate the hot war he doesn't want, e.g., abrogation of the U.S. peace treaties with satellite Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary, and establishment of U.S. military control over them if they didn't behave.

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