Destiny Comes on Wednesday

At 3:30 p.m. each Wednesday, a group of men gather in the Cabinet room of the White House Executive Offices to determine how the U.S. stands amid its international perils and opportunities and to tell the President, who sits with them, what they think he ought to do about "the situation."

The group is the National Security Council, created by the defense unification act of 1947 to "advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to the national security so as to enable the military services and the other departments and agencies of the government to cooperate more effectively in matters involving the national security." The law designates as members the President, Vice President, Secretaries of State and Defense and the chairman of the National Security Resources Board (Stuart Symington), and says that the President can add others. As regular members, Truman has added Mobilizer Charles Wilson, Advisers Averell Harriman and Sidney Souers, General Omar Bradley, Intelligence Chief Bedell Smith and the NSC's secretary, James S. Lay, 39, an alert administrator who before World War II was a sales manager for the Hagerstown Gas Co. in Hagerstown, Md.

Policy & Action. Formally, the NSC can decide nothing. Harry Truman decides. But Truman's attention is most sharply focused on the great issues of war or peace, appeasement or resistance, "containment" of Communism or retaliation, when he is sitting, on Wednesday afternoon, with the NSC.

The NSC now has before it nothing less than a reappraisal of basic U.S. attitudes and policies in world affairs. Events--Korea, the U.N. mess, Eisenhower's electrifying trip through Europe, the wage & price freeze--have overtaken the old policies and outrun the old pace of U.S. action. In a sense, the NSC is considering whether to advise Truman to adopt consciously, officially and essentially the broad policy to which he has already committed the U.S. by piecemeal actions.

The price & wage freeze, for instance, is an action that fits only with a policy of all-out mobilization for all-out struggle. So is Korea. So is the U.S. position in the U.N. debate. So is the decision to send large U.S. forces to Europe. Out of step with these actions are many other aspects of U.S. policy, e.g., last week's statement that the U.S. still does not intend to veto Communist China's admission to U.N. (see INTERNATIONAL).

Unworkable Formula. Disjointed U.S. policy encourages its enemies, bewilders its friends (especially Britain) and annoys its people, who know quite clearly that passive "containment" is no longer a workable formula. That is why the attitude of the American people is: get out of Korea or go all-out. "All-out" does not mean "drop atomic bombs on Russia"; it means go after the enemy in whatever is the most effective way.

Some Wednesday afternoon soon, eight more or less good men & true may come to agreement. A onetime salesman may record it. A onetime haberdasher may adopt it. Then democracy will speak with a clear voice again, and a great issue of human destiny will have been decided.

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