One Man's Doubts (Cont'd)

Hobbling along on crutches, Bob Taft returned to Washington last week after a nine-day checkup for an ailing hip in a Cincinnati hospital. As he picked up the chores of Senate majority leader, Ohio's senior Senator also picked up where he had left off in his headline pronouncements on foreign policy to the National Conference of Christians & Jews last fortnight (TIME, June 8). Said Taft, in an explanatory public statement: "At no time did I use the words that the U.S. should go it alone in the Far East or anywhere else. I pointed out that our whole present policy was a policy of military alliance, building up nations willing to use their arms to fight the Communists if they are attacked. What I said was that we should forget the United Nations as far as the further conduct of the Korean war is concerned . . ."

But Taft was not retreating an inch from his belief that the U.N. should not be allowed to dominate U.S. foreign policy. "The United Nations," he said, "serves a very useful purpose as a town meeting of the world where disputes can be brought out in the open and peaceful means urged to prevent war, but it is an impossible weapon against forcible aggression." He cited the U.N.'s confused stand against Communist China. Though the U.N. has formally condemned the Chinese Reds as aggressors, and pledged itself to the goal of a unified free Korea, "on the [U.N.] committees concerned with the war are India and many other countries which say they are not on the side of the United Nations at all, but are neutral in the fight. How ridiculous . . ." Then Taft took his general thesis one step further: "If we are able to disentangle ourselves from the U.N., we already have treaties with Australia and New Zealand, with Japan and the Philippines, and a very definite understanding with the French in Indo-China. I think we should [also] have a free hand to form a [military] alliance with the British [on] Far Eastern affairs . . . but not one in which they possess any final veto against our policies."

For a peculiar reason there were no outraged squawks of rebuttal at this persistent divergence from Eisenhower's announced pro-U.N. policies. The British have long resented the fact that the U.S. did not invite them into its Pacific alliances, and thought Taft's proposal was a step forward--for Taft. Two ranking Administration foreign policy leaders in the Senate, Wisconsin's Alexander Wiley and New Jersey's H. Alexander Smith, liked the idea too, and promptly said so. Almost as a dutiful postscript, Wiley added that the whole treaty network, like NATO, should be undertaken under the U.N. charter.

Suddenly the "go it alone" man found himself traveling, part way at least, in good company.

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