The People's Week

East and West, from within and without, news crashed upon the U.S. last week. There was something almost primitively different in the pattern of events. World news is usually government news. Last week it was the people, the nameless millions, who gave the news its dominant impulse.

In Korea, the people were 27,000 anti-Communist Koreans let free from prisoner-of-war stockades (see WAR IN ASIA), and mobs of students and workers who shouted against the truce that the U.N. favors. Defiant Syngman Rhee led these people, releasing the prisoners, organizing the anti-truce demonstrations. But Rhee, wisely or unwisely, spoke what his people felt. The P.W.'s slipping out of captivity, the white-clad civilians clamoring hysterically, were a reminder that many Asians know and fear Communism as deeply as anyone in the West. The U.S. was so accustomed to rousing other nations to awareness of the Communist danger that it came as a shock to find a people charging it with gullibility and softness toward Communism. No easy solution of the Korean mess was in sight. The U.S. had fought a war without a will to victory, and from that lack sprang snarl after snarl that might hurt U.S. prestige and influence among Asian peoples for years to come.

Shouts of Anathema. In East Ger many, the newsmaking people were workers who poured from their tenements onto the streets, shouting anathemas at Communism and defying Red army tanks with stones (see INTERNATIONAL). Like the Koreans, they were jolting proof of a fact that the free world's leaders seem all too reluctant or timid to act upon: the people who have suffered Communism hate it passionately. They are not necessarily afraid to rise up against it. East German rebellion against Communism seemed to give the anti-Communist world its greatest opportunity--and challenge--since the cold war began.

At home, the news was the final days of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Two years ago, their trial and its shocking revelation of espionage made Page One stories but evoked no public displays of emotion; the long series of legal appeals and the Communist propaganda for their release became items of routine news.

The foreign press, which spoke of a "hysterical" U.S. public demand to execute the Rosenbergs, could hardly have been more wrong. Then Justice William O. Douglas granted his strange stay of execution. With that, the Rosenberg case finally got to the U.S. people--but not in the way that the "free the Rosenbergs" propaganda had intended. Without hysteria, but with an evident feeling that the Rosenbergs had been fairly convicted and sentenced, the people seemed to approve the Supreme Court decision, ending the confusion and doubt created by Justice Douglas.

Lost in the Shuffle. In 1953, at least 35 criminals were executed before Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The day before they died,. 129 U.S. soldiers were killed in history's worst plane crash in Japan. They were returning to Korea to help defend the embittered Koreans against the great conspiracy that the Rosenbergs had served. No picket lines formed for the 129. They, too, were of the people, who get lost in the shuffle of statecraft, and who now and then emerge in their courage, their long-suffering patience and their strength.

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