All Thumb, No Plum

With the air of a Little Jack Horner just back from his own special corner, Foreign Operations Administrator Harold Stassen hustled up to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week to put across the point that he had been a very good boy indeed. He had stuck his thumb into world economic problems at the London conference (Britain, France, the U.S.) last fortnight, and the plum he was holding up for the Senators to see was a U.S. decision to go along with an expansion of trade in "nonstrategic" items between the West and Russia.

The Senators, still unnerved by Secretary Dulles' grave warnings about Indo-China (see above), were in no mood to applaud--even though Stassen promised that there would be no relaxation of tight controls on trade with North Korea or Communist China. New Jersey's usually sunny H. Alexander Smith scowled darkly when Stassen admitted that the list of nonstrategic goods for Russia included "simple types of machine tools." Snapped Senator Smith: "It seems to me that we are strengthening their war potential." With an increased supply of civilian goods from the West, he said, the Soviets "can now concentrate on arms production."

Opening the Curtain. No, replied Stassen, the new plan would not add to Soviet war potential "in any significant way." The Eisenhower Administration believes that the U.S. does not face "an early or inevitable world war," and if war should appear inevitable, the U.S. could easily slap a complete embargo on trade with the Communists. Moreover, the trade might even move the Soviet economy in the direction of peaceful consumer goods. Stassen said. "We are opening up the Iron Curtain to what we call merchants of a better life."

Michigan's Homer Ferguson arrived late for the hearing, muttering under his breath: "I don't agree with this increasing East-West trade at all, not a bit." Ferguson lost no time in getting Stassen to admit that Russia is currently "disturbed" by civilian shortages. "That," said Ferguson, "would indicate that we are getting results . . . When we find they are in trouble, then we hold a meeting to send them more consumer goods." Replied Stassen: "We are endeavoring to turn the Soviet economy to peaceful pursuits."

Whose Disunity? "But isn't disunity behind the Iron Curtain the hope of the free world?" asked Ferguson. Countered Stassen: A tight blockade would increase disunity in the free world. "I can't agree with you," Ferguson replied. "I can't agree that the people of the free world are going to be broken up by stress or strain before the people behind the Iron Curtain are."

After a few more minutes in the committee's chilly atmosphere, Stassen abruptly stood up, packed up his charts and went back downtown to his office. If he had stuck to the plain fact that the agreement to relax controls on East-West trade was a necessary concession to the British and French, who are being hard-pressed by the U.S. diplomacy on the political front, the Senators would probably have understood him better. But when he implied that the new trade might soften the heart of Communism--i.e., that Russia makes guns only because she has no channels for peaceful trade with the West--then Stassen was clearly all thumb and no plum.

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