Warsaw v. Moscow

On the way home from the campaign swing along the West Coast, President Eisenhower was handed a Teletype report from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles about the latest development in Poland, where nationalist-minded Communist leaders were defying the edicts of Moscow (see FOREIGN NEWS). In Denver, the President studied fresh messages, made a brief airport speech, talked long-distance to Dulles, and instructed Press Secretary James Hagerty to issue a statement warmly sympathizing with traditional Polish yearning for liberty and independence.

All weekend, lights burned late at the State Department as Washington weighed the implications of the Polish move. It was the biggest moment of decision in the cold war since Khrushchev last spring tore down the Stalin image and conceded to Tito that alternate roads to "socialism" are possible. (It was the State Department that first published the Khrushchev text.) The pattern had already been set. The U.S., by backing up Tito when he first broke with the Kremlin, had launched its first major step in breaking up the Soviet empire eight years ago. President Eisenhower, by deciding to continue that aid last week, took another step in encouraging the Soviet satellites to demonstrate their independence.

To the State Department, the Polish attempt-which had been gathering momentum for weeks-seemed to be a vindication of Western policy. Whether the U.S. will now proffer aid to the Poles is still under consideration. As Secretary of State Dulles put it: "Anything which weakens this great structure of Soviet Communist power and leads to its breaking up" is in the interest of the United States.

Landing in Washington, President Eisenhower turned his attention to another facet of Moscow relations-a personal note to Ike from Premier Bulganin calling on the U.S. to join with Russia in bringing H-bomb tests to a halt (but making no mention of the U.S. insistence on safeguards). Ike was nettled because Moscow had published the text before he had seen it. He was angry because Bulganin noted that "certain prominent public figures in the United States"-i.e., Adlai Stevenson -had proposed a plan to stop H-bomb tests. And the President characterized as "personally offensive to me" a charge that Secretary of State Dulles had distorted recent Soviet atomic proposals.

In the stiffest diplomatic message of his Administration, the President charged Bulganin with a serious violation of international practices in which "you seem to impugn my own sincerity." By sending the note in the middle of an election campaign, he said, and especially by referring, by implication, to Stevenson's views on atomic testing, Bulganin had interfered in U.S. internal affairs in a way that, "if indulged in by an ambassador, would lead to his being declared persona non grata."

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