Extraordinary Adventure

Pundits Joseph and Stewart Alsop, who have criticized the Administration's Middle East policy and defended the Franco-British attack on Egypt, last week goaded Old Socialist Norman Thomas into unwonted words of praise for the Eisenhower Administration. In a letter to 21 of the papers that carry the Alsops' column, Thomas marveled at the Alsops' "extraordinary adventure in support of the blundering Eden and the sorry socialist, Mollet." Said Thomas: "Suppose (as the Alsops would have it) that the U.N., with the President's approval, had put off a cease-fire in the Middle East. We might already have been caught in the first stages of that new world war which there is still hope of avoiding."

Thomas, who has frequently criticized the Administration's foreign policy, urged support of "Eisenhower's effort to use the U.N. as the world's main hope of avoiding World War III." He blamed Truman and Acheson for "failure to turn truce into peace before Russia [could achieve the] strength to interfere so ominously in the Middle East." Concluded Thomas: "The President, however, and the American people, who must deal with things as they now are, can only be hurt by the kind of pontificating [exemplified by] the Alsop effort."

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