Middle East Debate (Contd.)

FOREIGN RELATIONS

Middle East Debate (Contd.)

Pushing through the overflow crowd jammed into the Senate caucus room to hear him, the Secretary of State appeared fit and fresh in his pin-stripe grey suit and gay red necktie. Once more he was on hand to explain the President's request for authorization to 1) use U.S. forces, if requested, to defend any Middle Eastern nation against Communism, and 2) spend, without restriction, $200 million of already appropriated funds for Middle Eastern economic aid. Late the next afternoon, as he wearily pulled on his overcoat after questioning by the combined Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, John Foster Dulles was pale and drawn. He had met not only the care ful, concerned sort of questions that the Senate is duty-bound to ask. but also the hectoring and badgering of a small group of Democrats who launched what Vermont's mild-mannered Republican George Aiken called "a concerted effort to destroy you politically and personally."

Georgia's Richard Russell, wearing dark glasses against the glare of television lights, led off for the tough-but-responsible Democrats. He was, he drawled, a "little confused" about how the Administration planned to set up its program for economic aid to the Middle East. Dulles explained that as soon as the Eisenhower proposals are approved by Congress, a fact-finding commission, led by South Carolina's James Richards, former Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, will depart for the area to draw up a bill of recommendations.

"Why didn't you send Richards out there as soon as he was employed, and get his program?" asked Russell sharply. "It seems to me he could have flown out there and gotten back by now and given Congress his recommendations. We are being asked to buy a pig in the poke." Dulles flushed. Pounding on the table with clenched fist, he snapped: "If Congress is not willing to trust the President to the extent he asks, we can't win this battle. If we have to pinpoint for every country, including the Communists, every step we are to take, this resolution will not serve its purpose. The emergency is great and the military situation is one of great danger."

"Calculated to Weaken." Arkansas' Democrat William Fulbright, onetime President of the University of Arkansas, who wears his Rhodes scholarship on his sleeve, waited patiently and purposefully for his turn with Dulles. When it came, he pushed his glasses down his nose and began to read a prepared statement. U.S. Middle Eastern policy under Dulles, he said, has "grievously wounded" Britain and France. Before Congress approves the Eisenhower resolutions, Fulbright continued, Dulles should be called upon to account for why these "responsible and friendly governments" had felt it necessary to conceal from the U.S. their plans for armed intervention in the Suez crisis.

"Speaking for myself," said Bill Fulbright, "I need more convincing evidence than I have had, up to this time, that the Secretary of State has evolved policies regarding the Middle East which are in the interest of our national welfare. I regard the policies which he has been following as harmful to our interests, as being calculated to weaken the influence of the free world in the Middle East, disastrous to the NATO organization, and as damaging to our friendship with Great Britain and France." Dulles, he said, should prepare a State Department White Paper reviewing "his conduct of our foreign relations in the Middle East, at least since the time when he visited General Naguib in Cairo and gave him a silver-plated pistol."

"Intellectual Wilderness." Dulles scribbled heavily at his doodle pad, his face beet-red, and Rhode Island's ancient (89) Theodore Francis Green suggested impatiently that Bill Fulbright was going far beyond the senatorial province of asking questions. Later Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey took up the Fulbright cause:

"Do you really know what you have in mind for Egypt?" he asked Dulles.

"The more appropriate question," replied Dulles, "is do we want to tell the Communists what we have in mind for Egypt. The answer to that is no."

But, asked Humphrey, has not the Eisenhower Administration always argued that the Russians should be warned in advance about how the U.S. would meet Communist aggression? Said Dulles: it is one thing to warn the Communists of the penalties of aggression, but quite another to let them know that "we are going to employ so many men, and at such and such a time in such and such a place." Cried Humphrey: "I am not going to be led off into an intellectual wilderness."

Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse showed up in the same neck of the woods--and led Dulles into one of the most unfortunate remarks of the hearings. Morse, wringing his hands lest "American boys might have to go over there alone," suggested that Britain and France join the U.S. in backing the Eisenhower Middle Eastern resolution. Dulles replied softly: "I hope, before you commit yourself to that proposition, you will give careful consideration to the reception the British and French could get in the Middle East." Then, half-joking and still referring to the low esteem in which the Middle East holds Great Britain and France, Dulles added: "If I were an American boy, as you term it, I'd rather not have a French and British soldier beside me, one on my right and one on my left." Lifted out of context, so that it appeared that Dulles was reflecting on the soldierly qualities of the U.S. allies, the remark was sped to Europe, where it caused a middle-sized explosion (DULLES INSULTS OUR FORCES, headlined the London Daily Sketch.

Even while Fulbright and his Senate friends were plucking the political fiddle strings, the House of Representatives was moving swiftly--and with point. The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the Eisenhower resolution virtually intact by a 24-to-2 vote, moved it toward the House floor, where overwhelming approval is expected. But the committee report also noted that the resolution failed to meet such "basic"' Middle Eastern problems as Arab-Israeli relations, the Suez Canal dilemma, and the handling of Arab refugees. The House, said the committee, should get on with the business of adopting the Eisenhower resolution--and then should receive from the Administration "positive and comprehensive measures for dealing with the fundamental problems of the Middle East."

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