Tito, Stay Home

The quick little public duster that whirled around King Saud's visit built up while he was at sea and blew out shortly after he stepped ashore. It was nothing compared with the storm blowing up from pulpit, editorial page, civic organizations and even state legislatures over a visit tentatively scheduled for April by Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito. By last week it was plain that, foreign policy or no, Tito was persona non grata to a vociferous segment of the American public.

In the forefront of the attack were some Catholic groups, unshakably opposed to Tito as an old-line Communist and enemy of the church. The Knights of Columbus called on Ike to "refrain" from extending an invitation. In heavily Catholic Massachusetts, the house of representatives in a protest resolution said that an invitation to Tito "would be an act of subservience." In predominantly Protestant Washington State, the state senate resolved that Tito's visit would be "a rebuff to the brave Hungarian and Polish people who are resisting Communist pressures." The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars took similar stands. Impressed by their mail. Congressmen in a petition urged President Eisenhower to keep Tito out. Wisconsin's Representative Alvin E. O'Konski even said he would consider resigning his seat if "a murderer and dictator" was invited to the U.S.

Nobody had good words for Tito, but the visit did have its defenders. In Mayfield, Ky., the Rev. Frank Cayce asked his Episcopal congregation: "Why shouldn't Eisenhower have Saud and Tito as guests? Didn't Christ associate with lepers, whores and publicans?" Editorialized the Denver Post: "A lot of Americans probably never have understood the importance of Tito as a fracture in the monolithic structure of international Communism. If so, the fault lies with our policy strategists, who have not explained the facts of the Communist struggle for power for general consumption."

So loud did the clamor become that it reached at last to Tito himself. In Belgrade, Government Spokesman Branko Draskovic announced coldly that Tito's U.S. visit "will not take place for the time being because the conditions and atmosphere created in the U.S. in connection with it have shown that the time for such a visit is not ripe."

Said President Eisenhower at his press conference last week: "You don't promote the cause of peace by talking only to people with whom you agree. That is merely yes-man performance. You have got to meet face to face the people with whom you disagree at times, to determine whether or not there is a way of working out the differences and reaching a better understanding. In this light I am always obliged to any man, any head of state, who will come and talk when we think we have problems that might be advanced, solutions that might be advanced by this kind of meeting. I therefore deplore any discourtesy shown to a visitor who comes to us, representative of a government or of a people, and whose purpose is to see whether he can assist in ameliorating any of these difficulties."

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