The Senator Rebels

That formidable California bulldozer, Senate Minority Leader William Fife Knowland, is a man who sometimes will not see the trees for the forest. When he has an idea, he thrusts straight ahead to the conclusion--and often manages to carry a lot of his countrymen along with him. Last week Bill Knowland, a United Nations delegate himself, pushed through to a conclusion about the Middle East and the entire U.N. that scattered a whole grove of carefully planted Administration trees.

Bent on avoiding a flare-up in the smoking Suez crisis (see FOREIGN NEWS), the Administration had tried to nudge the Israelis out of Sinai by threatening to support U.N. sanctions against Israel. President Eisenhower sent a warning letter to Israel's Premier David Ben-Gurion, and both Ike and Secretary of State Dulles dropped public hints for Israeli consumption--at the same time hoping fervently that the hints would be enough to forestall an embarrassing U.N. vote on sanctions.

After Dulles' first hint, at his press conference, Knowland spoke up. It would be "immoral" and "insupportable," he said, "to punish Israel while Russia disregards U.N. resolutions on Hungary with impunity." Then Ike backed Dulles by pointedly noting, in reply to a press-conference question about sanctions, that the U.S. is "committed to the support of the U.N." Undeterred, Bill Knowland rumbled: "What I said yesterday I repeat today. I stand on it."

On the Senate floor next day, Knowland kept pushing straight ahead. A "double standard" of international morality, he said, "is growing like a cancer at the heart of the U.N. . . . Nations which failed to show the slightest interest in applying either moral or economic sanctions against the Soviet Union, which has failed to respect any of the ten resolutions passed on the Hungarian issue, now urge sanctions against Israel, which has at least partially conformed to the U.N. resolution relative to the Middle East."

Many Washingtonians thought that Bill Knowland, in pushing on his path of logic, had managed to make a little headway toward a possible political goal: edging out his fellow Californian Dick Nixon for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960.* Politicking or not, Knowland had built up a position that was likely to make him more friends than enemies. It would appeal to 1) the conservative Republicans, who instinctively trust and admire Knowland and have mistrusted the U.N. from the start, and 2) the once-trusting U.N. partisans who have lost faith in the U.N. since its vote against Britain, France and Israel during the invasion of Egypt, and are now as distressed about the "double standard" as Bill Knowland is.

* Knowland has a long way to go, reported the Gallup poll this week. Asked whether they would "personally prefer" Dick Nixon or Bill Knowland as the G.O.P. presidential nominee in 1960, Republican voters replied: Nixon 63%, Knowland 23%, don't know 14%. But even more indicative: of Republican voters polled, only 2% said they did not know Nixon, 28% said they did not know Knowland.

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