The Lawless & the Lawful

In seeking to measure the meanings of the cold war, the U.S. and its allies have lined up many opposing concepts--freedom v. slavery, opportunity v. conformity, godliness v. ungodliness, and so on--to define and dramatize what the struggle is all about. Last week the global sweep of the news added up to another concept: namely, law and justice v. authoritarian rule, two 180DEG opposites ranged against each other across organized land masses of freedom and serfdom. In the reports out of Budapest, Panmunjom, Washington, the operative word was justice; the question welling up, the debate accumulating, the pressure contending, was about how to get justice, how to fortify it, how to throw light on it and extend it.

The Crushing Judgment. In the United Nations a committee of five member nations returned a crushing indictment of the Communist subjection of Hungary (see FOREIGN NEWS). Almost as important as the indictment was the fact that it was drawn up not by cold-war powers but by small nations whose combined population could be lost almost any day in the fields of the Communist Ukraine. Almost as important was the manner in which the indictment was drawn up in the procedures of justice, the evidence carefully set forth and detailed, the Communist side fairly presented, the credibility of witnesses established.

In Korea the U.N. took up in the name of law and in law's terms, the question of repeated Communist violations of contract in the armistice agreement. With the facts established, the U.N. command sat down at Panmunjom and quietly announced that it meant to modernize its own forces, thus redress the legal balance.

The Growing Job. In the U.S., too, the news was of a nation arguing its basic questions in terms of law and justice--the Girard case on the rights and responsibilities of U.S. servicemen overseas; the St. Lawrence power case on the role of the Senate is ratifying treaties. Greatest discussion of all was about where the Supreme Court ought to take its stand between individual rights and the needs of national and individual security in the times of the Communist cold war. There was praise and there was criticism for the Supreme Court (see below), but the great fact was that the debate went on within legal framework in essentially legal terms. "The Communists declare that the court is an arm of the political system," a Texas law-school dean noted of the Supreme Court's decisions. "If that ever happens, justice under law is gone."

Helping to make the point was the testimony of a Hungarian girl student to the U.N. small-power committee: "We were brought up amidst lies. We continually had to lie. We could not have healthy ideas because everything was choked in us. We wanted freedom."

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