Author Meets Critics

FOREIGN RELATIONS Author Meets Critics

Probably nowhere in the U.S. are the words and ideas of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles more thoroughly or frequently attacked than at the bar and across the dining tables of Washington's National Press Club. Last week Dulles, still glowing from the President's press-conference tribute, went to a sellout luncheon at the National Press Club to face his critics. By the time he had finished his formal speech and a question-and-answer session, he had left on the record one of his clearest appraisals of his own job and U.S. cold war policy.

No doubt, said he, the Communist rulers gained a success in Sputnik. "But Sputnik, mocking the American people with its beep-beep, may go down in history as Mr. Khrushchev's boomerang. A wave of mortification, anger and fresh determination swept the country. Out of that mood is coming a more serious appraisal of the struggle."

The Iron Grip. In the new cold war struggle, said Dulles, the strengths of Communism are bound up in its iron grip upon nearly 1 billion people, enabling Communism to squeeze the great bulk of its resources into armaments and political-economic offensives. But the weaknesses of Communism are also bound up in that iron grip, above all in the restless demand of subject peoples for freedom of thought and freedom to buy more consumer goods. This is why the U.S. has been trying to base its cold war policies upon 1) "everpresent and ever-alert retaliatory power to deter Soviet aggression," 2) political-economic aid and beefed-up world trade. 3) the exportable and basic meanings of the U.S. way of life. "It is up to us to make our freedom so rich, so dynamic, so self-disciplined that its values will be beyond dispute and its influence become so penetrating as to shorten the life expectancy of Communist imperialism."

Dulles moved on to blunt the newest anti-Dulles campaign: the argument that he is too rigid an anti-Communist to permit a parley with the U.S.S.R. "The truth is quite the contrary," said he. "We do want a summit meeting provided the proper conditions obtain. " The proper conditions: preliminary meetings, held in secret at diplomatic levels, in which the possibilities of real agreements can be explored and in which the sense of urgency of the free world need not be let down. Said Dulles: "There are, I know, many who feel that the cold war could be ended and the need for sacrificial effort removed by a stroke of a pen at the summit. That is the kind of illusion that has plagued mankind for a long time."

The Real Respect. Dulles struck his hardest blow--and got his warmest applause--when he took out after a question that summed up much of what his critics have had to say. The question: "So far as world prestige is concerned, how do you think America stands today as compared with five years ago?" Dulles stepped up to the microphone, a smile beginning at the corners of his mouth. "I can hardly answer that question, perhaps, without a certain amount of bias. I would say, to try to be as candid as possible, that the U.S. stands higher than ever before with the governments of the free world countries. I cannot say the same as regards public opinion, where I think public opinion may perhaps have been somewhat misled, but perhaps you gentlemen have a very different view of that.

"Now there is a difference between being respected and being liked. We do not run the foreign policy of the U.S. with a view to winning a popularity contest. And we have to do things which we know are not going to be popular. But we have not done, in my opinion, anything for which we are not respected, and I prefer being respected to being popular."

In the ensuing punditry. many an editorialist and opinion molder ruminated that Dulles had "changed," that he was now showing an encouraging willingness to negotiate. And it was true that the preoccupation of most of the press with the summit had forced him to be more explicit about what the U.S. would and would not do. But it was also true that the "new Dulles" was basically the same John Foster Dulles, with basically the same view of the cold war, who went into office just five years ago this week.

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