Hardening Line

Hardening Line The U.S. Government moved slowly in the presence of serious events last week toward a sterner position in the cold war.

President Eisenhower led the U.S. protest against the Kremlin's execution of Hungarian Revolutionaries Imre Nagy, Pal Maleter and two comrades (see FOREIGN NEWS) with his strongest anti-Communist statement since Budapest. "I cannot think of any incident that could have, and has, more shocked the civilized world," said he at his press conference. "It is clear evidence that the intent of the Soviets is to pursue their own policies of terror and intimidation to bring about complete subservience to their will. I think there is no incident that should have more alerted the free world to the lack of confidence that we are compelled to feel in the words and actions of these Communist imperialists."

The President added that he was all for U.S. economic aid to U.S.S.R. satellites in order to set up "centrifugal as opposed to centripetal forces" and to "awaken new interest in these countries to pull away from Moscow." Both House and Senate unanimously condemned Soviet "barbarism and perfidy" in the Hungarian executions and called on free parliaments everywhere to join in denouncing them.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took just as strong a position against a thinly veiled attempt of Egypt's Dictator Nasser to overturn the pro-U.S. government of Lebanon, a threat backstopped by a call from Moscow Radio last week for "volunteers." Dulles handed Nasser and the Communists a thinly veiled warning that the U.S. was ready to help the U.N. or act on its own to help the Lebanese government maintain the country's "integrity and independence." Said Dulles: 1) the U.S. Sixth Fleet is "watching the situation"; 2) some elements of the fleet "could, if need be, respond to appropriate invitation."

Not that the basic nature of the cold war had changed; it had not. What had been changed by executions inside darkest Communism and the rattle of the riots in Beirut was the terms of the worldwide debate that had sometimes tended to obscure that basic nature. For months U.S. policy had been influenced by the imponderable pressures of "world opinion" toward negotiated agreements with world Communism in general and toward a suspension of U.S. nuclear tests in particular, and in longings for a parley at the summit. Now that pressure was indefinitely postponed--as usual, at the cost of the lives of brave men. Said Secretary of State Dulles: "I still think it will be a little time before there is a summit conference, if indeed there is one at all."

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