Clear Line

The President of the U.S. last week told the Communist world that the U.S. would fight before it would see the Chinese Communists seize Quemoy. He told restive free world allies that, with or without them, the U.S. was determined to stand against the kind of appeasement that led down the road to World War II. And inferentially, he warned the U.S. not to be surprised to find the Armed Forces fighting to defend Quemoy--not for the rocky real estate but for the principle that armed force shall not be used for aggressive purposes. "I know something about . . . war," said Dwight Eisenhower, in a nationwide radio-TV speech, and he predicted an inevitable tragedy "if the peace-loving democratic nations again fearfully practice a policy of standing idly by while big aggressors use armed force to conquer the small and the weak."

Once the Communists turned from their Quemoy bombardment guns to the bargaining table, the President said, the U.S. would be ready and willing to negotiate toward "a solution that could be acceptable to all parties concerned, including, of course, our ally, the Republic of China."

Confusion Compounded. Early in the week intelligence reports to the vacation White House in Newport, R.I. convinced the President that it was time to make the U.S. position unmistakably clear. U.S. Navy destroyers were escorting Nationalist supply ships to the three-mile limit off Quemoy, but the Nationalists were being clobbered on the beaches (see FOREIGN NEWS) by Communist artillery. It was not impossible that a U.S. ship would be hit, since one obvious Chicom aim was to provoke the U.S. into aggressive-looking acts. (The Reds even sent out false directional signals in hopes of luring American planes over the mainland, where, shot down, they would look like attackers.) Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev, rattling the Moscow end of the Communist axis, threatened in another propaganda letter to Eisenhower that U.S. ships "can serve as targets for the right types of rockets." (The President patiently wrote back a request that Khrushchev talk sense, not waste time on "upsidedown presentation," and help cool down the dangerously aggressive Red Chinese.)

To Fight Confusion. Meanwhile some home-front pundits and commentators had done a good job of confusing the issues. State Department correspondents gave Secretary of State John Foster Dulles such a querulous needling on U.S.Formosa policy that he telephoned the President to urge that the basic principles be laid down in a presidential speech.

The confusion was compounded by an erroneous report in the New York Times that the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Pacific forces, Admiral Harry D. Felt, had questioned the Quemoy policy for such unlikely reasons as an alleged ammunition shortage that would inspire, the story said, the fleet to early use of nuclear warheads. (The fact was that Felt cabled heavy support for the policy shortly after he was first asked to comment three weeks ago, felt his force suitable to the job.) The President's mail reflected public apprehension, and he decided to fight the confusion with his major address.

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