A Stand on Principle

In his dogged fight to head off aggressive world Communism, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles has taken many a sling and arrow from behind. Last week Dulles was in the thick of a struggle to defend the beleaguered Chinese Nationalist island of Quemoy--from an attack begun and carried on night and day by Communist guns, backed by Peking's threats to conquer Formosa, and charged with tension by Moscow's bomb-rattling promise to throw the U.S. out of Asia. Yet Dulles had reason to wonder whether he did not have more to fear from his friends than from his enemies.

The cries of alarm from the professional hatchetmen were to be expected. "This evil man, bent on war, must be checked," shouted Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse, who was promptly countered by New York's Republican Congressman Kenneth Keating for giving "aid and comfort" to the Communist enemy. Massachusetts' John Kennedy, stumping for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, blamed Dulles for having been caught in Quemoy and Matsu, implying that the U.S. should somehow have found a way to slip the islands out from under the Nationalists on the sly. Notably, leading Democrats Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson voiced no public criticism. But cartoonists, columnists, TV commentators and editorialists were badgering Dulles with a unanimity that he has seldom encountered at a time of national crisis. And the U.S. public, as it floated pleasantly out of recession and into the football season, seemed perilously bored by the whole situation.

Allies Help. Against this array Dulles fought a tireless battle. Though Chinese Communists had shown no interest in real negotiations at Warsaw, Dulles ordered U.S. Ambassador Jacob Beam to talk with them again this week. In Manhattan he consulted with Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd,*who gave a diplomatic dinner for Russian U.N. Delegate Andrei Gromyko to urge Moscow pressure on Peking for peaceful settlement. Dulles met privately with Lloyd and French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville, who began making the Western case in U.N. for an effective cease-fire in the Formosa Strait.

But Dulles did not retreat an inch from U.S. principles, and he tried hard to make restive U.S. allies see why. "We would find acceptable any arrangement," said he in a Manhattan address to the Far

East-America Council of Commerce and Industry, "which on the one hand did not involve surrender to force or the threat of force, and on the other hand eliminated from .the situation features which ... to use President Eisenhower's phrase, were 'a thorn in the side of peace.' " But the U.S. intends to stop Communist aggression wherever it breaks out. "These offshore islands do not constitute the ideal defensive position," the Secretary admitted dryly, but neither does West Berlin. "Berlin is militarily indefensible. It is a small island of freedom totally surrounded by Soviet power. But we do not abandon it on that account. Nevertheless, the U.S. and its allies have risked war and stand committed today to risk war rather than surrender Berlin."

The Consequences. Two days later he made his point again to a Boston meeting of the privately sponsored Atlantic Treaty Association. "The strength of NATO and the immunity of the NATO area from aggression depend very largely upon what the Soviet leaders consider to be the will of the U.S.," he said. "Is the U.S., they ask, willing to defend territory other than its own in support of collective security? If the U.S. should give in to the arrogant Communist demand in Asia." concluded he, "the consequences would be felt in Western Europe."

There was, in truth, very little disposition in the U.S. to "give in," despite the carping of home-front and foreign critics. But in the face of Communism's clear warning of its intentions, and Dulles' need for help in heading them off, it was high time for the U.S. to sit up and take notice.

*Though few Britons saw merit in defending the offshore islands, the Foreign Office has cables from all its North and Southeast Asian embassies and legations reporting unanimously that U.S. retreat from Quemoy would batter Western prestige, corrode Britain's own position in Singapore and Hong Kong.

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