Around the Doughnut Table

Ever since the League of Nations so spectacularly failed to make the world safe for democracy, Geneva has earned a reputation as a home of lost causes. Diplomats who acknowledge its convenience and its setting hate to be identified with its name. Among the hundreds of diplomats, sword bearers and aides, and the 1,174 newsmen who descended on the city last week, the prevailing mood seemed to be that the 15th Big Four conference since World War II was bound to be a meaningless inspection of knapsacks before a later trip to the summit.

As if to prove the point, the conference started off with a thwacking round-table joust. Sensing that the Russians wanted the ministers to sit at a round table so that the Germans could the more easily join them on an equal basis, the Westerners insisted cagily on a square table: four sides, four powers. Instead of beginning their proceedings on time, the four ministers found themselves at the town house of Britain's Selwyn Lloyd, making sketch after sketch of possible seating arrangements on little scraps of yellow paper.

The Status Seekers. It was almost like the Mad Hatter's tea party, with the Western Three pouring tea on the Russian dormouse's nose. Seemingly nothing could shake Russia's taciturn Andrei Gromyko. And then at last, at 3:45 p.m., Gromyko, without a flicker of emotion, withdrew his demand that the Germans sit with the Big Four. The three Westerners then agreed to adopt a round table, but with the two German groups sitting apart, at separate tables. How close? Gromyko took six pencils and laid them side by side. "Just this far," he said stolidly. "I will initial it." And so, as the Communist press proclaimed "de facto recognition of East Germany," the conference began.

Gromyko, "the world's highest-ranking errand boy," arrived at the opening session wearing, of all things, a Homburg. Hamming for the cameras, the dour old disher-upper of cold-war epithets raised the Homburg and waved, and he cracked a certain smile as he posed with his East Germans at his elbow. (Actually, at least three of the six East Germans, including Foreign Minister Lothar Bolz, are Soviet citizens who spent years in Russian exile, came back to Germany with the Red armies.) Taking his turn in the chair next day. Gromyko pressed for admitting Poland and Czechoslovakia to the table too. Neither nation was one of the allied victors who are charged with making a German peace treaty, but Gromyko argued that they had suffered "incomparably" during World War II. France's Couve de Murville could not resist pointing out that the Poles had been victims of both German aggression and Russian partition.

Down to Business. If the Russians were eager to harp on the issue of inviting other nations, they were not willing to wreck the conference over it, and the U.S.'s Christian Herte>r, taking the chair next day, plunged straight ahead to the conference's real business. His lucid opening speech made clear that there would be a summit conference afterward if "constructive proposals" were made. He affirmed that "the U.S. is in deadly earnest about wanting to reach agreements." After the three other ministers and representatives of the two Germanys made speeches, Christian Herter proceeded to put forward the West's "package" plan.

It turned out to be the most ambitious and sweeping proposal for a German and European settlement since World War II. Its complex and neatly dovetailed provisions represented a formidable accomplishment of allied unity. It went far beyond the last previous proposals advanced by the West at the Geneva summit of 1955. Main points:

P: Germany should be reunited after free, secret, all-German elections, but these elections are no longer the requisite first step (as the West has always proposed before); they could be held within a period of 2 1/2 years.

As a first step toward German reunification, East and West Berlin should be reunited to provide the future capital of Germany. Free elections should be held there as soon as possible under four-power or U.N. supervision. The first freely elected all-Berlin council might then administer the city under the supreme authority of the Big Four, who would have free right to station troops there until Berlin becomes the nation's capital.

P:A mixed German committee (25 West Germans, 10 East Germans, based on relative populations) would be created to work out a draft electoral law for later approval by plebiscite. By thus proposing that Germans rather than its World War II conquerors carry out this basic task, the West meets the Soviet objection that the Germans should have the say in determining their future status.

P:The mixed committee's decisions, in drafting the election statute and increasing contacts between the two Germanys, would be subject to three-fourths majority vote, thus assuring that the East Germans would not be outvoted. But this partial veto must not result in no agreement at all; if they could not agree, two drafts must be submitted to the voters.

P:During the transition toward German reunification, there would be a whole series of precisely phased military changes that would give the Russians explicit assurances of security with each new step. Example: the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would each reduce armed forces to 2,500,000, finally 1,700,000 men.

P:Whether or not the new Germany joins NATO, it would be expected to affirm Bonn's 1954 pledge not to produce "ABC" (atomic, bacteriological, chemical) weapons. Also, in a zone whose size would be determined by negotiations, there would be limitations on both sides of the Iron Curtain of national (i.e., German) and foreign forces.

P:If the new Germany joins NATO, the West will offer wide, new security guarantees to Russia, including a pledge that NATO forces would advance no nearer to the Soviet frontier than their present positions in West Germany.

P:Last of all, after election of the all-German government, the peace treaty would be concluded.

Listening intently as the plan was read first in English and then in Russian, Gromyko withheld comment. But within hours, Radio Moscow was already denouncing the Western plan in its propaganda broadcasts to Greece.

At the conference next day, Gromyko asked for the microphone, formally presented his own plan. It was the same Soviet draft treaty for Germany that was submitted to the Western Three last winter, and his windy speech (1 hr. 20 min., 5,000 words), blaming the West German "military" policy for creating international tension, added nothing new.

Russian tactics were not to reject each Western item one by one, but to object to their being put in one package. To link Berlin, Germany and European security together, grumbled Gromyko, is "to muddle together various political problems into one tangle . . . which it would be quite impossible to untie." Diplomats count on short memories: the Russians now want to talk about Berlin alone, but it was Stalin back in the 1948-49 Berlin blockade days who insisted that Berlin was "an inseparable component" of the German question.

Having His Way. In Moscow, receiving a Lenin International Peace Prize, Nikita Khrushchev, with his accustomed demagogic skill, repeated how eager he was to reach agreements. The Western plan held nothing new, he went on, and had to "frankly say that it left a bitter taste in my mouth." The West expected him to turn it down and take the blame, "but we shall not give this satisfaction." The Western proposals, he added cautiously, "contain certain questions which are worthy of discussion and against which we shall not object." He was no more specific than that.

The day before, Khrushchev had fired off letters to Eisenhower and Macmillan, seeming to give ground on agreeing to ground inspection of each other's country to detect nuclear explosions at great heights. But on closer reading, his answer was full of calculated ambiguities.

By these tactics, Khrushchev apparently hoped to sit down at a summit table without showing any of his hand. The overriding decision to be made at Geneva (and back home) was whether summit talks were so desirable, or so inevitable, that he should have his way.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.