Success for an Idea

As the President of the U.S. flies homeward this week from his eleven-nation world trip, he brings back snapshot recollections of vivid ceremony and unaffected friendliness. Dwight Eisenhower, the world's best-known, most respected statesman, lifted personal prestige and national influence to new highs from Rome to New Delhi to Paris. But equally as important as the President himself was the backdrop of popular reaction to his visits. His trip was a success because the American idea is a success; he had once and for all destroyed the myth that anti-Americanism prowls the world. The roaring welcomes defined no new world view of the U.S.; what they did was to dramatize the fact that the world likes an Americanism which day by day works for the quiet processes of emerging democracy and business opportunity (see BUSINESS), and stands up for its principles in actions ranging from the Marshall Plan and Korea, through the Truman Doctrine and U.S. intervention in Lebanon.

In Paris the President found the trip's most serious diplomatic challenge. Around a mosaic-inlaid table he conferred with France's Charles de Gaulle, West Germany's Konrad Adenauer and Britain's Harold Macmillan in a difficult Western summit meeting. To a ruffled Premier De Gaulle he explained that the U.S. is basically in sympathy with French attempts to end the struggle in Algeria. But in private session he argued adamantly against France's pullback of support from NATO'S integrated defense (see FOREIGN NEWS), agreed to disagree until more staff work could be done on the problem.

The allies fully agreed on a formal invitation to Khrushchev to attend an East-West summit in Paris late in April. Ike took the proposal even further by suggesting a series of summits that might last through his presidential term.

There are plenty of problems to be solved among the allies, and some of them must be solved before the West is ready to present Khrushchev with a solid front. But Ike's trip, and even De Gaulle's assertion of independence, made it clear that the West would be dealing at the summit from a new kind of strength, backed by a new kind of world confidence and support.

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