Any Other Day in May

U.S. Ambassador Llewelyn Thompson and family were opening presents around the tree in Spaso House Christmas morning when the phone rang. It was the Soviet Foreign Ministry, asking the ambassador to drop by Andrei Gromyko's office. An hour later Ambassador Thompson received a letter from Premier Khrushchev, assuring President Eisenhower that Khrushchev would be glad to go to a summit meeting in Paris next spring, just so that he could get back to Moscow in time for May Day. The same message also went to the British and French.

It was a measure of diminished urgency that the summit meeting to discuss Berlin and other matters had become something to be fitted in with the participants' other engagements. The Western Three had put forward April 27 as a summit date, because President de Gaulle was booked to visit President Eisenhower the week before, and Prime Minister Macmillan had a long-standing date to attend a Commonwealth meeting the week after. After comparing everyone's social calendars, the second week in May looked like the best date. Nobody apparently had anything more pressing to do that week.

Gold & Tariffs. The same low urgency had surrounded the brief Western summit just ended in Paris. It presumably settled the when and where of talks with Khrushchev--yet in fact only confirmed what Chancellor Adenauer had predicted after his meeting with De Gaulle in early December. In Paris, De Gaulle and President Eisenhower had had but one private talk, 55 minutes long, and much of the time was spent in translations. De Gaulle and Macmillan had 45 minutes together one afternoon; they discussed tariffs. Macmillan had asked for a breakfast session with Ike at the U.S. embassy residence, but learning in advance that the U.S. would give him what he intended to plead for, Macmillan and Ike talked golf.

The brief communique ending the three-day exchanges barely mentioned the Berlin question, and when the Germans tried afterward to indicate that the Western Four had taken a stronger attitude on Berlin, another Western minister rejoined: "No--but we have not taken a weaker stand." This same minister, asked to say what the big confrontation accomplished, quipped that it had "relaxed tensions between the allies." In the end, every issue of substance was referred back to working committees for "further study." Working committees exist for just that; what miffed the members of these committees was that the Western Four had laid down so few guide lines for them.

Wedge & Bridge. The most substantial decision of the Paris meeting was to call a twelve-nation conference in Paris in mid-January to set up an Atlantic economic committee, including the U.S. and Canada. Subject: what to do about the impending division of Western Europe into two rival economic blocs. This was the topic that alarmed Macmillan. The British talk of building a bridge to draw together their Outer Seven and the bigger Common Market Six. U.S. Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon returned from a European tour last month convinced that the U.S. would have to involve itself as a direct participant in consultation between the two developing trading groups, if only to protect its own trade interests. But Washington was not particularly interested in bridging or blending the two groups, in order that they might exchange special privileges that exclude the Americans. Instead, the U.S. itself wants in on any trading of special preferences.

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