The Visible Hand

The hand that reached out last week to pull the strings in Japan was--as both President Eisenhower and Premier Kishi said--the hand of organized Communism. In forcing Japan to cancel the President's visit, it administered a stinging slap to U.S. pride and prestige. No Red propaganda victory in years had so served to humiliate a President of the U.S. Coming in the wake of the U-2 dust-up and Nikita Khrushchev's party-line attack on Eisenhower at the summit, it was--as Moscow and Peking intended it to be--a blow to the U.S. image. Allies were apprehensive because the U.S. had allowed itself to get in such a fix. Peking and Moscow were jubilant; one called the President "a rat," the other called him "a snake."

Yet, just as the Russians overreached themselves at the summit, so, perhaps, had Communism overreached itself in Japan. U.S. power in Asia had not been diminished. The alliances that are the basis of U.S. policy had not been broken. The economic viability of the whole Asian perimeter, from Japan to Australia, had not been challenged or changed.

But the crisis in Japan raised a red flag of danger where one should always be flying. Japan, heretofore considered a pro-Western bastion, was now a question mark: a sovereign nation not yet able to defend itself, a democracy not yet strong enough to repel serious, if sporadic, Communist infiltration. Japan's first duty was to pull itself together and get on with the economic and political future that lay in the full promise of its free institutions. The U.S.'s duty was to guarantee unequivocally that nothing should be allowed to interfere with that promise.

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