A Matter of Timing

The foreign ministers of the West who gathered in Paris were agreed on the danger of Berlin, but not on how fast the clock was ticking. They agreed to disagree for now.

As they sat down in the Quai d'Orsay's gilded Salon de Beauvais in Paris to work out an allied reply to the latest Communist gambits, it was U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk who was most eager for action. All the ministers agreed that, if need be, the West would have to risk war. But all still hoped to find a formula for peace; all now recognized that major negotiations with Russia--perhaps even a summit meeting--would be necessary before the year was out.

Private Reasons. The disagreement came over timing. Rusk flew into Paris hoping to persuade his partners that there should be immediate contact with Russia to set a date and fix an agenda for a Berlin conference. This, he argued, would regain the initiative for the West. The French and West Germans were unwilling, and each has a private reason. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer is in the midst of an election campaign and in particular wants no discussion of possible bargaining concessions or muddying up the electioneering before election day, on Sept. 17.

France's Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville, who skillfully articulates what Charles de Gaulle allows him to say, argued that the West could bargain more firmly after the projected NATO troop buildup was complete, and that it was unseemly to be hasty. There were those present who thought the French had another motive. Prolonging the Berlin crisis a few extra weeks is one way to keep some nationalist responsibility alive in the French Army, which is nearly out of hand over Algeria and Tunisia. Courteously, Rusk bowed for now to his allies' insistent demands. But as a matter of fact, he, too. has some firm dates in mind. He thinks some parleying with Moscow must begin before the Oct. 17 gathering of the XXII Party Congress in Moscow, lest Khrushchev take advantage of the occasion to make some outrageous further demands he would have a hard time backing away from later.

Near the Flash Point? For all his professed desire to parley, nothing Khrushchev said last week suggested a new basis for discussion of anything--except his own demands that East Germany be given total control over access to Berlin. Britain's slim and elegant Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, thought it necessary to caution his own people about being prematurely relieved by the prospects of talks: "It is really no good looking on the word negotiation as an incantation that can be repeated as if it might solve everything," he said. "So far, in all our contacts with the Russians, they have been willing only to talk about a) handing over Western rights completely to East Germany, and b) how they can be whittled down . . . We've come close to a very dangerous situation and possibly war." Some London newspapers reproved him for being so militant.

As East fenced with West, in a skirmish which went by certain rules and limits, everyone was increasingly aware that a dangerous imponderable had been added to all the cautious, careful calculations about the "aching tooth" of Berlin, the bone in Khrushchev's throat. This was the presence of an ever-increasing flow of westward-moving refugees racing to use the West Berlin escape hatch. For the West to encourage it, or for the East to shut it off, could bring things to a flash point.

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