On the Front Edge

President Kennedy said that world affairs, in a not very resounding phrase, were entering into "a rather climactic period." Secretary of State Dean Rusk, appearing before the Foreign Policy Association in Manhattan, put it another way. "I suspect that we are," he said, "on the front edge of significant and perhaps unpredictable events, a period in which some of the customary patterns of thought will have to be reviewed and perhaps revised."

Pressed for specifics, both Kennedy and Rusk wandered off into generalities. Yet, for all their inadequacy in verbalizing their feelings, both men were, in fact, reflecting a growing sense of change in the balances of the cold war. For years, cold-war relationships had seemed drawn up along a sort of Maginot line, with fixed sides, fixed positions and fixed personalities. Now that line was breached, and with its breaching had come a period of fluidity and flexibility. There were hazards ahead, but also opportunity.

If the U.S. had not yet achieved a complete victory in Cuba, the Soviet Union had suffered a stunning setback. Just as significant as Nikita Khrushchev's backdown in the face of firmness was the fact that the Cuba crisis had heartened the Western alliance while helping to splinter the Communist world.

In the torrent of events, old relationships were being reversed, old positions abandoned, old ideas discarded. Here was India, under savage assault from the Communist giant it had sought to befriend, unaided by the neutralist nations it had led ("Where was Sukarno? Where was Nasser? Where was Tito?" asked a disillusioned Indian diplomat). And here was India, the unaligned, seeking and receiving help from the Western powers it had scorned. Here, at the same time, was neighboring Pakistan, long one of the U.S.'s staunchest friends, threatening to turn to a policy of "positive independence," and sending Foreign Minister Mohammed Ali, an amiable old friend of the U.S.'s, off to Peking for conferences. Most important of all, here was the quarrel --no longer discreet or polite--between Moscow and Peking. This split, as it was at last being called, might still require the two great Communist powers to back each other's moves, but they no longer seemed to be coordinating them in advance (see THE WORLD).

Aware of these shifting tides and of things undone, President Kennedy called top members of his National Security Council executive committee into conference at Hyannisport. One by one and two by two they arrived--Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor, Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, Under Secretary of State George Ball, Bobby Kennedy, White House Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Special Counsel Ted Sorensen, Kremlinologist Llewellyn E. Thompson

Jr., and John J. McCloy, who heads a three-member group negotiating about Cuba with Soviet representatives at the United Nations.

They talked of Cuba, but also of India --of tightening the economic and political noose around Castro's neck, of finding out what India needed and what could be done to help her. At the moment there seemed to be opportunities for bold maneuver on all the fronts of the cold war, and if these could be explored and exploited, it would indeed be time to talk of a climactic period.

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