Washington-U.S.A.
DUSCHA, JULIUS
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. Presidential Race THE EYES OF Washington are on West Virginia, not Paris. Although the long-awaited summit conference will begin in Paris only two weeks from now, on May 16,...
...The West insists that first there must be agreement on foolproof controls...
...British demands for an understanding with the Soviet Union continue to be an important factor in pushing the West toward summit conferences and other international meetings...
...But what can Khrushchev pull out of Paris...
...The last summit conference, in 1955 at Geneva, was so built up in the public mind before President Eisenhower ever shook hands with then Soviet Premier Nikolai Bul-ganin that its dismal results came as a bitter disappointment to those who had believed it would do so much...
...it is also because of a growing feeling in the capital that another summit conference is not likely to make the world over even in the heady atmosphere of Paris in the spring...
...Four years ago Adlai Stevenson found few persons who would listen when he tried to raise the test moratorium question as a serious campaign issue...
...Although the long-awaited summit conference will begin in Paris only two weeks from now, on May 16, Washington seems much more concerned over the outcome of the Democratic primary in West Virginia on May 10...
...What, then, is the summit conference likely to accomplish...
...For 17 months, it is pointed out, Khrushchev has sought to present himself to the world as a man of peace who would settle all of the grave outstanding issues between East and West if those stubborn Western democrats would only sit down with him...
...This seems clear from the recent meeting of the Western foreign ministers in Washington, which was notable for two reasons...
...In the United States, some candidates and political leaders who think they have a sure finger on the public pulse believe that voters are becoming increasingly impatient with the arms race and the expenditure of so many of their tax dollars for armaments that soon become obsolete...
...It is perhaps just as well, therefore, that Washington is more interested in West Virginia than in Paris...
...then, and only then, can disarmament proceed step by step...
...If a President at 70 could travel half-way around the world to see the peoples of Asia and to meet with their leaders, surely a President in his 40s or 50s can—and probably must—do the same thing...
...Most of the candidates who return from the hustings report that peace is the issue which transcends all others throughout the nation, except perhaps in states like West Virginia where unemployment has become almost endemic and where economic development seems to be stagnated...
...In the first place, the foreign ministers apparently failed to resolve their differences over Berlin or the Western approach to disarmament...
...The Soviet Union wants a sweeping agreement on disarmament, to be implemented later by controls...
...Dulles traveled so much that the foreign ministers of the world—and the prime ministers, too—soon decided that Dulles was the only American diplomat who counted...
...Another possibility is an agreement to continue the Geneva disarmament negotiations...
...As for disarmament, the chicken-and-egg argument continues to dominate the discussions...
...Why waste time dealing with an Ambassador when the Secretary of State would soon be along...
...Thus the East-West differences over disarmament, which date back to the beginning of talks in 1945, are as fundamental as the differences over Berlin and Germany...
...He must be prepared to face new problems and new challenges not only abroad but also at home...
...In France, on the other hand, President Charles de Gaulle made it quite clear to Khrushchev during his recent visit that the French were by no means ready to bargain anything away to the Russians in exchange for something as flimsy as a Soviet promise to behave...
...The most likely possibility is an agreement that would lead to a prohibition of all or most nuclear testing...
...The next President may well find himself in the same position that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was in during his final years in office...
...Such decisions would hardly add up to a successful conference, but no realistic By Julius Duscha Overshadows Summit Conference observer expects anything more to be accomplished...
...These are the kind of questions that are being asked by thoughtful persons in Washington as the State Department makes its final preparations for Paris, and as the Democratic politicians plunge into the last week of the West Virginia campaign...
...In the view of most Washington observers, the next President must do more than consolidate the consolidating of the eight Eisenhower years...
...Yet, should a President, especially in his first year or two in office, be expending so much of his energy in travel and in the kind of pro forma discussions with world leaders that hardly amount to much more than get-acquainted sessions...
...As far as the West is concerned, the key to Berlin remains a Germany reunited by internationally supervised and democratically conducted elections...
...The Soviet Union, of course, remains adamantly opposed to this proposal because the Communists could not possibly win such an election or even poll a respectable vote...
...There are many people in Washington who maintain that from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's point of view the conference cannot adjourn without at the very least leaving the impression that some sort of East-West agreement has been reached...
...Another problem both candidates will have to face is the precedent of personal diplomacy which President Eisenhower has set during the last year...
...This is not only because 1960 is a Presidential election year which will see a change in the White House no matter which party wins...
...In the second place, they did not come up with any new solutions to the problems of peace and war...
...The recent decision to abandon the Bomarc missile, on which $3 billion was expended, is difficult for many members of Congress, let alone many militarily unsophisticated voters, to understand...
...It is likely, therefore, that both Vice President Richard M. Nixon— who is still the odds-on favorite for the Republican nomination, despite the stirrings of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller in Albany—and the Democratic candidate will propose some dramatic plans to catch the imagination of the peace-seeking voters...
...Can he do this—and all the traveling, too...
...One indication of the feeling that the nation is growing impatient with the East-West stalemate was the way all of the Democratic Presidential candidates followed Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy's lead last month in announcing that they would respect any agreement to ban nuclear tests that President Eisenhower might negotiate...
...The voters are not at all sure, of course, how peace is to be achieved without a strong defense program and without the development of the latest weapons, but there obviously are lingering doubts everywhere over the way in which the world has been drifting in the 15 years since the end of World War II...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 18
