Where the News Ends:

...Why didn't the President immediately withdraw our Ambassador from Moscow and our representatives at the two futile and, indeed, dangerous conferences on disarmament...

...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin A Dirge for the Idea of Summitry LET US HOPE that the "Summit That Never Was and Never Should Have Been" will be the funeral dirge for the whole idea of summitry, with its strong and ugly aroma of appeasement...

...As the Western powers could not, without eternal shame, betray West Berlin, a complete deadlock was created before the conference began...

...Much of the breast beating in this country over the Paris fiasco is based on a demonstrably false assumption: that the downing of an American re-connaisance plane was the cause, and not a mere pretext for Khrushchev's tantrums in Paris...

...Why didn't the three Western chiefs of Government fly to West Berlin and give solemn assurance that this brave community would be defended, whatever the risk and whatever the cost...

...Macmillan seems to have cut a pitiful figure, trying to push Eisenhower into a half- or three-quarters apology, and almost winning over the well-meaning but naive President to this futile and disgraceful course...

...Let us hope that no American President of any party will go to a conference with the boring boor Khrushchev, Let us accept cold war as the normal, inevitable relationship between Communist and free states...

...The summit meeting was doomed, so far as positive results were concerned, by Khrushchev's bellicose speech in Baku, delivered some time before the unfortunate flight of May 1. In this speech he threatened that, if he did not get his way on evacuation of West Berlin, he would deny the Western powers access to that city by the sleight-of-hand of signing a peace treaty with his puppets in the Soviet zone...

...In the first of these conferences Czechoslovakia was the victim...

...At least this blow-up in Paris should discredit beyond hope of rehabilitation the false and dangerous idea of salvation through summitry, of achieving some miracle of international reconciliation by bringing together the chief statesmen of the free and the totalitarian worlds...

...If there was anything more disgusting than the spectacle of this clown turning what was supposed to be a serious conference into a rowdy propaganda circus it was the dazed meekness of the reaction of the Western representatives...

...in the second, Poland...

...Within a year of Munich, Great Britain and France were at war with Nazi Germany...

...Let us build up the invulnerable, overwhelming deterrent and the strong alliances which offer the only hope of preventing cold war from leading either to appeasement or to hot war...

...The excuse in each case was the importance of maintaining peace and good relations...

...Never in its history has the United States, in the person of its Chief Executive, been so violently insulted and reviled by a dictator who can hardly open his mouth without using language so foul that it has to be expurgated in translation...

...An age is made heroic or ignoble by its leaders and, with the exception of de Gaulle, it could hardly be said of the Western leaders: This was their finest hour...

...if he attached such terrific importance to them, why did he not raise the issue then...

...Downing the plane merely gave the Soviet dictator a welcome excuse for gratifying his ego by heaping abuse on the President and breaking up the conference with a resounding bang...

...It is simply absurd to imagine that the participants in such meetings can find new arguments capable of inducing departure from established positions...

...the excuse in each case proved hollow and empty by the subsequent course of events...

...Why didn't Eisenhower, if not at the first insult, at least at the fifth or sixth, get up and walk out of the meeting in the Elysee Palace, followed by Macmillan and de Gaulle...

...Indeed, there is a deadly parallel between the appeasement of the totalitarian tyrant Hitler at Munich and the appeasement of the totalitarian tyrant Stalin at Yalta...

...Stalin filled in capably for Hitler...

...and it took several displays of guts (the resistance in West Berlin, the war in Korea) to convince Stalin that he could not pursue his smash-and-grab tactics with impunity...

...It is no accident that the two most famous, or infamous, summit meetings of modern times, Munich and Yalta, ended in disaster and disgrace...

...What happened at Paris was a little surprising, even for this age, with its habit of turning what were once diplomatic meetings of privacy and gravity into a Donnybrook of brawling propaganda...

...Roosevelt and Churchill abandoned the cause of their weaker ally, Poland, as Chamberlain and Daladier threw over Czechoslovakia...

...What saved the day, apparently, was the rock-like stability of de Gaulle and the clearer vision of some of the President's diplomatic advisers...

...Khrushchev himself says that he knew about these high altitude flights at the time he met Eisenhower at Camp David...