The Heart of the Matter

...The only guess that didn't turn up in most of the press was the possibility that Moscow had not been informed of the projected invasion, and when it got the news, bore down hard on Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader, to end the adventure...

...Less conspicuous but equally deadly is the increasing use of the silent treatment in areas where healthy discussion and debate were once encouraged...

...The Chicago public school system provides a striking example...

...I hope that if the new Administration becomes convinced there is a chance America Afraid It can't happen here, we keep telling ourselves, but it happens every day...

...They had failed to take the only step which might have prevented it...

...Speaking for the President as "official spokesman," Press Secretary James C. Hagerty said the Soviet editorial "might be the first statement toward something concrete...

...II Our reply has been to point a mocking finger at the Communist invasion of Laos, one of the three Associated States of Indo-China...

...Instead of implementing the broad policies of the Eisenhower address with specific, negotiable propositions, the Secretary of State embarked on a rambling and quarrelsome discourse designed to placate Republican firebrands by emphasizing the belief that the Soviet peace offensive was just another trap or trick...

...To play it safe the works of scores of American writers and artists are being banned, including those of George Gershwin, celebrated composer who has been- dead for 16 years...

...Dulles went on the air to take back much that his chief had said...

...In a little noticed statement recently...

...A recent poll by Elmo Roper showed 70 per cent favoring a strengthened UN, and a Gallup Poll disclosed 77 per cent convinced that it is "very important" for the United States to try to make the UN a success...

...More than 1,200 local committees sprang to action under Notes in the News the slogan "From People to People...

...The Communists began to withdraw, although they had encountered no serious resistance and had marched to within ten miles of the capital...

...This, of course, is no justification for Communist terror and bloodshed, but it helps explain here, as elsewhere in the tension areas of the world, why hungry and hopeless peasants will gamble with communism even if in the end it means exchanging one tyranny for another...

...The old familiar scenes, the British way of life, with its easy tolerance and its reasonable distrust of rigid political dogma, may quickly reconvert them...

...has long urged it...

...2) increase the food supply, and 3) improve health...

...It is a curious fact that both Mr...

...on Page 6 of this issue...

...Norway's Example The Eisenhower Administration's foreign aid program proposes to spend more than 90 per cent of the $5,800,000,000 budget on military and related projects, and the remaining small amount on technical and economic assistance...

...He himself related to Tito's foreign minister, Edvard Kardelj, how he advised Mao Tse-tung to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek and to disband the Chinese Red armies...

...But suddenly the Red drive into Laos ended as quickly and mysteriously as it had begun...

...Communism is also at times a blind force which moves wherever unresolved local conditions create fertile ground...

...Thus the Communists were not committing a technical act of aggression...

...King Haakon made the kick-off speech...

...French refusal to grant a meaningful measure of independence to the three states of Indo-China—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—not only brought war to Vietnam, now in its seventh year, but threatens to produce rebellion in the other two countries...

...A few months later, however, the schools were encouraged by the superintendent's office to invite students to write essays on "A Teen-Ager Looks at Advertising" for a new contest sponsored by the Advertising Federation of America, and to enter the essay contest sponsored by the Propeller Club of the U.S...

...Last year the school superintendent quietly dropped observance of United Nations Day...

...But the issues in Indo-China are not nearly so black-and-white as we sometimes like to pretend...

...The next step was to choose a project...

...how, with an oriental slyness that matched Stalin's own, Mao listened reverently and nodded approvingly, promising to behave...

...Here is the heart of the matter, expressed in simple, commonsense terms by a Republican veteran of diplomatic negotiation...

...How sensible and unafraid...

...Eisenhower's notable address to the editors had won for America and the free world...

...But nothing at all was done by way of concrete response...

...The New York Times reported from Moscow that one experienced diplomat evaluated the Soviet declaration this way: "They have put the ball back in the American court...

...Perhaps Mr...

...A comparable problem confronted the Norwegians about the same time...

...Perhaps the worst was our shocking treatment of a small group of returned American prisoners-of-war who, we feared, might have been "misled" by Communist propaganda in North Korea...

...Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith interrupted a prepared address to describe the editorial as "of major significance...

...There are many other examples of our unashamed aping of communist and fascist methods...

...Although they continue to make frantic pleas for international aid, the French stubbornly refuse to internationalize the conflict by placing it before the United Nations...

...to reply...

...Isaac Deutscher, one of the West's ablest students of the Soviets, discussed an even more extraordinary episode in a recent Reporter: "We also learn from Tito—but not only from him—that Stalin tried almost to the end to stem the tide of the Chinese Revolution...

...certainly it acted from then on as though that were all the reason it needed to abandon its original open-mindedness to Soviet peace overtures...

...IV Actually, as some of the keenest of the Washington correspondents have implied, the Eisenhower Administration turned tail and fled from the consequences of the President's historic speech because it feared reprisals from the Congressional clique that regards a negotiated settlement as appeasement and will tolerate nothing less than unconditional surrender—even if it means a widening of the shooting war in Korea and Indo-China...

...The people at home understand that in the enforced idleness of captivity many issues can appear in a distorted guise...

...There seems to have been no discussion at all about the possibility of sending a bomber or two or three, or guns or tanks...

...Another State Department directive, which represents an admitted knuckling-under to McCarthy, calls on American book publishers to certify that material furnished the foreign information program was not written by "Communists, fellow travelers, or persons who might be considered controversial...

...In New York he chose the day the Communists made their major concession in the Korean truce talks to speak truculently of breaking off negotiations unless the Reds accept our terms...

...With this background it becomes somewhat less fantastic to place alongside the guess that the monsoon season halted Red aggression in Laos, the equally unconfirmed possibility that Ho Chi Minh embarked on an adventure of his own design without confiding in his big brothers, or that he ended it at the insistence of Moscow or Peiping or both...

...Here non-Communists seem ready to throw their lot in with the Communists in a desperate drive to break free from their colonial chains...

...Dulles paid no attention...

...Even if the Kremlin's peace talk turns out to be a total fraud, we will have sown mistrust among our friends and allies and weakened our leadership of the West unless we demonstrate a more genuine willingness to engage in give-and-take negotiations...

...Dulles' superior and subordinate found hope in the Pravda editorial, but no one thought it worth following up...

...2) sought to curb his hunger to expand Yugoslavia's borders, and 3) brought pressure on him to withdraw support from the Communist guerrillas in Greece...

...Said King Haakon: "Let us start this program with the firm conviction that the thing we are doing is the only road that leads to a happier world, better international understanding, and the fulfillment of humanity's great prayer...

...Said Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express, whose anti-Communist credentials are about as impeccable as J. Edgar Hoover's: "If any of the returning prisoners have come back as converts to communism, it should make no difference in the warmth of the reception they are given...

...The President's address had hardly been translated in the capitals of the world when the bumbling Mr...

...In Washington he took refuge in timorous silence when Pravda, in an editorial that was remarkably courteous and conciliatory, responded to the Eisenhower foreign policy speech by calling for "businesslike" talks on troublesome problems...

...The Sorting appropriated $1,500,000—a sizeable amount in Norway—and the people took over from there...

...But nothing could more effectively spring the trap, if trap it be, than for the United States to "check or chill the processes of good-will...

...Doubtless it is genuinely convinced that Moscow inspired, or at the least tolerated, the invasion...

...This distorted interpretation of a fundamental issue in world affairs—the struggle for the minds and hearts of the half of humanity in Asia and Africa who are still shopping around for a way of life—is bound to hurt us where we are weakest today, the ideological sector of the global conflict...

...It was a king—not a commoner from Kansas—who expressed the truest meaning of a foreign aid program...

...The choice was obvious: motors and refrigerators for the fishing industry to 1) provide jobs...

...As Harsch wrote for the Monitor: "It may be that Communist operations are usually under direct control from Moscow, but this is not necessarily always the case...

...All Norway is involved in the program...

...The old Truman Administration had reached the point xwhere it could make no concessions of any kind to the Communists without being charged with appeasement...

...A special train called the "India Express" carried leaflets and speakers to the whole country...

...The most powerful nation on earth felt obliged to imprison 23 wounded American boys on a special plane, rush them from Korea to a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania before they could see their families, and re-wash their brains lest they contaminate the rest of the 158,000,000 Americans...

...This year the schools dropped the United Nations Essay Contest...

...The French, who own Indo-China and exploit her miserable people for the profit and glory of France, have behaved abominably...

...freedom from want...

...Tito himself is authority for the revelation that his break with Stalin began when Stalin 1) urged him to restore the monarchy in Yugoslavia...

...But nobody seems to know precisely who the "and so forths" are...

...Technicalities aside, however, the Red invasion of Laos could understandably be interpreted for a time as a violation of the spirit of peace negotiation professed by the Soviets...

...By French definition, Vietnam and Laos are only different provinces of the same country...

...The Prime Minister and President of the Sorting, or Parliament, urged the country to" action...

...Now it's up to the U.S...

...Cooper spoke up, and 2) suggesting that it is not public opinion the Administration must dare to buck, but the extreme Right Wingers of its own party who would lose much of their political stock-in-trade if a live-and-let-live agreement could be worked out with the Soviets...

...No one outside the Kremlin knows if the Soviet peace overtures are genuine...

...In my opinion that is where hope lies in the Eisenhower Administration...

...The Progressive Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17 June, 1953 Number 6 The Heart of the Matter THE Eisenhower Administration's surrender to the worst elements in Congress is ably documented for the domestic scene in Willard Shel-ton's "Is Ike Abdicating...

...for real peace, it will have the courage—even against adverse public opinion—to do what is necessary to be done...

...A confidential directive by the State Department to U.S...

...If the Eisenhower Administration gave this possibility a passing thought, it gave no sign...

...When officials found the order impossible to administer, the State Department changed it to embrace the output of "Communists, fellow travelers, and so forth...

...American experts produced a variety of guesses to explain the abrupt end of the invasion...

...The UN Under Fire Ralph Bunche's deep concern over the attempted smear of the United Nations (See his "The Attack on the UN," Page 12) is based, in part, on his observation of many overt assaults on that body...

...Equally disturbing is the speed with which the President, and more glaringly his Secretary of State, have kicked away the political and moral leadership in world affairs which Mr...

...John Sherman Cooper, Kentucky Republican who was formerly a delegate to the UN, warned the Administration that a "straitjacket attitude" toward the Soviet Union would destroy the hope for peace...

...Mostly they seemed to like the guess that the arrival of the monsoon season had dampened Red enthusiasm, as though the Communists had failed to look at the calendar before they marched off to Laos...

...Ill The April aggression of the Communists against the destitute, mountainous, and sparsely settled kingdom of Laos caught the French by surprise...

...Asked to explain, school authorities said there were too many contests distracting students...

...Dulles is right in suspecting that the Kremlin's purpose is to trick the West into relaxing its defenses and quarreling over what to do about the proffer of peace...

...Their reason is hardly inspiring: they are fearful of debate on their whole corrupt program of colonialism...

...We would amend his statement only by 1) pointing out that the Eisenhower Administration has been squandering its freedom of maneuver at a reckless rate since Sen...

...Joseph C. Harsch, foreign affairs analyst for the Christian Science Monitor, explained it this way: "If Laos had been established as an independent state, the Communist attack would have been an act of international aggression...

...This new aggression, our government has insisted, makes a shambles of everything the Soviets have said about peace...

...But France has refused on the ground that it might jeopardize the integrity of the French Union...

...They, too, felt the urge to help strengthen the free world...

...Information Service libraries abroad orders the suppression of books, writings, paintings, music, pictures, films, and other works by "persons who are subjects of public controversy...

...and how then, totally ignoring Stalin's counsel, Mao led Chinese Communism to its triumph...

...The notion that the men in the Kremlin may sometimes oppose aggressive acts by their Communist satellites is not nearly so weird as many Americans might suppose...

...Every Norwegian was urged to give "A day's pay for India"—and a great many did...

...In sharp contrast, and almost as though he were imploring his American friends to hold their tongues and use their heads, Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressed this statesmanlike comment to a cheering House of Commons: "I trust nothing will be said here or elsewhere to scheck or chill the processes of "good-will which may be at work, and my hope is that they may presently lead to . . . businesslike discussions on the highest level...

...But Mr...

...The king of Laos had sought independence for his country . . . The U.S...

...We cannot escape the fact," he said, "that some place along the line we will have to make some concessions...

...The British can teach us much on this score...

...Confident of the strength of their culture and institutions, they saw no reason to doubt that British soldiers who returned expressing doubts of the superiority of the UN cause in Korea should not be sent home at once...

...In Paris he demanded of our NATO partners that they ignore Soviet overtures in their military planning...

...It is heartening, however, to observe that the great majority of the American people continue to believe in the United Nations despite its obvious shortcomings...

...They shrewdly chose India as the place they could do the most good, and even more wisely chose Travan-core-Cochin, where communism has made great strides, as the one province where their help would count for most...