NOTES IN THE NEWS
noTEs in the nEWS Aftermath in Wisconsin When a recent Republican meeting in Milwaukee reached the item of "new business" on its agenda, after droning through the minutes of the last meeting,...
...a group of influential men were waiting on his doorstep to give him information...
...You make your proposals so complicated and so far reaching that the other side is almost certain to reject them...
...This is Washington lingo for saying that Stassen blames his superiors in Washington but would rather not be caught saying just that...
...Stassen: Public & Private Publicly, Harold Stassen still bubbles with optimism over the ultimate harvest of the recently deadlocked disarmament talks in London...
...The exodus began shortly after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union revealed, in February 1956, the paranoid brutality that marked Stalin's long regime...
...Only once in 65 years—and that was part of the Roosevelt landslide of 1932— have the Democrats elected a governor in Wisconsin...
...Here was a golden opportunity...
...Party memberships are multiplying and candidacies are blooming in the hope that Proxmire's triumph represents the end of one of the longest droughts in American political history outside the Solid South...
...Hope Comes Calling The Arab-Israeli conflict, so heavily charged with violent emotion, often seems insoluble...
...Dulles' refusal to receive me—and his refusal to listen to the others—may have had considerable to do with the turn events have taken...
...Formula for Failure Perhaps the most revealing disclosure of Stassen's private feelings about his five and a half months of haggling in London came from Marquis W. Childs, one of the ablest and most accurate of Washington correspondents...
...He spends a lot of time flying around the world interviewing leaders to obtain the raw materials of his policies...
...But a hopeful expression that time may be working for a mellowing of moods came recently from, of all places, Damascus, and from, of all people, Khaled Azem, Syria's defense minister and the man most responsible for Syria's increasing economic collaboration with the Soviet Union...
...noTEs in the nEWS Aftermath in Wisconsin When a recent Republican meeting in Milwaukee reached the item of "new business" on its agenda, after droning through the minutes of the last meeting, someone hastily made a motion to adjourn...
...Louis Post-Dupatch, Childs drew on information from at least two persons with whom Stassen had talked in "strictest privacy" of his difficulties in London...
...All asked to see Mr...
...But a new generation is emerging and it might not be as bitter about Israel as many of us are now...
...It was 80,000 in 1945...
...The motion carried overwhelmingly...
...You impose on the negotiator file necessity to check and recheck with officials back home before he can advance another step in the negotiations...
...With the tide running as it is (See Senator Proxmire's article, "Seeds of Revolt," on Page 6 of this issue) and with candidates like Proxmire and Nelson heading the ticket, it doesn't seem unreasonable to take seriously the gOhfident claim of the Democrats that fhey will capture Wisconsin in 1958 far the second time since 1892...
...In other words, you make it as difficult as possible to carry on a frank face-to-face discussion on the terms of a disarmament agreement...
...Red Retreat The Communist Party in the United States is skidding to an all-time low...
...I was one of those men—my country's delegate to the U.N...
...To his closest intimates in Washington he has expressed views bordering on despair—and the culprit is not so much Soviet Russia, however great was her truculence in rejecting the Western package in purely propaganda terms, but the Eisenhower Administration that sent Stassen to London to represent it...
...He didn't need to travel...
...But he flatly refused to see any of the diplomats...
...Writing for the St...
...In his exclusive interview with Gervasi, Azem told of a hitherto un-publicized snub administered by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in the spring of 1955, that was to have far-reaching consequences...
...Stassen, his friends have disclosed, feels that the rug was pulled from under him at several strategic moments during the London talks—by the Pentagon, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—when preliminary agreement seemed near...
...If the present pace of defection continues, Congressmen and publicists who have found rich pickings in the red menace will find themselves technologically unemployed...
...Talking with the New York Post's roving Middle Eastern correspondent, Frank Gervasi, Azem said: "It is impossible to talk of peace with Israel in the present context and while some of us are still alive...
...I cannot deny that Mr...
...Dulles...
...Stassen has other and quite clashing views...
...Childs took pains to point out that Stassen was careful not to place specific blame on officials of the Eisenhower Administration, but "he left no doubt that he felt he had been under a grave handicap during the London talks...
...Stassen told them, Childs reported, that if you deliberately want to prevent achieving an arms agreement, then you do the following: "1...
...Privately, however, Mr...
...More astonishing, still, was Azem's subsequent comment that there may be a possibility of peace in "two, five, or ten years, given a long period of quiet on the frontiers and sincere demonstration on Israel's part that it has truly peaceful intentions toward us...
...Seven thousand comrades, or 45 per cent, abandoned the Party during the past year, leaving present membership at 10,000...
...He is State Senator Gay lord Nelson, one of the most popular political figures in the state, a skillful strategist, brilliant debater, and keen student of state affairs...
...Publicly, too, the American delegate to that conference places the blame for failure up to now on the Soviet refusal to agree to a ban on the making of fissionable materials for weapons purposes...
...While Republicans in Wisconsin are silent, confused, and leaderless, Democrats are jubilantly looking forward to a statewide sweep in 1958...
...In June 1955 seven foreign ministers from the Middle East were in New York for a meeting of the United Nations," the Syrian official recalled...
...You tolerate, if you do not actively encourage, officials who say publicly that there is no possibility of getting a disarmament agreement and that an agreement would in any event be unworkable if not undesirable...
...It continued through this year as a new wave of purges and a revival of Soviet intransigence in foreign affairs sickened many of those who had survived the earlier revelations...
...In fact, as Senator William Proxmire reports in his article in this issue, his recent campaign in the home state of McCarthy was marked "by the almost complete disappearance of McCarthy-style campaigning...
...President Eisenhower seemed genuinely dedicated to reaching at least a limited understanding with the Soviets, but allowed Dulles and the military brass to tie Stassen's hands at just the moments he seemed closest to success...
...It picked up fresh momentum that fall when the Kremlin imposed its iron terror on Hungary...
...Snubs and Sensitive Souls It may seem hard to believe but a snub 28 months ago is held at least partly accountable for "the turn events have taken" in the Middle East...
...Newest and most important of recent defectors is Joseph Clark, foreign editor of the Daily Worker, who, like Howard Fast and other long-time Communist spokesmen, has now concluded that American Reds cannot attain genuine independence of the Kremlin line...
...Now, with the election still more than a year away, Wisconsin Democrats have an announced candidate for governor...
...Nobody seemed to want to discuss the only new business there was—the resurgence of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin in the wake of Senator William Proxmire's smashing victory over former Governor Walter J. Kohler in the race for the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's seat...
Vol. 21 • October 1957 • No. 10
