International: Back to the Dance

Russia thinks of herself as the Cinderella among the Powers. In the pumpkin coach of victory she went triumphantly to San Francisco. Potsdam was a second, even more enjoyable affair. At London last September she went too far. The clock struck 12 and Cinderella returned to Moscow, where she sat patiently until last week, when smiling Jimmy Byrnes turned up with the glass slipper.

It was two nights before Christmas that Jimmy Byrnes entered, amidst a tremendous ovation, the red & gold box at the Bolshoi Theater from which he watched Sergei Prokofiev’s new ballet, Cinderella. It had been a busy day, but after Ballerina Lepeshinskaya took her last curtain call there was more work for weary statesmen. Secretary Byrnes and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin wanted to give the world a Christmas present. They had reached a partial agreement with Molotov, but Byrnes did not want to release it until he talked it over with French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault. Next morning Byrnes tried to reach Bidault in Paris on the telephone. Bidault was out, his aides explained, shopping for wedding presents (see MILESTONES).

The communiqués, released without Bidault’s okay, set up a procedure on drafting peace treaties far closer to the Russian than to the U.S.-British proposals at London. The Russians at Moscow agreed to a general conference, but the Big Powers will handle the first & last drafts.

Government by Gadget. On Japan the U.S. stood fairly firm. To save Russian face it set up an eleven-power policy-making commission and a four-power council to “implement” the policy. The commission would operate under veto provisions, so that little or no action could pass through this Rube Goldberg international machinery. Fortunately, General MacArthur can make interim decisions. The General, however, did not like it. He said: “On Oct. 31 my final disagreement was [radioed to Washington that] the terms ‘in my opinion are not acceptable.’ Since that time my views have not been sought. . . . Whatever the merits or demerits of the plan it is my firm intent … to try to make it work.”

In Korea a U.S.-Soviet commission will attempt to set up a provisional government, may recommend establishment of the first of the trusteeships envisaged in the San Francisco Charter. If so, Korea will be run by the U.S., Russia, Britain and China for five years, after which it will be free. Koreans in the U.S. zone greeted the trusteeship with mass strikes and attacks on American soldiers.

To China the Foreign Ministers promised an early withdrawal of troops, and support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Government.

The big U.S.-British concession was on the Balkans. The underlying issue at London had been the U.S.-British refusal to recognize Russian-occupied Bulgaria and Rumania until their governments had been made more democratic. To save Allied face, the Russians agreed at Moscow that the Rumanian and Bulgarian governments should be slightly broadened, made more democratic.

Proof of the Pudding. By the time Jimmy Byrnes’s plane reached Washington, the world had had time to read the communiqué, think it over. At the airport he wearily told reporters he had just one wish: “To get out of my drawers and have a haircut.” Eagerly he asked State Department aides: “What was the reaction to the communiqué?”

“Very good,” they told him. They might better have said that the world was waiting with crossed fingers.

Next night, Byrnes went on the air with a defense of the agreements. He argued that the U.S. would use its veto power against peace terms that ignored small-nation interests. As for the Balkan nations, he said, “It is for us to say whether the terms have been complied with.”

As the Foreign Ministers had directed, Vice Commissar of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vishinsky, U.S. Ambassador William Averell Harriman and British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr hurried to Bucharest to put into effect the new deal in the Balkans. These three, of all the millions who cared, would be the first to discover whether the Moscow conference had been a genuine advance over London, or just a meeting with a friendlier “tone.”