CONFERENCES: Generally Speaking

Impish, earnest Fiorello LaGuardia last week told the Food and Agriculture Organization in Washington (see below) how international cooperation seemed to him:

“I find it extremely difficult to prepare a statement for any international body. You write what you think is a good statement, and then you are told to ‘take that out; your public may not like it,’ and that goes out. Then you have another point, and you are told, ‘Oh, no; the Prince of Monaco is not in agreement with that.’ Out it goes.”

The end result, mused LaGuardia, were speeches that sounded like this: “Gentlemen, I am in full accord with the principles of the conference. And, of course, while we cannot ignore established customs, and we cannot at one time change the habits of trade and economists, it is yet the purpose of this meeting, generally speaking, to make it useful in making an original preliminary survey, so that we may report it to our governments, and, in 1949, meet again at the city of Metropolis, where we can there consider it. . . .”

In the same week the PICAO (Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization), meeting in Montreal, produced an illustration of LaGuardia’s point. It was getting nowhere in its efforts to work out an international code for civil aviation when heavyset, solemn William A. M. Burden, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Air, rose to propose:

“As the best means of arriving at a multilateral agreement . . . capable of universal acceptance 1) that this commission recommend to the assembly forthwith that a final multilateral agreement should not be completed … at this assembly; 2) that this commission proceed immediately with a frank and open discussion of all of the problems involved in developing a multilateral agreement so that the national points of view may be made known; 3) that the discussion resulting therefrom be formalized into a document . . . for submission to the next annual assembly; 4) that during the coming year each member state furnish . . . any additional views which it may have on the subject. . . .”