National Affairs: Gathering Rosebuds

Stepping off the Queen Elizabeth with his wife, Britain’s Professor Harold Laski, a longtime apologist for Communism, sadly confessed: “I am deeply grieved by the Russian treatment of Czechoslovakia and by what little I know about the Russian treatment of Italy in next month’s election.”*

Russia, said Laski, is “aware that it can’t fight a major war with any degree of success. . . . The Russians are afraid of you and they will go as far as they can until you tell them to stop.” But, he added, “the gentlemen in the Kremlin—and some of them are not gentlemen—rather naturally take the view that your policy in international affairs is semi-paralyzed until November. They’re gathering rosebuds while they may.”

* Wrote Author Laski in 1944: “No one is now entitled to doubt that there is developing in the Soviet Union those qualities of mind and heart which gave to the Greek city-state at its best the capacity to raise the moral stature of its citizens.”