THE ADMINISTRATION: Stuck Whistle?

Secretary of State Acheson sat down before his news conference last week, calmly slipped on his spectacles and read the riot act to two foreign nations in terms that might have been fighting words in the old days of hanky-pank diplomacy.

First he took on Czechoslovakia for charging three U.S. embassy staff members with espionage, and jailing one of them. These incidents and charges, said Acheson sternly, were “obviously trumped up in order to intimidate further the local population . . . This government has sufficient knowledge of the police methods and practices employed by the present regime in Czechoslovakia to know how much credence should be placed in ‘confessions’ and ‘irrefutable proof produced in cases of this kind.”

Then he turned to Communist China as calmly as he turned the pages in the looseleaf notebook before him. The department took a “serious view,” he said, of the “flimsy pretext used by the local authorities” to prevent the homecoming of General Robert B. Soule, the U.S. military attache. “The U.S. Government does not countenance negotiations under duress and will not authorize its representatives in China to submit to such pressure.”

New York Timesman James Reston, his ears ringing from ten such strident U.S. statements in the past month, reported that they sounded “slightly like a stuck whistle.”

This week the State Department abruptly sharpened its tone, told the Czech government to call home two of its own diplomats, the consul general in New York and a strangely authoritative embassy housekeeper in Washington.