Unfolding his breakfast newspaper one morning last week in Paris, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles received an egg-curdling shock. Addressing the NATO conference opening session one day earlier, Dulles had carefully set the tone of U.S. participation with an appeal for moral principles in international affairs, cited the British-French cease-fire in Egypt as a compliance with morality. But his newspaper bannered a point-blank refutation of Dulles’ argument by an influential American diplomat: his breakfast host, Ambassador Clarence Douglas Dillon. Returning briefly to the U.S. last fortnight, Dillon had paused in Washington to record a radio interview for CBS’s Capitol Cloakroom. One inevitable question: Why had the British and French stopped their Suez advance? Dillon’s exact answer: “Well, I think what is generally felt to be the reason in the Middle East is probably—was probably the main reason, and that was fear of Soviet armed intervention. It was—I don’t think—they knew that we were—certainly it was not the oil pressure; that hadn’t had time to make itself felt. They knew that we were opposed to this thing, but they had continued as long as they did even in the face of that opposition; they only had to continue for a couple of days more and that job would have been done. The only new element that had come in was these Soviet threats, which were very, very strongly phrased.” “But,” insisted CBS Newsman George Herman, “you don’t think it was moral suasion that stopped them?” Answered Dillon unequivocally: “I don’t think it is moral suasion, no.” Broadcast three days later, Dillon’s recorded remarks stirred pro-Americans in Egypt, who were afraid that apparent U.S. sponsorship of the phony Moscow-did-it line might harm U.S. prestige just when that prestige was needed to get the Suez Canal running again. In Washington the State Department quickly announced that Dillon “was expressing his personal views in answer to a question”; privately State’s exasperated spokesmen predicted that Soviet propaganda would make much of Dillon’s blunder.
After an uncomfortable chat with his Paris house guest, Dillon issued his own statement, emphasized he “had no intention of minimizing the effect of worldwide moral pressure which was exerted through the United Nations.” Hedged the ambassador: he would have listed all the causes behind the British-French action, but time ran out on him. Explaining his good intentions, Dillon explained something else as well: why, as a result of such impulses toward irresponsibility, U.S. foreign policy is sometimes criticized as confused.
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