THE NATION: The Tug of Freedom

“American policy,” said Secretary of State John Foster Dulles last week, “is conducted on the assumption, as a working hypothesis, that free governments in the long run are going to prevail, and despotic governments in the long run are going to go under.” Dulles was answering a question at his weekly news conference, and even as he was talking, Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev was maneuvering and striking against the Stalinists in one of the great upheavals of Kremlin history (see FOREIGN NEWS).

The West took the upheaval in its summer stride, as if the appeal of freedom and erosion of despotism were now so clearly established that they needed no self-conscious exploitation. The President did not cancel his Fourth of July weekend on the farm at Gettysburg; the Secretary of State did not return from his long weekend at Duck Island, his retreat on Lake Ontario. In Washington the experts’ comments on Khrushchev’s apparent dominance ranged from a cynical “You can’t run anything with a committee” to sweeping predictions that the beginning of the end of Russian Communism was at hand. Until the air cleared, the safest prediction was made by a Western diplomat: “We are in for a lively time—full of surprises.”

One remarkable fact of the latest Kremlin shakeup was that Khrushchev found it necessary to define Communism’s goals in American terms—”initiative,” “incentives,” etc. He told a workers’ mass meeting in Leningrad that Communists should “be able to solve the problem of catching up with the U.S.A.,” that the Soviet people should have enough meat, butter, milk and fruit, and their shops should be filled with “everything that makes man’s life more beautiful.”

The implications were plain: Khrushchev was keenly aware of the tug of capitalist freedom. And the implications lent special weight to Dulles’ words-before-the-fact definition of the basis of U.S. foreign policy. “The government which is responsive to the will of the people, which admits of diversity and freedom of thought, is the government which has the future ahead of it,” he told the newsmen. “I don’t put any dates on these things. I don’t say what is going to happen in one year, five years, ten years, but I am confident that that is a basic truth.

“Certainly it’s an assumption that must be made by anybody who believes in the American tradition. It was in that belief that our nation was founded. It’s expressed in the Federalist Papers. It is expressed by Abraham Lincoln . . . He said: ‘The Declaration of Independence . . . gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time.’ It means in due course the weight should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.

“That is a basic American belief and it is also the working hypothesis on which we conduct our foreign policy.”