COLD WAR: The Spirit of Camp David

Since Khrushchev met Eisenhower at the President’s retreat in the Maryland hills, Soviet propagandists have been making great play with what they call “the spirit of Camp David,” a 1959 model to replace the spirit of Geneva and the Bandung spirit. The formula is simple: appropriate a place name where talks were held but agreements not reached, then invoke it to imply common agreement of whatever you are for, or to deplore whatever you dislike.

Premier Khrushchev may set the cat among the pigeons as he did by telling Soviet journalists fortnight ago that West Berlin “is situated on the territory” of the East German state. But any Western words or actions displeasing to Moscow —a U.S. Navy plane dropping flares near a Soviet tanker in the Pacific, a London hint that sending Russian scientists into British laboratories calls for reciprocity, a U.N. committee vote calling on Communist North Korea to allow free elections for unifying the country—cause Communist hands to be raised in righteous protest against “violation of the Camp David spirit.” Recently the Soviet press has been unexpectedly publishing the full text of speeches by Dean Acheson and Christian Herter. Finally it drew its conclusion: neither of these men is in tune with Camp David.

Closed Eyes. Last week, before a Soviet spokesman could invoke Camp David against a proposal to debate the Hungarian question in the U.N. General Assembly, the U.S.’s Henry Cabot Lodge got there first.

“I have some right to talk about Camp David,” said Lodge, who escorted Khrushchev through his U.S. tour, “for the simple reason that I was there.

“What is against the spirit of Camp David, Mr. Chairman, is the subversion of small countries.

“What is against the spirit of Camp David are acts which turn a brave little country into a moaning colonialist slum.

“What is against the spirit of Camp David is any behavior which makes a mockery of peaceful coexistence.

“Mr. Chairman, nothing happened at Camp David which requires us to pass by in silence when a brutality is committed. The spirit of Camp David never told us to close our eyes to the truth.”

Domestic Matters. After the assembly voted 51 to 10 to debate the truth about Hungary, New Zealand’s Sir Leslie Munro, the U.N.’s special representative on the Hungarian question, reported that eight Hungarian patriots have been secretly tried and executed recently and “there is imminent possibility of further executions.” Sir Leslie noted with scathing constraint that the Communists barred him from visiting Budapest on grounds that the 1956 uprising was “a matter of domestic jurisdiction,” yet continued to spread the “fanciful” and contradictory story that “the uprising was instigated by foreign powers.”

At week’s end, Nikita Khrushchev returned to Moscow from a brief Black Sea vacation, and made it back from Moscow’s airport to the Kremlin courtyard in an eight-seat Soviet helicopter, which he pronounced “roomier and more comfortable” than Ike’s Sikorsky. Next on Khrushchev’s travel plans: a flight to Budapest to attend that mockery of “domestic jurisdiction,” the Hungarian Communist Party Congress.