International: Calculated Conciliation

The two huge green waves, lashed by some abysmal fury, reared up and blotted the sky from view. They seemed about to crash into the quiet, pleasant room, threatening to shatter the fragile decor, engulf the politely conversing statesmen.

These waves of destiny (in oil on canvas by Painter Frederick Waugh) ornamented the delegates’ bar in the U.N. General Assembly building and served as an inescapable reminder to statesmen who might forget over Scotch-&-soda that U.N. stands in the midst of apocalyptic forces. The picture of the waves was called The Roaring Forties.

New Tune. Some of the world’s Assemblymen had come to Manhattan last week half expecting the dizzy glories of ticker tape and drum majorettes. But the New York of the Fitful Forties received them soberly, gave them a welcome of cautious hope. The mood of the delegates exactly fitted this welcome.

Cautious skepticism, rather than hope, dictated the organist’s choice of an overture. It was To Each His Own, a marked withdrawal from the brave notes of The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise, which opened the first U.N. meeting at San Francisco. As the delegates gathered in the old New York City World’s Fair Building at Flushing Meadows, they beheld another omen. Dominating the vast, greenish Assembly Hall was an oddly contorted map of the world (in cartographer’s lingo: “a north polar azimuthal equidistant projection”) which made the U.S. and Canada look relatively normal while the rest of the troubled planet was either upside down or misshapen.

New Tone. The greatest surprise were the Russians, who acted more jovially than at any previous international gathering. There were some flurries, such as their request for added police protection of their Glen Cove, L.I. estate, and the occasion, at Flushing, when indomitable Foreign Minister Molotov almost walked straight into a wall where he thought a door should have been. But it was perhaps typical of the new Russian mood that he smilingly permitted himself to be guided along the right path by Interpreter Pavlov, thus avoiding a major clash of unyielding forces.

Molotov’s fellow delegates could hardly get used to his frequent smiles and handshakes, suspected that at times he even hovered on the brink of a backslap. Cracked he: “This is my first vacation since the Revolution.” Oscar Englund, a waiter at the Waldorf, found Molotov gracious enough to give an autograph—though Englund later lost his job for his audacity. “So what?” said he. “That’s history, what I saw.”

Perhaps the most spectacular gesture of conciliation was made by Russia’s cynical, ductile Andrei Vishinsky, who led a five-man Soviet delegation into St. Patrick’s Cathedral to attend a Solemn Pontifical Mass for the United Nations on the Feast of Christ the King.*

Materialist Vishinsky heard Msgr. Joseph F. Flanelly denounce “impious and rank materialists.” After Mass Vishinsky bowed, smiled and warmly clasped the hand of the Most Rev. J. Francis A. Mclntyre. The new Russian line might turn out to be long or short, straight or crooked, but it was surely being drawn in crayon with a heavy hand.

If the new line was straight and long (and the judicious hardly dared to hope it would be either) millions of plain men would bless the United Nations Assembly meeting, where that line first appeared. On the Assembly’s second day, small crowds gathered in the sun outside the Assembly Building. A woman kept talking wistfully of One World. Said a fat wise-guy with drowsily half-closed eyes: “Lady, with the atom bomb, the only world is the next world.”

-Established by Pope Pius XI to combat “the great modern heresy of laicism [which] refuses to recognize the rights of God and His Christ over persons and peoples and organizes the lives of individuals, families and society itself, as though God did not exist. This laicism ruins society. … It begets jealousy between individuals, hatred between classes and rivalry between nations.”