National Affairs: Ringing Remarks

First it was Bulgaria’s charge d’affaires who had the riot act read to him. Dr. Peter Voutov listened silently for 15 minutes while Under Secretary of State Jim Webb demanded an end to the nonsense of trying to implicate U.S. Minister Donald R. Heath in Sofia’s espionage trials. Then Hungarian Minister Imre Horvath was summoned to the State Department, dressed down in terms he could barely understand (because his English is poor). For closer study, he got a formal protest note to be sent to his government.

The U.S., Webb told Hungary, was outraged at its arrest and month-long confinement of Robert A. Vogeler, assistant vice president of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., and the recent jailing of Israel Jacobson, head of the American Joint Distribution Committee. To make sure that the protest was understood, he announced that, until further notice, U.S. citizens would not be permitted to travel in Hungary.

Such protests once had a resounding ring about them; now, the ring was hollow, empty and false—not listened to, and therefore not heard.

How had the gentle art of diplomacy become such a grim business? Because “the survival of Totalitaria” depends primarily on “bad relations with Western democracies,” wrote Lord Vansittart, for eight-years the head of Britain’s diplomatic careerists, in the current Foreign Affairs. “There is a smell of the jungle about these dense growths of words which smother old conceptions like voluble creepers,” he said. “Part of our species is being conducted by sedulous apes back to the treetops . . .”