National Affairs: The Inscrutable Occidentals

To anyone looking on from Asia, the ways of the big, cumbersome and confused U.S. democracy must have seemed last week as inscrutable as the solemn Gautama Buddha himself.

Halfway across the Pacific, Rear Admiral Walter F. Boone eased the big aircraft carrier Boxer into Pearl Harbor, on his way to strengthen the Navy’s Seventh Fleet in the Philippines. “I have no ‘shoot’ orders,” he said briskly, “but we are fully prepared for any eventuality and have a full allowance of ammunition . . . The Navy’s mobile air power in the Western Pacific is one of the principal instruments of U.S. diplomacy.”

In Washington, Senate Democrats decided at a caucus to stick together behind Secretary of State Dean Acheson, though many were privately critical of his foreign policy in Asia. It was the Republicans who loudly demanded that something more decisive be done. Then last week, to the amazement of everybody, House Republicans teamed up with Southern Democrats and New York’s Communist-line Vito Marcantonio to defeat a $60 million installment of economic aid for Korea. The vote was 192 to 191.

It was a strange, new lash-up in foreign affairs, a combination of economizers who don’t care much about foreign aid and others who, caring a lot, mistrust the whole Administration Far Eastern program.

Sometimes the coalition met itself coming & going as it argued that there was no use doing “something” for Korea in light of the Administration’s “do nothing” policy on China. In vain, Minnesota’s studious ex-missionary Dr. Walter Judd, an Old China Hand and able Republican critic of State’s Asian policies, tried to get things right side up. Cried he: “If, on top of the blow the Administration has just dealt to the last hope of the Chinese, we here today walk out on the Koreans, what do you think it will do to the hearts and hopes and confidence in us of the other 800 million human beings in Asia? On their decision depends more of our own future than we realize.”

Nobody was more embarrassed by the House vote than the Senate Republicans, who had been blaming Acheson for doing too little too late. Their anchor man, California’s hefty, well-tailored Bill Knowland, said tersely: “Korea will get its help at this session.” Administration strategists decided to send through a new version of the Korean aid bill, and hoped to get it passed.

Said Dean Acheson, in a letter to the President: “It would be disastrous for the foreign policy of the U.S. for us to consider this action by the House … as its last word.”