CONFERENCES: Truman v. Truman

The foreign ministers of Australia and New Zealand, Richard G. Casey and T. Clifton Webb, pulled up chairs around a green baize table at Kaneohe Marine Air Station in Honolulu this week, full of announced eagerness, to face Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose mission was to send them away disappointed.

They met to add a new word to the language—Anzus (for Australia, New Zealand, U.S.). Sixteen months ago, faced by New Zealand’s and Australia’s reluctance to sign the Japanese Peace Treaty, President Truman announced a Pacific pact of the three powers to guarantee one another’s security.

Australia and New Zealand accepted enthusiastically, and signed the Tripartite Security Treaty (as well as the Japanese treaty). Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies beamed: “One of the great events in international affairs.” Sir Carl Berendsen, New Zealand’s ambassador to the U.S., said: “This is much more than a scrap of paper.”

From the start, the Pentagon stupidly balked at giving definite security guarantees to Australia and New Zealand. President Truman and Dean Acheson. careless of Pacific affairs, fiddled & faddled. When President Truman’s Pentagon refused to send any top brass to the Anzus meeting, President Truman’s Acheson thought he better go in person, in the hope that his prestige would give the meeting standing, and help to disguise the U.S. failure to offer anything concrete to her eager Pacific partners.