GENEVA: Time to Go Home

Out of the White House early last week went a secret letter addressed to Nikita Khrushchev. In the most dramatic, though private, Western move since the foreign ministers’ conference began. President Eisenhower made a last-ditch personal attempt to break the stalemate in Geneva.

Burden of Ike’s letter was a solemn warning that unless the Geneva conference made some progress toward ending the seven-month-old Berlin crisis, the U.S. would not agree to an East-West summit conference. In essence, Ike told Khrushchev the same thing that he told a White House press conference two days later: “I see no use whatsoever in trying to have a harvest when there is no planting and no tilling.”

“Great New Plan.” With sublime and confident arrogance, Russia’s boss ignored Eisenhower’s personal warning and rejected a final set of Western concessions at Geneva—concessions that included an implicit offer to accept a communique making no direct mention of Western occupation rights in Berlin. Instead, in an uncompromising, 70-minute speech in Moscow, Khrushchev derided “anyone” who thought that the U.S.S.R. was “prepared to pay any price for the sake of a summit meeting,” truculently argued that there would be summit talks regardless of what happened in Geneva, “since the existing situation urgently requires it.”

The only give in Khrushchev’s speech was purely illusory: he still insisted that the Western powers must withdraw their troops from Berlin, but professed willingness to bargain over the deadline date. Delivering this “great new plan” to the Western foreign ministers in Geneva, dour Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko suggested that Moscow might be willing to wait as long as 18 months, instead of a year. Either way it was an ultimatum, though Gromyko quibbled at calling it that. At this bleak point, 41 days after they had first assembled in Geneva, the Big Four foreign ministers at last agreed upon something: a three-week recess.

The Meaning of Nyet. As they gloomily dispersed, Western diplomats found consolation in the unity that they had shown at Geneva and in the fact that they had made no substantial concessions to Moscow. This claim, as far as it went, was true: the Western powers had not compromised their legal or physical position in West Berlin, and though they had been shouldered dangerously close to de facto recognition of Communist East Germany, they had clung to their refusal to grant formal diplomatic recognition to the East Germans. But none of this altered the fact that as the weeks went by, the Western performance at Geneva had been one of foot-shuffling irresolution.

Time after time, U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter and his colleagues had refused to believe that nyet means “no.” Until the very last moment, their reaction to every Russian rejection of their proposals had been to fish out another minor concession or two with which to tempt Gromyko. Result was that by last week’s recess, they had exhausted all the painless compromises the West had to offer, while Gromyko had barely begun to unwrap his stony-eyed alternatives.

Who’s Hooked? One reason for this tactical setback was that some Western diplomats, mainly the British, had gone to Geneva convinced that their chief task was to offer Khrushchev an unembarrassing way to “get off the hook,” i.e., to retreat from his original demand that the Western powers evacuate West Berlin by last May 27. (This theory was still being peddled last week by British officials, only 24 hours before Khrushchev made it clear he felt it was the West that was on the hook.) Western unity at Geneva had been preserved by the dubious expedient of a steady drift toward the “flexibility” urged by Great Britain.

From the beginning, Harold Macmillan’s government regarded Geneva as but a preparatory step, since Khrushchev was the only man with the power to make genuine concessions to the West, and he, in his ego, would only make them personally at a summit meeting. And though British diplomats insisted that Britain, like the U.S., would never go to the summit “under duress,” the fact seemed to be that Britain was ready to do just that. If Geneva resumed in the sterile atmosphere of its recess, argued Selwyn Lloyd last week, all the more reason for the West to demand a quick summit conference: rather than appear to be dragooned to the summit by Khrushchev’s threats of economic strangulation of West Berlin, it would be better for the Western powers to seem to go willingly.

So far at Geneva, the West had lost nothing more than diplomatic face. It had lost face not by what it gave away, but by the posture it displayed there of accommodation, accompanied by private explanations that if the whole crowd did not keep talking, Khrushchev might do something dreadful. As they left Geneva last week, the idea occurred to some diplomats that perhaps Geneva had only reinforced Khrushchev’s conviction that setting up obstacles, not removing tensions, was the way to have his way.