National Affairs: We Can Only Act Like Men

For a few tense hours one day last week, official Washington hung breathlessly on the march of events in the powder-keg Middle East, not knowing whether the U.S. would or would not be in a shooting war with Russian “volunteers” within the next 48 hours. Diplomatic dispatches from U.S. Ambassador to Russia Charles E. Bohlen and press reports from U.S. correspondents in Moscow added up to a tentative conclusion: the Russians had decided to move their “volunteers” at least into Syria and possibly into Egypt, to stake out the Red army’s first foothold in the Middle East. U.S. intelligence added solid evidence that complete Red air force units had already flown over Turkey and taken up positions on three airfields in Syria.

The President, deducing from the evidence and from his own experience that the Russians were feeling out the U.S. position, reacted coolly. With no undertone of provocation, he told his weekly press conference quietly that it would become the duty of the members of the U.N., which would include the U.S., “to oppose” the Russian volunteers. Privately he flashed a cable to Ambassador Bohlen instructing him to make absolutely sure that the Kremlin did not misunderstand U.S. intentions: if the Russians moved troops into the Middle East the U.S. would oppose them with arms. At an emergency meeting of the National Security Council that morning the President heard out the reports of his staff, picked off his glasses, and said grimly: “If they move, we can only act like men.”

Atomic Retaliation. All day Washington waited word, with U.S. armed forces from the Mediterranean to the China Sea alerted for whatever the Russians might choose. As tension mounted. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. called from U.N. headquarters in Manhattan to propose that the President prepare dramatic measures. Soon a new strategy was under consideration in the White House: the President might fly to New York to appear before the U.N. General Assembly, to assure the U.N. that U.S. troops were available and ready to stop any Russian incursion. Meanwhile, the U.S. had reassured the jittery French and British through NATO’s retiring General Alfred Gruenther, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (see below), that any Soviet move to rocket-bomb London and Paris would be met by atomic retaliation.

There was little public sense of crisis because the President had deliberately maintained restraint in his press-conference answers. Despite provocative questioning (“Are we writing off as a fact the permanence of Russian influence in the Middle East?”), he refused to specify by what means the U.N. might decide to oppose Russian volunteers, but noted meaningfully that the U.N. “is not by any manner of means limited to resolutions” (e.g., Korea). When he was asked about the possibility of three-power talks with Britain and France, or a parley at the summit with the Russians, he again stood by the spirit of the U.N. While the U.N. was seeking peace in the Middle East, he said, it would be a “mistake” to go back to big power diplomacy. “I am determined, with this out of the way, our friendships with these two countries” (Britain and France) will be “stronger than ever.”

Moral Sanction. Not until the next afternoon did the dark threat of war with the Russian volunteers simmer down. Russia’s Bulganin wrote notes to Britain’s Eden and France’s Mollet in more placid phrases. Nasser’s Egypt announced that it had no imminent need of Soviet volunteers after all. The U.N. police force moved into the Suez in sky-blue helmet liners, men out of faraway places clothed in the weighty moral sanction of the U.N. General Assembly (see FOREIGN NEWS).

From all visible signs it seemed that the Russians had understood what the U.S. meant by promising “to oppose” the Russian volunteers, a promise that Under Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr. reiterated before the U.N. General Assembly later in the week. But no one in Washington thought that this quiet victory settled anything permanently. For one thing, the Kremlin was throwing dust in all directions; e.g., at week’s end, almost as if there had been no Budapest, no threat of desert war, the Russians proposed a new disarmament plan, which they couched in boasts that they could sweep across Western Europe—and punctuated by a new high-level A-bomb test.

The British and French, while willing to snuggle down again in the NATO fold, had not yet abandoned the campaign to get the U.S. back of their private national interests in the Middle East. And the U.S., in turn, deferred its emergency plans to ship oil to Britain and western Europe (see BUSINESS).

Moral Authority. Beyond the pressing present lay an even greater problem. “It would be a great mistake to believe that stability and tranquillity can be permanently established [in the Middle East] merely by emergency measures to stop the fighting,” said Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as he emerged from Walter Reed Hospital this week. “It is necessary to attack the basic problems of the area.” The time for the U.S. to attack these problems, reported TIME correspondents in London, Cairo and Tel Aviv, will never be more opportune than now. For despite massive Russian propaganda attempts to claim credit for stopping Middle East aggression, both Arabs and Israelis understand that the U.S.: 1) comes out of the crisis with clean hands and unparalleled moral authority; 2) seeks no private gain in the Middle East area; and 3) is the only nation that can provide the stability the Middle East must have before it can attack its vital economic and political problems.

Said a good U.S. friend, Lebanon’s Philosopher-Statesman Dr. Charles Malik: “It is absolutely a sine qua non condition of this opportunity that the U.S. makes it crystal clear that while it will not condone destruction of Israel, equally it will not condone expansion of Israel. The U.S. should stop at no limits in preventing further penetration of this area by Communism and should do everything it can to roll it back. Part of the opportunity is for the U.S. not only to take an interest in economic development—which is, after all, neutral—but it should interest itself as well and more profoundly than ever in the political, ideological and cultural problems. It is equally imperative for the highest and deepest in western diplomacy to assert itself in such a way as to close the hole in the ranks of the West on a basis of complete respect for the freedom and independence of the Middle East, and for genuine conditions of justice and equality between the West and the Middle East.”

It was a tall order. But it was also a pressing order—and an opportunity to prove in another context Ike’s ringing phrase: “We can only act like men.”