THE NATION: Duty & Deeds

Across the world from the mid-Russia industrial city of Tula came the raucous sound of still another blatant Khrushchev threat to Berlin and the peace of the world (see FOREIGN NEWS). In Washington President Eisenhower replied at his press conference with a statement that set down the U.S. position on Berlin with a precision that could not be misunderstood.

If there is any shooting, he said, it will be “to stop us from doing our duty. We are not saying that we are going to shoot our way into Berlin. We say we are just going to go and continue carrying out our responsibilities to those people and the ones that we agreed to undertake way back in 1945. So that if we are stopped, it will be somebody else using force.”

With that meaningful statement of position, the President was off next day for the kind of diplomacy by deeds that he likes best. In keeping with his policy of paying special attention to U.S. neighbors —demonstrated in his meeting in March 1956 with Mexico’s Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and Canada’s Louis St. Laurent, and last July with Canada’s Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker—he flew southwest to Acapulco to confer with Mexico’s new President Adolfo Lopez Mateos (TIME, Dec. 8) on neighbors’ problems ranging from dam building on the Rio Grande to lead and zinc markets. Result: cheers and carnations strewn in Acapulco’s streets for the two Presidents, marked enhancement of U.S. good-neighbor relations.

Russia’s good-neighbor contrast the same week: 1,500 farmers and farmers’ wives from the Polish town of Siemiatycze (rhymes with Shame ya witch ya) trekked 100 miles to Warsaw, mobbed the U.S. embassy on nothing more than the strength of a wild rumor that the U.S. would transport anybody who wanted to settle in Alaska. Key reason why the rumor swept on through village after village: Communist officials and newspapers insisted that the rumor was a lie.