THE NATION: Toward the Summit

To the U.S. from Moscow, Paris, Bonn and London flew the man hailed in British headlines as “Supermac” and enthusiastically billed, on the way to British elections, as political leader of the free world. With each approaching mile, the blips showed more clearly that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan meant to persuade the U.S. to relax some of its basic cold-war policies. Forewarned by London press leaks and by its own intelligence from Western Europe, the U.S. was partly forearmed; soon after Macmillan landed he was deliberately whisked away from the pressures and pressagentry temptations of Washington to the quiet of President Eisenhower’s Catoctin Mountain hideaway, Camp David. There Old Friends Eisenhower and Macmillan (a political adviser on General Ike’s staff during the North African campaign in World War II) explored the road to the summit.

The long-held U.S. attitude was that a summit conference was useless if it was nothing but a forum for propaganda; before any summit could live up to expectations, foreign ministers should explore the possibilities of genuinely solving cold-war issues. Harold Macmillan, fresh from Moscow’s storm and sunshine, argued that Nikita Khrushchev was really the only Communist worth talking to; Macmillan was willing to go through the motions of a foreign ministers’ conference, but he wanted to get right down to setting a summit date. At Camp David, President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Macmillan agreed 1) on a foreign ministers’ conference to begin on or about May 11 (TIME, March 16), and 2) to go to the summit late this summer. Addendum: the West will accept Polish and Czechoslovakian representatives as observers, but not, as Khrushchev had demanded, as participating delegates. Macmillan made a minor concession: no exact date was set for the summit conference. But the U.S. made a major concession: the summit conference was not made contingent on success at the foreign ministers’ talks.

All this looked fine to Nikita Khrushchev. Indeed, even before the Camp David decision, he had seen what was coming and, in high good humor, summoned newsmen to the Kremlin for his second press conference since taking power (see FOREIGN NEWS). He told how his six-month deadline for the West to meet his Berlin demands had not really been hard and fast, and he accepted—without being formally notified—the May 11 date for the foreign ministers’ conference, probably in Geneva. But real results, he said, could only come at the summit: “Let’s put in the heavyweights.”

At Camp David the heavyweights of the U.S. and Britain were committed, and in the months to come their energies would be turned to working out the mechanics of the summit conference, and, far more important, their differences over such basic free-world policies as Berlin and the unification of Germany. The leaders of East and West had last met at the summit at Geneva in 1955. Hopes were high then for an end to the cold war—and because those hopes were shattered by Soviet obduracy and Khrushchev’s hippodroming, the phony spirit of Geneva may have done more harm than good. In 1959 the U.S. moves toward the summit with more modest hopes. The chances of any harm’s being done are therefore correspondingly less—for as long as the free world stands firm on first principles.