GENEVA: Off the Ground?

High in the North Atlantic sky in a three-year-old DC-6B one night last week, the foreign ministers of Russia, the U.S., Britain and France took off their jackets and settled down to talk business. The Westerners drank scotch, gin and tonic or “17 to 1” martinis; Gromyko drank Coca-Cola. The late John Foster Dulles, who put so much store by airborne diplomacy, might have derived wry satisfaction from the fact that it was his funeral that had finally broken the two-week-old impasse at Geneva, and enabled the ministers at last to talk informally.

The Big Four public meetings at Geneva were certainly getting nowhere. Neither did the first of their private talks, 15,000 feet over the Atlantic. But already everyone was looking for an agreeable way to break off the Geneva talks in a week or two, and the chief interest now centered on a search for an interim agreement committing all Big Four powers to maintain something like the status quo in Berlin. The Russians, who wanted something to show for backing off farther from Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum (which expired uneventfully on the day of Dulles’ funeral), were haggling for token concessions from the West. Sample: a promise from the West to diminish its intelligence and propaganda operations in West Berlin. The Western ministers indicated their willingness to make some such concessions.

Would such a bargain justify a summit meeting? The British, most eager of all the Westerners to promote summit talks, had a further suggestion—let the final Geneva communique also report “mutual interest” in such problems as disarmament and nonaggression pacts—a ceremonious way of simply reaffirming that problems exist, even if solutions do not.

Almost everybody concerned seemed to feel that the purpose of Geneva was to render a heads-of-state meeting possible. But the inconclusive talk at Geneva, and the uncompromising talk outside it, reinforced the suspicion that a summit meeting is unlikely to settle anything the foreign ministers cannot. In fact, even Nikita Khrushchev’s longstanding enthusiasm for summit talks seemed last week to have been cooled—as it was last year—by the evidence that he was unlikely to win any cheap victories. Almost ignored was his offhand remark, in a speech at Korea in Albania: “If there is no meeting of the heads of government in the near future, we shall wait until the time is ripe.”