FOREIGN RELATIONS: Anticlimax

All week long the State Department tried hard to choke down its disappointment.

For weeks it had bugled announcements of a forthcoming Big Four conference, which would go to work on a rough draft of the Great Blueprint for Peace (TIME, June 12.)* Stately old Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington’s fashionable Georgetown, was made ready down to the last pebble on its carefully graveled walks. The U.S. had named its Under Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, as chairman of the U.S. delegation, thus, in diplomatic language, hoping to underscore its view-that other representatives should be at the important level of Under Secretaries. England and China followed suit, appointed the veteran Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Alexander Cadogan (rhymes with shruggin’) and the veteran Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Victor Hoo.

Moscow was silent until last week, when, only seven days before the conference was to open, Russia asked for a week’s delay. This was Blow No. 1. A little later, Blow No. 2 fell. The Russian representative was named. He was neither of the two men U.S. and British diplomats had expected, neither the Vice Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinoff, nor Andrei Vishinsky. He was youngish (35) Andrei Andreevich Gromyko, who holds his first important post as Ambassador to the U.S., and who is only a little less inexperienced than Ed Stettinius.

Russian explanations were lame: busy with the immediate necessities of war and reconstructing devastated areas, the country is short of topflight men who have been thinking about postwar organization; Ambassador Gromyko is an able young man (“Why, he served as an UNRRA delegate in Atlantic City!”). A more likely explanation: Russia’s topflight diplomats were being held at home to work out the Polish problem. And some State Department men even concluded that the Soviet Union attached little importance to the Dumbarton Oaks discussion anyhow.

In Washington this week, Britain’s Sir Alexander Cadogan tried to breathe some hope. He said Britain, in the main, backed the U.S. blueprint for peace. And he added that the Russians had finally put their program in writing and would bring it to the conference. But few observers believed that the men who assemble at Dumbarton Oaks next week will do any major architecting on a peace program.

* Not to be confused with Anglo-American-Russian discussions on surrender terms now being held in London (see FOREIGN NEWS).