INTERNATIONAL: San Francisco Conference

Two Russians with plenty of money to spend bustled around San Francisco last week. They were eager to rent a 35-room furnished house for Andrei Gromyko & Co. during the Japanese peace treaty conference. They had already made a temporary reservation for the entire tenth floor of the St. Francis Hotel.

Bad Weatherman Gromyko, whose head pops out when storms impend, just as Jacob Malik sometimes emerges to indicate clearing skies, might thunder against the Japanese treaty but he could not prevent it. The State Department had drafted a tough set of procedural rules which forbid amendments, limit each delegation to one hour’s formal comment, rule out debate on points of order. But these rules must be adopted formally by the conference itself, which may give Gromyko a chance to get in his propaganda licks first. His audience will be vast: the treaty sessions in San Francisco’s Opera House will be the first program ever transmitted over coast-to-coast TV relay network.

‘R.S.V.P. State still counts on getting perhaps 40 signers out of the 48 nations which have accepted invitations to San Francisco. Responses are still coming in. Indonesia said that it would come; Burma and Yugoslavia said they would not. Neither Nationalist China nor Red China is invited, a compromise made necessary because Britain recognizes Mao; the U.S., Chiang. Instead, Japan has been told it can conclude a separate peace with whichever China it chooses. This allows the vanquished to determine whom she regards as her victor, and brought an angry protest from the Chinese Nationalists: such a step is “incompatible with the recognized principles of international justice.”

At week’s end, the last big holdout was heard from: India will boycott the conference. Jawaharlal Nehru told a cheering Parliament that he opposes the treaty because: 1) it does not prohibit U.S. forces in Japan; 2) does not turn over Formosa to Red China; 3) gives the U.S. trusteeship over the Ryukyu and Bonin Islands, including Okinawa; 4) does not confirm Russia’s Yalta title to the Kuriles and South Sakhalin; 5) does not give Japan “honor, equality and contentment.”

Calm Rebuttal. The State Department countered this rebuff with a calm but uncompromising rebuttal. It regretted that “India is not disposed to join this united effort for peace,” quoted Japanese Premier Yoshida to the effect that the treaty “reflects abundantly American fairness, magnanimity and idealism,” and argued that no peace treaty is possible “unless the nations are willing to accept what, to each, may seem, imperfections.”

Nehru’s supporters said that India is staying away so that it will not have to link itself with Russia in its opposition. But its note had much the same effect.