THE PRESIDENCY: No Invitations, Please

In thinking about the post-Stalin upheavals in Russia, Dwight Eisenhower has one advantage over the host of diplomats, pundits, dopesters and intelligence experts who try to figure out what it all means. The advantage: from World War II days he knows personally bluff, tough Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, now grown mighty as No. 2 man and Defense Minister in Khrushchev’s new “flexible” regime. Last week the President showed how much this “old soldier” relationship —and its possible usefulness in promoting world peace—weighs on his mind.

In response to a reporter’s question at his midweek press conference, Ike casually agreed that an interchange of meetings between Zhukov and his U.S. opposite number. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, “might” be useful. “Marshal Zhukov and I operated together very closely [in occupied postwar Berlin],” said Eisenhower. “I couldn’t see any harm coming from a meeting between the two Defense Ministers, if that could be arranged.”

Necessary Caution. Recalling his tortuous postwar discussions with Zhukov —a “confirmed Communist” but an “honest man”—Dwight Eisenhower went on: “One evening we had a three-hour conversation. We tried each to explain to the other just what our systems meant . . . to the individual, and I was very hard pufe to it when he insisted that their system appealed to the idealistic and we completely to the materialistic, and I had a very tough time trying to defend our position because he said: ‘You tell a person he can do as he pleases, he can act as he pleases, he can do anything. Everything that is selfish in man you appeal to him. and we tell him that he must sacrifice for the state . . .’ “

Asked by the New York Times’s James

Reston if he meant to imply that democracy was more difficult to defend than Communism, the President patiently explained: “Look, Mr. Reston, I think you could run into people you have a hard time convincing that the sun is hot and the earth is round . . . Against that kind of belief you run against arguments that almost leave you breathless. You don’t know how to meet them.”*

Despite the difficulties, the President said in answer to another question, “There is nothing that I wouldn’t try experimentally … to bring about better relationships as long as we observe this one very necessary caution . . . You must not have meetings that, by their very holding, by their very occurrence, give rise to great hopes which, if unrealized, create a great wave of pessimism.”

Bloody Recollection. Ike’s cautious opening of the door to a Zhukov-Wilson conference—he shied away from any hint of personal involvement—blossomed into international headlines, provoked widespread, mixed reaction. Montana’s Mike Mansfield, Democratic whip in the Senate, urged Ike to go farther, meet Zhukov face to face; such a meeting would “weigh heavily in the President’s fav.or. I’m certain that the President would not be taken in.” Western diplomats leaked worries that Ike’s friendly remarks about Zhukov, suppressor of the bloody Hungarian revolt, might kill a U.S.-sponsored United Nations resolution condemning Soviet brutality in Hungary, might unduly alarm U.S. allies fearful of bilateral U.S.-Soviet negotiations.

Echoing widespread congressional clamor, the New York Daily News cited Zhu-kov’s role as a “top-ring Kremlin hoodlum,” bristled: “If Engine Charlie Wilson can force himself to shake hands with this honest man, he has more self-restraint than he has shown yet . . . How about General Ike thinking of some other foreign . guest—almost any other—to come over here and take up Secretary Wilson’s valuable time?”

Soon the uproar diminished, and it was clear that neither the White House nor the Kremlin was in any rush to bring Engine Charlie and Georgy together. After Ike left for a long weekend of golf and relaxation with Mamie and the grandchildren at his Gettysburg farm, unquotable Washington “officials” said flatly that the Administration has no plans to invite Zhukov, but did not rule out the possibility that Secretary Wilson might accept an invitation from the Kremlin should it be tendered.

Last week the President also: ¶ Accepted a 226-piece silver set (valued at $7,000) from Britain’s Sir Peter Roberts, a gift of the famed cutlery industry of Sheffield in appreciation of Ike’s “courage and leadership” in World War II. Cf Sent Press Secretary Hagerty, plus a squad of security and communications specialists, to look over the Newport vacation site on Coaster’s Harbor Island. ¶ Swore in Iowa’s lantern-jawed Republican ex-Governor Leo A. Hoegh, 49, as new Federal Civil Defense Administrator to replace Nebraska’s Val Peterson, who is off to Copenhagen as U.S. ambassador. ¶ Cabled “best wishes” to Spain’s Dictator Francisco Franco on the 21st anniversary of the start of the revolt that eventually brought him victory over the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war. ¶ Told 764 visiting foreign exchange students from 30 nations—who chanted “We like Ike”—that they had been in the U.S. long enough to decide “whether most of us wear tails or horns or whether we are on the average sort of good people that want to live and work productively like any other decent people does.” ¶ Named retired Navy Rear Admiral George Dufek, 54, veteran South Pole explorer (Operation Deepfreeze), to replace the late Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd as top-level supervisor of U.S. expeditions in the Antarctic. ¶ Appointed his onetime Interior Secretary, Douglas McKay, 64, unsuccessful G.O.P. candidate for the U.S. Senate against Wayne Morse in Oregon last November, to membership (salary: $20,000) on the four-man U.S. contingent to the International Joint Commission, set up in 1911 to handle border disputes between the U.S. and Canada. CJ Appointed a seven-man committee of top Administration officials, including Labor Secretary James Mitchell, Treasury Secretary-designate Robert Anderson, Budget Director Percival Brundage, to join ten governors of states in deciding those federal functions “which the states are ready and willing to assume and finance” as a first step toward Ike’s goal of diminished central government and increased state responsibilities.

* Columnist David Lawrence last week politely supplied Ike with an answer: “Look here, General Zhukov, you know you have been deceived. There isn’t any ‘sacrifice to the state’ in the Soviet Union. It’s a forced sacrifice of individual liberty to satisfy Stalin . . . Can the word ‘sacrifice’ ever cover up or excuse tyranny and cruelty? Hitler also argued that what he was doing was for the benefit of the people, but he killed hundreds of thousands of innocent persons inside his own country who disagreed with him . . .”