FOREIGN RELATIONS: Second Look at Geneva

The day after Secretary of State Christian Herter delivered an hour-long report on the recessed Geneva conference to President Eisenhower at a White House breakfast last week, he put in one of the longest days of the year getting his message across to the Congress and the people. First he drove to Capitol Hill to deliver a two-hour report to the overwhelmingly approving House Foreign Affairs Committee. Then he made a 90-minute report to the overwhelmingly approving Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Herter’s clear word: the negative stand-off at Geneva to date did not justify U.S. participation in a summit conference later this year. In the evening Herter went on radio and TV, delivered a tough, no-surrender-at-Berlin report to the nation that got applause from all across the political spectrum and provoked Russia’s Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko into the cry that it did “not contain a single strain of truth.”

Long Look. “The Soviets called their proposal for West Berlin a proposal for a ‘free city,’ ” said Herter. “By this they meant a city free of the protection of allied forces and exposed to the pressures and inroads of the Communist area surrounding it. This was a typical example of Communist upside-down talk. The Soviets would take what is now in fact a free city and make it like East Berlin, which is now in fact a slave city.”

If Herter’s speech sounded surprisingly tough after weeks of talk about conciliation and concession at Geneva, it was because the U.S. was taking a long, critical look at the course of the conference to date. The most worrisome element: Britain’s seeming determination to have a summit conference at all costs. Just why, some of the State Department’s top negotiators still were not clear, even though they had gone along with some talk-softly British tactics at the conference against their better judgrment.

Long View. After watching the British in action, they had a revised theory: Britain wants a summit meeting in the belief that its diplomatic know-how and Foreign Office skill could win points from Khrushchev (as they did not from Foreign Minister Gromyko) and restore British influence and prestige. In this sense, the British believe that Khrushchev is really sparring for nothing but Western acceptance of Communist conquests to date; the U.S. believes that the Communists mean to win as much of the world as they can get, and that serious one-sided concessions will only encourage them to try to get more.

As the U.S. intends to make clear when the foreign ministers reconvene July 13, it is willing to go to the summit—and not fearful of going—under certain conditions. Foremost among the conditions: if the Kremlin wants a summit conference, it must be prepared to negotiate—to reciprocate concessions already made by the West.