The President's Peace Department
THE President last week appointed Harold E. Stassen to a newly created job of Cabinet rank that the news- papers are describing variously as Disarmament Direc- tor, Secretary of Peace, and Special Assistant to the President `with responsibility for reporting on developments in the fields of armament and disarmament.' It is Mr. Eisenhower's hope, We learn from a White House statement, that Mr. Stassen will 'develop, on behalf of the President and the State Department, the broad studies, investigations, and conclusions which, when concurred in by the National Security Council and approved by the President, will become basic policy toward the question of disarmament.'
The action symbolises much that is good, bad and indiffer- ent about the Eisenhower administration. On the moral level, it is, of course, praiseworthy. It is even, in a way, bold, original, imaginative. We who have pioneered in so many fields can now post a claim to being the first nation on earth to have a peace ministry, an anti-war department, a twenty-thousand- dollar-a-year executive working at high pressure to get rid of the guns and bombs we have laboured so mightily to amass. (The day after the announcement, though, the New York Times carried a reassuring story headed 'Military Hopeful of Arms Build-Up.') No more will we Americans have to suffer in silence while Molotov, Mao and Krishna Menon berate us for not loving peace enough. Which of their governments has a bureau that does nothing but search around for ways of abolishing war? Mr. Stassen should embarrass Mr. Dulles. The President is not a devious man, and there is no doubt that having a peace depart1nent, whether it was his idea or that of some advertising genius turned psychological warrior, appealed to him on its merits. (Incidentally, the idea is in a sense a triumph of the pacifist urge that was so strong here between the two World Wars. Those of us who went to school in that period remem- ber well the idealistic civics teacher who was always saying. `We have a War Department. Wouldn't it be a splendid thing, boys and girls, if we had a Peace Department too?') But an additional appeal of the project may well have been the oppor- tunity it afforded to offset Mr. Dulles with Mr. Stassen. For Mr. Stassen's way of getting in Mr. Dulles's hair is as nothing compared to Mr. Dulles's way of getting in President Eisen- hower's hair. Though the Secretary of State has changed his tune a good many times since 1952, when he wrote the Republican platform and in it promised the liberation of the satellite countries and just about everything short of the establishment of town-meeting democracy in the Soviet Union, his pronouncements made on his own behalf still do not come even close to the President's in terms of restraint and circum- spection. If one tries to catch the rhythm of events in Washing- ton, one obsserves that the periods in which our foreign policy, as it is laid down from on high, appears to reach the maximum of flexibility and sobriety are those periods when Mr. Dulles is out of the country and making the rounds of the chancel- lories. Then it is the President who speaks and who gives a powerful sense of being profoundly aware not only of the danger of Communist expansion but of the danger of war. After these interludes, Mr. Dulles flies in for a few days, delivers a couple of dour, Calvinist forecasts of doom and retribution, then heads back out to Bangkok or Rio or wherever.
It is believed in Washington that the President, who must retain considerable admiration for his Secretary of State, winces each time he is notified that Mr. Dulles is about to touch down at National Airport. He knows that there will be statements and speeches that will not in any sense contradict his own in substance but will place the emphasis where he has thought it unwise to place it. If the President is stressing his horror at the thought of an atomic war and his eagerness both to avert such a catastrophe and to prevent further Com- munist expansion, Mr. Dulles can be counted upon to bumble into town and say that if there should be a war, it will be found Dulles, both of them used to criticise their predecessors for a lack of militancy and both were, in the jargon of the day, 'liberationists' Every week now brings some development that carries the administration a step or two further from its original policy, and it is not, I think, unreasonable to say that it has long since been a good deal less militant—in practice if not in preachment—than the Truman administration. The world does not seem aware of this, the American people are manifestly unaware of it, and it may be that the administration itself is uncertain about the direction in which it has been headed. Yet any close inspection of policy makes the matter plain enough. Within the past several weeks, for example, the administration has to all intents and purposes ,reversed its stand on the vexed question of the Quemoy and Matsu islands. In January, when Congress passed a resolution giving the President powers he already had for taking military action in that area, it was taken for granted on every side that the whole purpose of the resolution was to ward off what was thought to be an impending attack on the islands. The reso- lution was intentionally vague in dealing with the Quemoys and Matsus, but there was nothing vague about the purpose, which was to throw the fear of retalidtion into. Communist hearts. March, however, finds the administration in full retreat from what it must have come to regard as an untenable position. At the very news conference at which he talked about the use of atomic weapons, Mr. Dulles announced, almost in so many words, that One place where they would not be used was in the Formosa Straits. He said, to the astonishment of reporters, that it was now the administration's view that if the Chinese Communists were to.couple an attack on the off- shore islands with a renunciation of force in their effort to regain Formosa, they would meet with no resistance from the United States. Asked if the situation, as he saw it, would require a renunciation of Peiping's legal claims to Formosa, he said he saw no need for this. That matter could be dealt with in other ways, he said, and a renunciation of force would 'meet the immediate requirements of the situation.' In fact, he told his gaping audience, there was even some doubt as to whether the President would have the right to intervene in a battle over the islands; the joint resolution, he pointed out, authorised the President to act in areas 'related' to the defence of Formosa, and if the Communists unrelated them by assuring us of future good behaviour, we would be effectively pre- vented from doing anything. It seemed an extraordinary bit of casuistry on the Secretary's part, but he was questioned sharply as to his meaning, and it was simple enough : if the Communists want the islands, they will meet with no trouble from the Seventh Fleet provided they have the foresight to assure us that they do not intend to go right on across the itraits to Formosa.
This was Mr. Dulles speaking, but he was careful to empha- sise that what he was speaking was the President's mind as he, Dulles, understood it. It was not, it may be assumed, the happiest situation the Secretary has ever found himself in. But what he was saying was in line with all observable trends here. It may be that there will be war and not peace, but if that is the case it will not be because the President made no effort to get himself off the hook fashioned by his advisers. He doubt- less has plenty of work lined up for his Peace Department.
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