Approach to Peace

Toward a Versailles-proof people's peace, Elder Statesman Herbert Hoover last week contributed some clear thinking about a planned change in the whole method and process of peacemaking.

Ruled out by the former President were another months-long armistice, the green-baize conference tables and the static "peace" formulas that followed World War I. Instead, Herbert Hoover proposed a peace in two stages:

> No armistice, but an instant conditional peace imposed by advance agreement between the United Nations. This, said Hoover, would enable the world to turn at once to the problems of recovery.

> No general peace conference, but a period in which war revenge and hatred could cool off and lasting solutions be worked out separately by commissions representing the dominant nations. The significant Hoover contribution was that he not only seconded the cooling off period but proposed interim action. He named six minimum conditions to a conditional peace: total disarmament of the enemy, designation of provisional boundaries, machinery for repatriation of prisoners and civilians, removal of economic blockades, immediate famine relief and provisional restoration of commercial treaties.

Hoover's design for future peace moved him a long step from the isolationist thinking that permeated his own party before Pearl Harbor. Last spring he had made a clean break, lined up for U.S. world participation in his book The Problems of a Lasting Peace, jointly written with Diplomat Hugh Gibson (TIME, July 6). Last week, in his speech before the Chicago Executives Club, he was substantially in agreement with the broad world program of men like Sumner Welles, Henry Wallace, Anthony Eden.

Said Herbert Hoover: "When victory comes after this war, we must jointly with our allies again try to lead the world to the promised land across this terrible maelstrom of conflicting forces."

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