Red Pepper

In the midst of last week's international tensions and uncertainties, Florida's Senator Claude Pepper, fervent New Dealer and able, if not popular, member of the potent Foreign Relations Committee, rose in the Senate to make a cool defense of the Soviet Union and a fiery attack on Harry Truman's policy of "getting tough" with Russia.

His main point: let the Big Three meet again, talk over all their differences, re-establish a basis of unity, and brush away the "web of fear" which, he said, shrouds the U.S., Britain, the U.S.S.R. alike.

Then the Senator defined "the most dangerous of issues" which divides the Big Three--"the almighty Bomb [held] like a Damoclean sword over the heads of Russia and the rest of the world." His novel proposal: let the U.S., Canada and Britain destroy every atom bomb, smash every facility for making another. "Then we could go into the court of this conference with the cleanest of hands."

The Bomb, to Senator Pepper, was the "newest form of isolationism." He attacked Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg as "the most vigorous and powerful advocate" of that isolationism. He answered Vandenberg's question of the week before--"What is Russia up to?" --with another question: "What is America up to?"

In all his 10,000 words, New Dealer Pepper had only praise and apology for Russia. Said he: "It comes with ill grace from certain world powers whose troops are stationed in every nation from Egypt to Singapore to make a world conflagration out of the movement of a few troops a few miles into a neighboring territory to resist an oil monopoly."*

It was not the U.S.S.R., he said, that had dropped an iron curtain across Europe. Instead, it was itself cut off from the Middle East, western Europe and the Mediterranean "by an iron curtain dropped by the Western powers." Russia, he said, is "denied the atomic bomb, denied warm water outlets, denied the common courtesy of economic negotiations with her greatest ally. . . . [Russia] is suspicious . . . beset by many fears."

To all this, the Senate listened in silence. Next day Minnesota's Republican Joseph H. Ball had a caustic reply: the Pepper speech was right down the Communist line.

Senator Ball added a cogent argument: "What the Senator from Florida proposes is that we strip ourselves of the only real military power we still possess, the atomic bomb, and then confer with Russia about future security and peace. We might enter such a conference with clean hands, but . . . we would enter it committed in advance by our own impotence to a policy of appeasement."

*For news of Iran's oil, see INTERNATIONAL.

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