"THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT"

Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, speaking at Wesleyan University's commencement exercises this week, made the bluntest public statement on U.S.-Soviet relations yet made by a U.S. official. Acheson is due to retire to private law practice June 30; his speech was his valedictory. Excerpts:

"The basic, underlying, never-varying tradition of [our] republic is insistence upon . . . the worth of the individual. . . . It seems true in society, as in nature, that the greatest energy is created by releasing the power of the smallest unit. In one case, the individual; in the other case, the atom. . . .

"This belief in the individual is in our blood. It is our most fundamental characteristic. It gives a certain typical disorderliness to our behavior which baffles some foreign observers. . . .

"Certainly during the decade of the 1940s this country has devoted its supreme efforts toward the preservation of the liberty of nations and individuals. . . . During the war constructive foreign policy . . . followed two objectives closely related and mutually dependent--to establish the unity, mutual confidence and cooperation of the great powers; and to create international organizations, necessarily based on the assumption of this unity and cooperation. . . .

"We did not pursue these objectives merely by exhortation or joint declaration and agreement. No people has ever given more tangible or extensive evidence of its good will and intention. Particularly is this true in our attitude toward the Soviet Union. . . ."

Pursuit of Happiness. "During the war we contributed to the Soviet Union $11.5 billion of the most vitally needed supplies. After the war, through UNRRA and Government credits, we made available another half billion dollars worth of goods for relief and reconstruction.

"In our military operations we pursued purely military objectives. . . . And when we overran our estimated and agreed objectives we withdrew to previously agreed zonal boundaries. These were acts, not words, based upon . . . mutual confidence and loyalty.

"Nor were these acts all. The whole series of arrangements for settlement in Eastern Europe, Germany and the Far East recognized to the full Soviet fears and interests, and were based upon confidence in their intention to carry out the pledged purposes of cooperation. . . .

"[But] unhappily the whole course of recovery and the international pursuit of happiness has suffered deeply by . . . the Soviet Union's pursuit of policies diametrically opposed to the very premises of international accord and recovery. In Eastern Europe the Soviet Union, over American and British protests, has used its dominant military position to carry on a unilateral policy . . . by which free choice of their destiny has been denied those peoples. . . . The minority Communist regimes fastened upon those peoples have acted to cut them off economically from the community of Europe."

The Shams & Frauds. "In the Far East, the Soviet Union has dismantled the industries in Manchuria, has obstructed economic and political unification in Korea, and has not carried out its commitments for the return of Dairen to Chinese administration as a free port. . . . In the Middle East, Persia has been for some years in turmoil, first through Soviet occupation of its "northern territories, and then through Soviet-sponsored local attempts to separate those areas from Persia.

"In Greece . . . the incalculably difficult task of rebuilding its plant, its production, its people's health and morale, and its governmental services, has been threatened with total defeat by civil disturbances, aided, equipped, and protected by Greece's northern, Communist-controlled neighbors. . . . We can note without surprise the cynical and barefaced coup d'etat in Hungary.

"We can do--and are doing--many things. We can expose for all to see the shams and frauds behind which peoples are deprived of their liberty by little groups supported by foreign power. The methods have not changed basically since the days of Maximilian in Mexico, merely improved in organization, and brutality and propaganda techniques. But they dislike exposure, and it remains to be seen whether they can survive much longer than Maximilian did the withdrawal of the foreign bayonets.

"We also can, and should, help within the limits of our capacity those who wish to help themselves. . . . This country has always responded to people struggling to attain or maintain their freedom. We have done so because it is important to us that they shall succeed.

"This, as I see it, has been the course of our foreign policy over these past few years. And it is our present course. It has not created the world of our dreams. But that is not our fault. It is the best course I know of, in the world as we find it."

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