Lessons Learned

At 7 a.m., reporters of the U.S. and foreign press began gathering sleepily at the State Department. They were handed a little five-page booklet; the text of the North Atlantic Treaty was top secret no longer. The newsmen had two hours to get their questions ready. On the dot of 9 a.m., Secretary of State Acheson, the man who had the answers, faced the reporters.

Dean Acheson, brown-suited and carefully brushed, let photographers swirl and flash around him. Then for an hour he held forth. Quickly he read through the treaty's 14 articles. Essentially, the parties to the pact agreed that:

P: They still believed in the United Nations, but were invoking their right under the U.N. charter itself to form a regional defense alliance.

P: They would help themselves and each other to establish armed forces adequate to defend themselves but would "refrain . . . from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the U.N."

P: They would consider an armed attack on any one of them in Europe or North America an attack on all of them. Each nation would determine for itself whether it was necessary to go to war.

P: They would define such an armed attack as an assault in the North Atlantic area on any territory, island possession, aircraft or vessel of any of the signers of the treaty. It would also include any attack on occupation forces in Europe.

You Need Latitude. Dean Acheson slipped off his spectacles, was ready for questions. They came fast from all sides. Would an attack on a Berlin airlift plane flying over the Soviet zone be considered an armed attack under the treaty? Acheson replied calmly that he thought that would be an attack on the occupation forces. "But if it occurs over the Soviet zone?" the reporter pressed. Acheson said it made no difference.

Another newsman asked: "Would aggression against a country, by infiltration within the country, be an armed attack?" If it were purely an internal revolutionary activity, said Acheson, .that would not be an armed attack. But if it were a revolution inspired, armed and directed from the outside, that would be a different matter. The pact, he said, didn't spell it out and shouldn't--when you come to real situations you ought to be able to have some latitude in deciding them.

Would he "discuss the question of moral obligation to use armed force in resisting attack on one of the members?" That was the heart of the matter. Hold your hats, the Secretary warned, there's been a lot of loose thought on the distinction between moral and legal obligation. Decent people usually carry out their contracts because of moral obligation. Some decent people default in their contracts because they get in trouble one way or another, and then they go to court.

If There Is Any Doubt. But in a contract between nations, said Acheson, there is no sheriff sitting up in the clouds who is going to come down and see the contract carried out. Nobody could force us to carry out our contract, but we would do what we had contracted to do. If there was an attack, the decisions on what the U.S. would have to do would be made under constitutional procedures.

Now, Acheson went on, if there is any doubt about what to do, you don't take the most extreme action first. If you have a little flurry on the border somewhere, you don't take a sledge hammer to kill a fly. You take what action is necessary, and it may be something short of force. The Japanese attack on the gunboat Panay in 1937 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 were good examples. Both were armed attacks; one called for response by armed force and the other did not.

Acheson said that the pact did not bind the U.S. to provide arms for Western Europe, but it was obvious to him that only the U.S. could. He did not say, but his audience knew that the Administration was already preparing a first-year program of $1 billion to $1.5 billion in arms shipments to Western Europe. It was the point in the North Atlantic Treaty discussions that was most likely to get senatorial danders up. The Senate, after plenty of questioning, would probably produce the two-thirds majority vote required to ratify the pact. But several key supporters of the alliance were not ready to buy the pact without looking at the bill first.

Stand Together. Dean Acheson continued his lecture in a radio speech which was cleared with Harry Truman and delivered with a Shakespearian actor's measured resonance. The U.N., he said, is "not working as effectively as we hoped because one of its members has attempted to prevent it from working.

"We have learned our history lesson from two world wars in less than half a century. That experience has taught us that the control of Europe by a single aggressive, unfriendly power would constitute an intolerable threat to the national security of the United States . . . We've also learned that if the free nations do not stand together, they will fall one by one . . . We and the free nations of Europe are determined that history shall not repeat itself in that melancholy particular.

"This country is not planning to make war against anyone ... It does not hold war to be inevitable . . . [But] if we should be confronted again with a calculated armed attack such as we have twice seen in the 20th Century, I should not suppose that we would decide that any action other than the use of armed force would be effective, either as an exercise of the right of self-defense or as necessary to restore the peace and security of the North Atlantic area . . .

"We sincerely hope that we can avoid strife, but we cannot avoid striving for what is right."

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