Next Witness

Modest, homely Omar Bradley of Moberly, Mo., the Army's Chief of Staff, slipped on his steel-rimmed glasses in the Senate Caucus room last week and took a soldier's look at the North Atlantic Treaty. The diplomats and statesmen had argued out the legal niceties of the pact. Infantryman Bradley skipped the fine print and drove to the main point. In his mild, high-pitched voice, Bradley told the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee: "Our frontiers of collective defense lie in common with theirs [the other treaty nations'] in the heart of Europe."

Ten years before, Franklin Roosevelt had kicked up a national uproar when he was quoted as placing the U.S. frontier on the Rhine. But this time Bradley made his point from the lesson of recent history. The invasion of Normandy, Bradley reminded his listeners, had cost 21,000 U.S. casualties in the first ten days. The North Atlantic Treaty was the surest way to save the U.S. from making another such bloody invasion. Said Bradley: "I don't believe any nation would attack such a combination of friendly countries."

"In the Common Defense." Bradley thought that the U.S., once it had approved the treaty, should proceed to furnish arms to Britain and the Western European powers. Under the waspish questioning of Missouri's legalistic Senator Forrest Donnell, he admitted he could not compute the exact dollar cost of U.S. surplus arms to be supplied. But, he added: "They may well be worth a lot more to us in the hands of somebody else than in a storehouse over here."

Soldier Bradley cut straight to the heart of the whole arms issue. Said he: "Plans for the common defense of the existing free world must provide for the security of Western Europe without abandoning these countries to the terrors of another enemy occupation. Only upon that premise can nations closest to the frontiers be expected to stake their fortunes with ours in the common defense."

By the time Bradley had finished, Senate opposition to the pact was dwindling fast. All week long the committeemen were urged to speed its ratification by a whole parade of witnesses: former Under Secretaries of State Will Clayton and Robert Lovett, the Republicans' John Foster Dulles, former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, Senator Robert Taft's brother, Charles P. Taft, former head of the Federal Council of Churches.

"Holy War." The first opposing witness seemed more apt to help than hinder final passage. Henry Wallace fidgeted and squirmed as he charged that the State Department had kept mum on Russia's offer to end the Berlin blockade for fear it would spoil the treaty's chances. (No one thought to ask him why the Russians took part in such a deal.) Henry Wallace rattled on. The treaty, he cried, was "not an instrument of defense but a military alliance designed for aggression." Furthermore, it was a deal backed by U.S. big business, the Roman Catholic hierarchy and British imperialists, who were "whipping up a holy war" against communism. The pact, Wallace said, would turn Russia "into a wild and desperate cornered beast."

"You simply are for Russia!" roared Texas' Tom Connally. "What do you want us to do--just sit down and let Russia absorb the world and do nothing about it?" Equally annoyed but more restrained, Michigan's Arthur H. Vandenberg chided Wallace: "I cannot condone your conduct in going about insisting that your country ... is bent on world conquest in one form or another." But in two hours of shouted questions and evasive answers, Henry Wallace had one response which nobody challenged. Said Henry: "I think for her own interests Russia would be utterly foolish to carry out a policy of expansion at this time."

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