No Sham Agreements

In Washington, where no resident has the vote, are gathered the men whose job is to divine what the voter is thinking. Their service and their livelihood depend upon it. Cut off as they are from the front porches and backyards of the U.S., they have developed highly sensitive antennae to read the public's mind from afar. Last week the White House listeners heard, or thought they could hear, a solid concurrence in President Truman's calm-and-steady policy of unappeasing firmness toward Russia. But there were other sounds.

There was the sound, for example, of 7,000 letters dropping into Senator Brien McMahon's mailbox. They came from people anxious for peace and hungering for quick solutions. Most of the letters endorsed McMahon's proposal of a $50 billion global Marshall Plan (TIME, Feb. 13) that would promise Russia and other nations fistfuls of U.S. dollars if Russia would only promise to outlaw the atom bomb. Many seemed to think that there was no other alternative: it was either McMahon's proposal or what he called "an attack that might incinerate 50 million Americans in . . . the space of minutes."

The Stakes. Such either-or talk was perfect nonsense. Neither the Administration nor anyone else was relying on the H-bomb and the A-bomb as the way to peace: the atomic bomb, uranium or hydrogen, was something the U.S. had to have if Russia had it too. The White House decided that its position needed more explaining.

Inside a pink granite Masonic temple in Alexandria, Va. dedicated to the memory of George Washington, Harry Truman went to work. There will be no new peace overtures to Russia, he made clear, no "parley at the summit" as proposed by Winston Churchill. Strength, not more talk, is what is needed to bring the Kremlin to an honest settlement.

The United Nations, he said, was still the place to work out world control of atomic energy. The U.S. was not convinced that its atomic control plan was the only answer. "The stakes are too large to let us or any nation stand on pride of authorship," said Harry Truman. If Russia or anyone else could produce a better plan the U.S. would gladly accept it. But "anything less would be a sham agreement."

Desperate Struggle. What could the U.S. do in the meantime to make itself more secure? "Freedom is not expanded by conquest," said the President. "Democracy is not created by dictation ... In the long run, our security and the world's hopes for peace lie not in measures of defense or in the control of weapons, but in the growth and expansion of freedom and self-government." This might come, he said, through Point Four, the Administration's program for spreading democracy by aiding the underdeveloped areas of the world.

"Today, in many countries of the world, the concepts of freedom and self-government are merely vague phrases. They express little to people who are engaged in a desperate struggle with ignorance and poverty ... to men who must work from sunup to sundown merely to keep alive . . . men who cannot read & write ... In their present condition, the immediate benefit of steel plowshares or smallpox vaccinations has more appeal than the abstract ideas of democracy . . .

"We are not trying to sell them automobiles or television sets. Our purpose is to help them to grow more food, to obtain better education and to be more healthy . . ." In short, peace was not to be won by weakness, nor won by bribing the Kremlin's masters with dollars. Peaceful intentions had to be mutual, or there would be no peace. And until there was peace, the job was to strengthen the U.S., and strengthen its friends.

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