Stalemate in Paris

Philip Jessup, by vocation a professor of international law (Columbia) and by persuasion a liberal, tried hard all week to explain the meaning of objectivity to Andrei Gromyko, by vocation and persuasion a Communist. Professor Jessup had a hard job.

Since the Big Four Foreign Ministers' deputies were in Paris only to draft a program for a future conference of their bosses, Jessup and his British and French colleagues simply wanted to list topics of discussion, in an order that did not prejudge their importance and in language that did not anticipate any decisions. Gromyko wanted a loaded agenda. He insisted that the first item must be "demilitarization" of Germany and safeguards against "remilitarization," the implication (which he expounded endlessly) being that the West was rearming Germany to attack Russia.

Patiently, U.S. Delegate Jessup replied that West Germany had no armed forces, and that the only "remilitarization" going on in Germany was in the Eastern zone, where the Russians have been building up a German Red army. The real cause of tension in Europe was "the overwhelming armaments of the Soviet Union."

All week, in the pink marble Palais Rose, the wrangling continued. When the U.S. proposed that the agenda include a peace treaty for Austria, Gromyko agreed --provided Trieste was discussed also since, he argued, the allies had transformed Trieste into a base of aggression. Again & again, as he exhausted other arguments, Jessup tried to show Gromyko, with every conceivable shading and turn of phrase, that this kind of reasoning was not objective. Gromyko knew that. It was not his business to be objective.

The hospitable French spread a lunch for the delegates, hoping to ease the tension. Gromyko did make one minor concession, but still seemed unwilling to let the conference reach agreement. As the talks rolled into their second week, the delegates were still deadlocked.

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