DECISION NEEDED ON DEFENSE OF QUEMOY

GEORGE MEANY, president of the American Federation of Labor, addressing the Washington meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

OUR Government must stop beating about the bush on the Quemoy and Matsu issue. We call for full frankness with the American people and our allies. If our military leaders think these islands are expendable and their loss will have no dangerous consequences for our ally [Nationalist China]--the strongest ally we have in Asia--and for our country and the common cause, then let our Government leaders frankly say so and put an end to the uncertainty as to the future of these islands.

But if, in the best judgment of our military experts, these islands are strategically vital to the security and freedom of our nation--without which there can be no freedom or security for any free nation anywhere in the world--then let our political leaders have the courage to tell that to the American people and convince them to take all necessary measures to help safeguard these islands for the sake of our own best national interest and our stake in world peace.

At any rate, let us stop this game of guessing. If we gear our foreign policy to the counting of ballots in 1956, then we and the rest of the free world will be falling into the worst pitfalls of appeasement. Our country cannot afford petty politics and bitter partisanship in its foreign relations. The Communist enemy, regardless of any momentary change of tactics, regardless of any treaty the Kremlin may sign, is bent on conquering the entire world--the United States not excluded--and remolding it in the form of the totalitarian dictatorship and slave economy imposed on the people behind the Iron Curtain in Russia, Rumania, Outer Mongolia and on the Chinese mainland.

LOYALTY PROGRAM TROUBLES ARE DIMINISHING

University of Chicago Professor EDWARD SHILS, editor of a special issue of the BULLETIN or THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS on the federal loyalty-security program:

SIGNS of light are beginning to break through the long unrelieved darkness of our loyalty-security policy. The Administration has announced specific changes in procedure and organization which might make its measures more just. Congress is discussing the establishment of machinery to survey our entire loyalty-security policy in a comprehensive way which will have more regard for justice, liberty and security than previous policies have shown. There are now grounds for hope that the hounding of dissidence, innocent of treason, will come to a halt.

The loyalty-security program should not be dismantled and discarded. Naturally, there is no danger of this at present--the danger lies at the opposite extreme. It should be retained, concentrated and improved. It should be retained because there is danger of espionage which is active and persistent. It should be concentrated and improved because, at present, the American security system flings its net too widely and indiscriminately, because it confuses the need for security, which is real, with the need for protection from subversion, which is negligible, and because it makes demands for maximal loyalty which are neither necessary for security nor admissible to the idea of freedom.

IKE SHOULD DECLARE NEW PEACE PROGRAM

The 19-paper SCRIPPS-HOWARD chain:

A DRAMATIC restatement of America's position in relation to world affairs is due soon. It is high time something be done to dampen the widespread notion--which seems to be shared even among some of our friends and allies--that America is hell-bent for war. America should take the peace initiative away from Moscow. We should prove to civilized opinion that we, more than anybody else in the world, want and need peace because we, above all others, have more to lose by war. This is a job which the President can do far better than anyone else.

In June the United Nations will hold a special commemorative session in San Francisco on the 10th anniversary of the signing of the charter. Many of the foreign ministers of the world--maybe even Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov--will be there. We respectfully suggest that it would be fitting for President Eisenhower to open that conference in person with an appeal for a new effort to establish peace.

He could: 1) offer to disarm to any limit the other powers would be willing to go to under strict regulation; 2) propose to ban mass-destruction weapons if others would agree to cheat-proof supervision and inspection; 3) suggest that the United States would agree with others and with adequate guarantees of compliance to limit the proportion of key resources that could be used for arms so that more could go into peaceful goods; 4) reiterate the right of civilized peoples everywhere to governments of their own choosing, at free elections, by secret ballot and without outside interference; 5) emphasize that we seek nothing that belongs to anyone else; that there are no strings attached to our offers; that all we ask in return for reciprocal arms reduction is the dropping of Iron and Bamboo Curtains --the opening of frontiers not only for international inspection teams but also for plain, ordinary people.

IKE COMMITTED TO NEW DEALISM

Theologian REINHOLD NIEBUHR, in the left-liberal NEW LEADER:

PRESIDENT EISENHOWER'S popularity is a real political phenomenon of great significance. The fact that the Republicans could win the election only with Eisenhower was not surprising; the appeal of a war hero won more than one election in this country. The permanence of the Eisenhower popularity is, however, more significant. [Eisenhower's] popularity is rooted in the fact that he is the agent of the acceptance by Republicanism of the major policies of the Rooseveltian Revolution of the past two decades. In foreign affairs, that meant acceptance of the concept of our nation's responsibility for the health of the community of free nations. In domestic politics, the revolution meant a break with the doctrinaire laissez-faire traditions of Republicanism, and the intervention of political power in economic affairs for the purpose of preventing violent fluctuations in the economic life and of establishing minimal standards of social security.

Thus, a policy against which the business community fought for two decades, an opposition which kept it from political power for these decades, has been finally accepted by the party which represents the business community. And it is generally accepted that a part of the Eisenhower popularity is derived from this acceptance. All this does not prove that Eisenhower can't be defeated in 1956. But it does prove that there is more flexibility in American democracy than our critics give us credit for. All political phenomena have a biographical pinnacle and a social and economic base. The biographical pinnacle of the Eisenhower phenomenon presents us with Eisenhower's personal appeal to the voters. But the political and social base of the phenomenon consists of the reluctant conversion of the U.S. business community to the revolution in domestic and foreign policy which it professed to abhor. The conversion may not be completely honest or absolutely complete. But the fact of the conversion has been of great benefit. For in a democracy the crowning triumph of a revolution is its acceptance by the opposition.

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