Around the Hollow Square

Lake Geneva glistened and Mont Blanc kept distant watch. In the frescoed hall of Geneva's Palais des Nations, the chiefs of government of four of the world's most powerful nations sat down at the green-leather-topped tables. They came attended by guards, fussed over and briefed by attendant swarms of experts, backed by libraries of data and filing cases crammed with plans. President Eisenhower was chairman of the first session, and therefore in position to set the tone.

"We meet here for a simple purpose," said the President. "We are not here merely to catalogue our differences. We are not here to repeat the same dreary exercises that have characterized most of our negotiations of the past ten years. We are here in response to the peaceful aspirations of mankind ... to inject a new spirit into our diplomacy."

"It is necessary that we talk frankly about the concrete problems which create tension," Eisenhower said. "First is the problem of unifying Germany." Other problems the President stressed: Every nation's fear of international Communism's "alien domination"; the overriding problem of armament and how to ensure that "no frightful surprises" can befall any nation.

Though carefully tamped down, as it had been, by all the cautious words in advance, an attitude of expectancy broke out in Geneva as the Big Four gathered around the hollow square of tables.

Everyone recognized Geneva as a testing place, though no one was sure what the testing standards would be. If Geneva is to succeed at all, its success would come not from settling anything, but from starting something. The West went to Geneva not to sign agreements out of trust, but to see whether trust itself is possible, or whether mutual self-interest now provides grounds for limited arrangements where trust is lacking.

Beyond Geneva's widening circles of participants and counselors (700 in the four delegations) and observers (some 1,400 newsmen) lay the great waiting public itself, which had alternately had its hopes raised and its expectations dashed by statesmen who sometimes acted as if the public, left to its native good sense, could not be trusted to achieve the proper expression of mixed skepticism and hope. But the public was the Big Fifth at Geneva. In the preconference remarks of both the U.S.'s Eisenhower and Russia's Bulganin was an implied acknowledgment that the public expected and demanded something of them.

No nation would want to leave Geneva in the role of spoiler of the world's hope. The public's expectation would be at best a spur to agreement; at worst, a temptation to the participants to show progress where there was in fact none.

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