Correcting the Slip

Soon after Ike's talk about neutralism hit the news wires, the State Department began to get anxious calls from some of its best friends in Embassy Row. While Ike's off-the-cuff slip about alliances' was explainable, it was obvious that some U.S. allies were shaken by what seemed a new, friendly emphasis on neutralism. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rushed to set things right in a speech delivered at Iowa State College.

"The principle of neutrality," said Dulles, "pretends that a nation can best gain safety for itself by being indifferent to the fate of others. This has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception. The free world today is stronger and peace is more secure because so many free nations courageously recognize the now-demonstrated fact that their own peace and safety would be endangered by assault on freedom elsewhere."

Dulles also pitched in to amend the President's remarks on U.S. history. "In 1823," he said, "President Monroe proclaimed to the despotic alliance then headed by czarist Russia that 'we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety . . .'It was indeed farsighted and bold for our young nation thus to identify its own self-interest with the fate of freedom thousands of miles away. Yet the pronouncement of that principle, Webster recorded, was greeted with 'one general glow of exultation.' That principle has now been extended . . . Within the last ten years the U.S., always acting in a bipartisan manner, has made such treaties with 42 countries of America, Europe and Asia. These treaties abolish, as between the parties, the principle of neutrality ..."

Because of the news of the President's operation, Dulles' speech did not get the headlines it deserved. But headlines or no, it was up to the President to put matters right himself as soon as he could do so.

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