Keeping the Peace

To mayors of cities along France's Mediterranean coast last week, the U.S. consulate in Nice dispatched an urgent predawn request: call out the police and round up all the U.S. Navymen in town. In half a dozen French and Italian ports, U.S. shore patrols marched into bars, hotels and nightclubs in search of men and officers of the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

By late afternoon the Sixth Fleet had sailed: from Cannes the 60,000-ton supercarrier Forrestal, from Naples the 45,000-ton battleship Wisconsin, from Leghorn the carrier Lake Champlain, from Villefranche and Marseille the heavy cruisers Salem and Des Moines. With them steamed a swarm of destroyers, transports, tankers. Under leathery Fleet Commander Charles Randall ("Cat") Brown, the atomic-armed Sixth was eastward bound to back up and buck up little Jordan's 21-year-old King Hussein (see FOREIGN NEWS).

"Independence & Integrity." In struggling against proCommunists and pro-Egyptians inside Jordan, Hussein was fighting not for the U.S. but for his own country and his own throne. But indirectly he was striking two blows for the West: against the prestige of international Communism and the prestige of the Arab world's voluble troublemaker, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who was trying from afar to bring Hussein down. The danger also threatened that Nasser's ally Syria might invade Jordan--possibly toppling Hussein, possibly touching off an explosion that would drag the U.S. into hot war. It was clearly to the interest of the U.S. and of world order to deter Syria--or Egypt or Russia or Israel--from intervening against Hussein.

In Washington the day before the Sixth Fleet sailed, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conferred by telephone with the President. Then Press Secretary James Hagerty announced that "both the President and the Secretary of State regard the independence of Jordan as vital." The wording, Hagerty noted, echoed the Eisenhower Doctrine's declaration that the U.S. "regards as vital to the national interest and world peace the preservation of the independence and integrity of the nations of the Middle East."

"Sail When Ready." The Joint Chiefs of Staff needed no further notice to send the Sixth Fleet hurrying eastward from its peaceful anchorages in the Western Mediterranean. Admiral Arleigh ("31-Knot") Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, issued the curt order: "Sail when ready." The Sixth Fleet sailed under the straight-faced explanation that it was merely returning to its normal theater of operations.

The fleet's hurried move brought on a flurry of arguments about whether the Administration was or was not acting under the newborn Eisenhower Doctrine, which authorized the President to use military force to aid Middle East countries appealing for help against aggressors "controlled by international Communism." But Jordan had not been attacked, and Hussein had not asked for help (although he had clearly declared that his troubles were being compounded by international Communism). The mission of the Sixth Fleet, which started patrolling the Mediterranean ten years before the Eisenhower Doctrine was born, was not to apply the doctrine, but to deter an outbreak of gunplay that might make it necessary for the U.S. to apply the doctrine.

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