Week of Challenge

From across the oceans and from space overhead came the clanking sounds of history on the move. To the U.S., it was a week of challenge unmatched since the days of the Korean war. More important. it was a week when the U.S. knew the challenges for what they were and began to frame the proper responses.

The challenge of Nikita Khrushchev's Sputnik III, a cone-shaped monster weighing almost 1 1/2 tons and launched by a rocket obviously bigger than any in the U.S. arsenal, brought no sense of panic or dismay. Instead, it was accepted as another stern warning that the U.S. must push hard on its own missile program, turn at least one deaf ear to propaganda talk of easy disarmament.

The challenge of the uprising in little Lebanon, the first Middle East nation that accepted the Eisenhower Doctrine without reservation, brought firm but soft-spoken promises of U.S. support. The U.S. airlifted tear gas, guns and ammunition so that the Lebanese government could control insurrection, speeded up a shipment of tanks, sent 18 C124 transports from Donaldson Air Force Base in South Carolina to West Germany to be within easy range of Lebanon. It also sent two Sixth Fleet amphibious units eastward in the Mediterranean with 3,600 Marines, ready if needed to back up U.S. Ambassador Robert McClintock's word that "We are determined to help this government maintain internal security."

The challenge of France, old U.S. ally and nation at the heart of the NATO pact, found the U.S. standing on the sidelines, confident that France could respond to her own challenge and capture the kind of internal strength and stability indispensable to her key position among Western nations (see FOREIGN NEWS).

But the challenge of South America, for what it told about the national frame of mind and will to deal with problems once defined, was the most heartening. Back from the humiliation at the hands of Communist-led mobs in Venezuela came Vice President Richard Nixon. His first concern was not with redressing his personal grievances but with setting right the things that he had found wrong with U.S. policy in Latin America; it was challenge and response. On this course his perennial enemies the Democrats agreed, even though they swung on Nixon as a political target as a result of the trip (see The Vice-Presidency).

"What are we to do about it?" asked the New York Times, as it surveyed the world around it. "We and the things we stand for will survive when we live up to the ideals we profess . . . The U.S. reaction must be positive, helpful and conservative."

And the beginnings of U.S. reaction in the week of challenge were just that.

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