What Khrushchev Wants

In one of the postwar's most remarkable political interviews, Minnesota's Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey talked across a Kremlin table last week for eight hours with the stumpy, gap-toothed man who rules the Russians. Humphrey, like such other recent Kremlin visitors as Adlai Stevenson and Pundit Walter Lippmann, came away convinced that Khrushchev knows what he wants, and intends to get it. And what Khrushchev wants right now, first and more than anything else, is Berlin. "I do not think that war over Berlin is likely," said Humphrey in London after the interview (see Foreign Relations). "But I would say that it is not impossible."

Khrushchev has superlative cause for worrying about the continued existence of West Berlin: it stands as a showcase outpost of freedom--a glowing symbol, 100 miles inside the Iron Curtain, of successful allied policy and capitalist prosperity, a haven for thousands upon thousands of East German refugees in flight from the drab, despondent backdrop of Communist East Germany. West Berlin's symbolism is repeated on a much larger scale in Konrad Adenauer's German Federal Republic. To erase Western strength in Berlin would be a sure step toward weakening West Germany, and the Russians have never ceased trying to punch a hole in NATO, to neutralize Germany and take it out of play by a succession of alternate bluffs and bribes. In this they have enjoyed a certain sympathy and support from ardent Western believers who see "disengagement" as a way to ease European tensions (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Minnesota's Humphrey, as a member of the loyal opposition in U.S. political terms, bluntly told Khrushchev that the U.S. is not going to get shoved out of Berlin. But, as a loyal member of the opposition, he came away calling for the U.S. to adopt some sort of "new approach" to the cold war. No one, least of all Secretary of State Dulles,* would deny the possible benefits of a new approach--provided it had something to recommend it beyond mere newness. But such an approach can only be a tactical means of implementing the principle, explained by Dulles in a San Francisco speech last week, that freedom itself--especially freedom expressed in economic and social progress and military confidence--is a force that can and will prevail. That principle is the basis of U.S. cold war policy. And the success of that policy, particularly as expressed in burgeoning West Germany, is the reason Nikita Khrushchev wants Berlin.

*Dulles, who underwent a successful operation for cancer of the large intestine in 1956, last weekend entered the Walter Reed Army Hospital for examination of "an inflammatory condition of the lower colon"--with medical assurances that preliminary studies showed "no evidence of any recurrence of the malignancy of two years ago."

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