Holiday's End

Recess was over, and the foreign ministers of East and West headed back to the rote and routine of Geneva. Most of them had sensibly spent the three-week holiday away from their books. France's Couve de Murville took a jaunt with President de Gaulle to Rome and Madagascar. The U.S.'s Christian Herter got in some sailing on the choppy waters of Massachusetts Bay. For Britain's Selwyn Lloyd there were long English weekends at Chequers. Even Russia's Andrei Gromyko presumably took some dour relaxation, though he also returned to Geneva with Khrushchev's humiliating words ringing in his ear: "Gromyko only says what we tell him to say. At the next Geneva meeting, he will repeat what he has already told you. If he doesn't, we will fire him . . ."

Justified Summit. On all sides then, homework seemed unnecessary, grand new schemes seemed futile, and the only purpose (in Russian and British eyes) seemed to be to prepare a conclusion that would give nothing away, would solve nothing, and would merely refer things to the heads of government for a summit conference. The U.S. objective remains the removal of the Soviet threat to West Berlin, and the threat, in fact, is the real reason that Secretary Herter is talking with the Russians in the first place. President Eisenhower had made it clear that Geneva had not yet "justified" the summit meeting that Moscow demands. Presumably the diplomatic job at Geneva for the foreign ministers was now 1) to pose their difficulties rather than to dispose of them, 2) to "justify" the summit by making it clear that the West did not have to go there under duress.

Vague Enigma. The Soviet Union in its vague and enigmatic way was already trying to prove that an ultimatum is not an ultimatum. Spokesmen, ranging from Nikita Khrushchev ("I desist from attacking and welcome you," he told seven junketing U.S. Governors) to touring Frol Kozlov ("Is a proposal to hold negotiations an ultimatum?"), mixed menacing warnings and unyielding basic positions with genial talk about how agreement was possible. But the most significant Russian clue of all, though buried in the midst of invective, was Andrei Gromyko's hurt complaint that the Russian position had been misrepresented in Herter's TV report to the U.S. If an East German-West German committee were set up to explore German reunification, there would be no change in Berlin's status during their 18 months' talks (as the Russians proposed, or 2 1/2years, as the West suggested). But afterward, if they failed to agree, would the Russians then unilaterally sign a peace treaty with the Communist East Germans? If so, said the West, Russia would still be holding a time bomb over Berlin, but merely lengthening the fuse. Answered Gromyko: The duration of the temporary agreement was "a matter neither of major importance nor of principle" to Russia, and if the German talks failed, Moscow contemplated renewed Big Four talks, not unilateral action. This modification, made since the last session at Geneva, was one thing the West hoped to nail down. The Reds further demanded that the West cut down its 11,000 troops in West Berlin to "symbolic levels," while the West riposted with an offer to consider only "symbolic cuts," a quite different idea.

With such much-shuffled cards, the Big Four sat down to the table at Geneva once again.

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