Prelude to the Parley

In the base camps of the Big Four, a panoply of potentates and elected chieftains made ready for the fateful journey.

All last week they were busy briefing their delegations, battening down their philosophies, packing planeloads of equipment for the Parley at the Summit.

Into the Swiss lakeside city of Geneva (pop. 150,000) the U.S. will move more than ten trunkloads of documents, including at-a-glance codifications of every treaty the U.S. has signed since the war. With the papers will go a battery of newfangled devices of diplomacy, e.g., the "electronic collating table," a twelve-foot Lazy Susan that speeds the putting-together of documents when they are needed in a hurry. Explained one Foreign Service officer: "You have to be prepared for anything."

Across the Atlantic to the parley will fly some 150 delegates from the U.S.: President Eisenhower (in the Columbine late this week), Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, such European specialists as the State Department's Livingston Merchant and Douglas MacArthur II (nephew of the general), such "unofficial delegates" as Presidential Advisers Harold Stassen and Nelson Rockefeller, backstopped by Filipino mess-boys from the White House.

From the Bonn and Paris embassies, the U.S. delegation will borrow about 100 hands: stenographers and switchboard operators, code clerks and receptionists, chauffeurs and cooks. One unlisted member of the U.S. delegation will be White House Stenographer Jack Romagna, one of the fastest shorthand-writers in the world, who took notes outside F.D.R.'s bedroom during the frantic U.S. Cabinet meeting in the first crowded hours after Pearl Harbor.

No Barbed Wire. While preparations in the U.S. went on calmly, there was hurry and confusion in Geneva. U.N. staffers scurried out of the first and second floors of the 20-year-old Palais des Nations to make way for the carpenters of the Big Four. Technicians uncoiled miles of signal wire, installed cable heads and rigged the automatic elevators so that no unauthorized person could step off at the Parley at the Summit.

The advance guards of the 700 delegates and 1,200 newspapermen were thronging along with the vacationers into the gleaming city that confronted the distant white crown of Mont Blanc: the French and British discreet and inconspicuous, the Russians discreet and conspicuous, the Americans crewcut, bow-tied and well-scrubbed.

Because the cagey Europeans had got first attention at the best hotels and villas, the U.S. was hard-pressed to find quarters for its delegation. Not until the middle of last week did President Eisenhower have a place to lay his head on the summit. Then Mme. Andre Firmenich, Scottish wife of a Swiss millionaire perfume-maker, consented to rent her 15 room Chateau du Creux de Genthod because "we could hardly refuse to offer it to the President."

There was an air of concord throughout Geneva: experienced old Police Chief Charles Knecht (who has shaken the hands of a long line of grey statesmen who failed to make peace in his city) decided that around the lakeside villas of the Big Four "barbed wire will not be necessary."

No Impending Collapse. As they made their preparations, the statesmen publicly pondered what they would talk about on the summit, and why they were going at all.

"Equal to equal," was the way Russia's Boss Khrushchev described the climate of the summit. "We are not going to Geneva with broken legs" (see FOREIGN NEWS). At his weekly press conference, President Eisenhower responded: "So far as I know there is no individual in the Government that has ever said that the Russians . . . are coming to any conference weak. Of course we recognize their great military strength ..."

But two days later the House Appropriations Committee inconveniently released previously secret testimony, delivered a month before by John Foster Dulles. Testifying on the reasons for the new Soviet amiability, Dulles said that the Russians "have been constantly hoping and expecting our economy was going to collapse in some way, due to what they regard as inherent defects in the capitalist system ... It has been their system that is on the point of collapsing." Some newspapers, e.g., the widely read New York Times, at once pounced on the word collapse and upon John Foster Dulles. The White House promptly explained that the President and his Secretary of State were not feuding; what Dulles had said was merely a restatement of the U.S. position that the Soviet Union has troubles at home and is "overextended." Dulles, as his full testimony showed, was not predicting any imminent collapse.

The debate about the Soviet Union's strength or weakness was vitally important. The French and British were insisting that the Russians indeed will be negotiating from equality. Conceding the strength of the Red Army and the Red H-bomb, the U.S. nonetheless replies that the Russians are talking peace because they have to. To support this view, the U.S. cites the instability of the Communist dictatorship, the discontent of the satellites, the demands of hungry and aggressive Red China, the slump of Russian agriculture.

Last week the U.S. got some more solid documentation for its thesis: the latest report of Foreign Operations Administrator Stassen disclosed that exports of grain to the West from the grain-rich Communist "breadbasket of Europe" fell off from 2,875,000 tons to 1,256,000 tons between 1952 and 1954, and that during the hungry fall of 1954 the Communists were compelled to import grain from the West.

Behind the U.S. position was the firm conviction that the West does not need to trade concession for concession with Bulganin at Geneva. By granting important concessions, e.g., allowing strategic trade with the Soviet Union, the West might well be strengthening the Russians and removing their need to be peaceful.

Hope, Not Expectation. As the summit was approached, the men who will meet there were clarifying their objectives (see box). Said the Soviet Union's Bulganin: "The lessening of tension should be the aim of this conference." Said Britain's Sir Anthony Eden: "It is reasonable to look for real, if modest, progress." The President of the U.S. was more cautious. "We ... go there with very hopeful attitudes," said Dwight Eisenhower, "but that hope has got to have greater food on which to nourish itself before it can become anything like expectation."

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