Middle East Debate (Contd.)

Amid foot stamping, cheers and a few muted boos, the House of Representatives last week approved the Eisenhower Middle East doctrine by 355 votes to 61 (35 Democrats, 26 Republicans'). "House Joint Resolution 117 simply means," accurately explained Ohio's Republican Frances Bolton during the debate, "that we will help the people of the general area of the Middle East stop Communist invasion, if requested, and will help them help themselves economically, also if requested.'' And although she was highly mindful of the duty of Congress to clarify and inquire and judge, "I am just not interested in trying to find out how many angels can dance on the point of a pin."

Deflected Delay. In the opposite wing of the Capitol, however, the senatorial angels were still busily pirouetting. "I don't think we've covered much new ground," sighed one State Department official wearily after Secretary of State Dulles finished another day of fending off his critics on the 30-man combined Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. At one point Arkansas' Bill Fulbright, who had put the stock market into a tail spin by his hazy handling of the 1955 financial hearings, even wanted to let the Eisenhower doctrine and the crisis go hang while he investigated U.S. Middle East policy all the way back to 1952.

Eventually Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson worked out an agreement acceptable to the Fulbright boys and the Republican leadership whereby the Senate would probe Middle East policy since Jan. 1, 1946--but only after action had been taken on the President's urgent requests for authority to act.

Reflected Bitterness. During debate on the Senate floor, Montana's able Democratic Whip Mike Mansfield made a noble effort to raise Democratic argument to a constructive level. He proposed that the Congress as well as the Executive should not only make clear that the U.S. will oppose Communist aggression in the Middle East "within our constitutional processes," but that the U.S. will give some long-range direction to its foreign aid program, support U.N. police action in the Middle East, and redouble its efforts through the U.N. "to curb" Soviet and other arms traffic in the area. Reflecting bitterness over the break with Britain and France over Suez, Mansfield noted: "We are not using our influence wisely when we pursue in the Middle East what appears to be not a policy of isolation, not a policy of internationalism, but a policy of isolated internationalism."

But by talking as if the U.S. and not the British-French were responsible for the Suez catastrophe when the U.S. had striven desperately to prevent it, even Mike Mansfield left himself open to the counterblast of Wisconsin's Alex Wiley that the patently anti-Dulles nature of the stalling on the crisis was "blatant, befuddled badgering," and that the U.S. people would so judge it.

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