P. S. to Teheran

Last week's crudest anti-Willkie story appeared in Moscow.

In the New York Times Magazine of Jan. 2, Wendell Willkie had assured "would-be Republican leaders" that Mr. Stalin, an acquaintance he had met on his travels, might listen carefulhy to the kind advice of proved friends; but "when he sees reactionary Democrats or ambitious Republicans stirring up suspicion and hatred toward Russia, he is not at all likely to be affected by American arguments."

Moscow's Pravda, over whose editorial attitude Joseph Stalin reputedly has considerable control, responded to Mr. Willkie's homily with the choicest selection from a Bolshevik's polemical dictionary. "Willkie Is Stirring the Waters" was the title of Pravda's prominently displayed blast. It accused "Mr. Willkie, as an obedient speaking-trumpet," of "reproducing the suspicious cries of the reactionary groups [in the U.S.] which are afraid of a victorious movement forward of the Red Army and the Allied Armies." In Willkie's brief for wholehearted cooperation with Russia, based on "simple American common sense," Pravda discovered "a rotten smell of familiar anti-Soviet slanders designed to cause mistrust toward the Soviet Union."

In New York, Wendell Willkie was about as stunned as the editor of the Communist Daily Worker, who had volunteered that "all antifascists will welcome Wendell Willkie's article" -- just 24 hours before Joseph Stalin, a well-known anti fascist, most decidedly did not. Mr. Willkie had no comment.

Others had. Passionate Internationalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer, for instance, who last February had resigned from his job as deputy director of OWI to conduct an uninhibited newspaper column on world affairs, submitted the hottest : "This Pravda piece means simply the breakdown of Anglo-American diplomacy." And the Moscow edict may indeed have been a unilateral P.S. to the Teheran communi que.

Polish Shadows. What seemed to have spoiled a beautiful friendship was Mr. Willkie's very tactfully expressed concern over the eventual fate of Poland and the Baltic nations (see p. 18). Proclaimed Pravda with an air of angry finality: "The question of the near Baltic republics is an internal affair of the U.S.S.R." And: "In respect to Finland and Poland . . . the Soviet Union will be able to get an agreement with them itself and does not need the help of Mr. Willkie." But what about the help of Mr. Roosevelt? Perhaps Stalin, shouting at a Presidential candidate, wanted also to be heard by the President of the U.S. A few weeks after Teheran, Soviet Russia had served gruff notice that the friendliest attempt to interfere with her unilateral decisions about the fate of Eastern Europe -- or even to discuss them -- would be resented.

To the U.S. people the Moscow explosion was more than a possible argument in a political debate. If there is one thing all U.S. citizens could accept as the issue of this war, it is the notion that Law and not Force should regulate international relations. Even so, last week no U.S. citizen, even among Polish immigrants, would have advocated serious U.S. commitments to correct the Russo-Polish border this way or another. But many Americans felt that Stalin's P.S. to Teheran was quite a mortgage on the desired future of U.S.Russian friendship.

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