The First Big Test

(See Cover)

After World War I, in the mirrored halls of Versailles, the world's statesmen, big & little, gathered to write what Woodrow Wilson hoped would be ''open covenants openly arrived at." The hope was chimerical. The Big Four fought in public; politicians from the small nations poisoned the air with claims and counterclaims. In the end, the covenants were not openly arrived at, and the covenants did not last.

This time the method and manner would be different. Would the results be different?

This week, in a long cream and gilt room of London's century-old, bombscarred Lancaster House, just west of St. James's Palace, the foreign ministers of the world's five great powers meet to begin writing the peace terms of World War II.

A long stream of carpenters, electricians and movers had worked long hours to put the magnificent house, once the residence of the Duke of Sutherland, into tiptop shape. Carpets were laid, a bar installed, and a brand-new international round table built--a plywood ring, 14 feet in diameter, set on brown varnished legs. Separate chambers were provided for each of the foreign ministers. Mr. Molotov had the most elegant: a paneled room with towering mirrors and gilt scrollwork which was once the Duchess of Sutherland's boudoir.

The conference sessions would be secret. The agenda would be limited. The ministers would not attempt to write the whole peace at one long, protracted sitting. They would take up a few problems at a time, take them home to their superiors and, perhaps, to their people for consultation.

Finally, they would present their findings to the United Nations for ratification, but that august body would largely be confronted by a fait-accompli. The ministers would then return to London for the next problems. Writing the peace might take months or possibly years.

The idea for this kind of peace conference, staged without pomp and with strictly limited membership, was an American idea. It was suggested at San Francisco by Assistant Secretary of State James C. Dunn, a State Department career man for 25 years. The suggestion was approved by President Truman, sold by him to Stalin and Attlee at Potsdam. It was eagerly snapped up by Secretary of State James Francis Byrnes, who knew instinctively that he would be thoroughly at home at a meeting where a few men could talk plainly behind closed doors. It was exactly what he had done for 24 years in the cloakrooms and conference chambers of Congress.

Strong Fusion. To London with Jimmy Byrnes, on the first sailing of the Queen Elizabeth since V-J day, went his wife, Maude; his closest adviser, Benjamin V. Cohen, the middle-aged wonder boy of the New Deal; Assistant Secretary Dunn, and a retinue of department specialists. Another notable member of the party was Manhattan Lawyer John Foster Dulles, the most eminent Republican foreign-affairs expert.

London would be Jimmy Byrnes's first big test. He would represent the most powerful nation of the world at the zenith of its influence. He would be the agent of a new President who had, in a few short months, injected a strong fusion of Realpolitik and plain dealing into U.S. foreign policy.

First order of business in London, after organizing formalities, would be the peace treaty with Italy. Second: the Balkans, with special attention to reorganization of Rumania's government. Third: discussion of a future provisional government in Germany. After that, Jimmy Byrnes would come home and report promptly to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--a promise he had made in his second press conference as Secretary of State. He would leave Assistant Secretary Dunn in London to discuss continuing international questions with the deputies of the other nations. The foreign ministers would meet again in a few months.

Neophyte? By last week South Carolina's Jimmy Byrnes had been Secretary of State just two months. There were some who still felt a little anxious about the U.S. being represented--and among all those experienced foreigners--by such a comparative neophyte. (Actually, only Molotov has had more experience; the Messrs. Bevin, Bidault and Wrang Shi-chieh are almost equally new to their tasks.) Although he had guided foreign policy bills through the Senate for F.D.R., Jimmy Byrnes's political life had largely been spent on domestic affairs. He had gone to Europe a dozen or so times, mostly for pleasure. He had been to the Orient once, for two months. And he has none of the outward habits and manners of the traditional diplomat.

But Jimmy Byrnes had one great asset. Just as in future years military tactics and strategy will be judged on whether they are pre-or-post Hiroshima, so diplomatic dealings today are dated backward & forward from Yalta. That was the key conference of World War II. Jimmy Byrnes was not only there; he was therewith pad & pencil in hand. His shorthand notes are still the best record--in the U.S., at least--of what went on at the Czar's Palace in the Crimea.

The Irishman. Another asset in Jimmy Byrnes's favor is his thorough knowledge of the workings of the U.S. Government. He is one of the few men in history who has held high office in all its three branches. Born to poverty, on the wrong end of Charleston's King Street, he ran errands for his widowed mother (a seamstress), studied shorthand, learned to know politicians as a court reporter.

Since then he has successively been Congressman (14 years), Senator (10 years), Supreme Court Justice (16 months), Economic Stabilizer (8 months), and War Mobilizer (22 months). As a Congressman he learned the ropes on the Appropriations Committee. In the Senate, he became the de facto leader, a shrewd trader who knew the likes and prejudices of his colleagues by heart. He was a Roosevelt-before-Chicago man; he supported the New Deal lock, stock & barrel, except for those measures which clashed with his conservative, Southern-blooded, economic beliefs.

On the Supreme Court he surprised everyone by his capacity for work, startled no one by his stubborn insistence on interpreting the will of Congress as the law of the land. As War Mobilizer he had a thankless job which gave him all of the grief of running a war and none of the glory. He stuck it out as long as he could.

Byrnes is a thoroughgoing Irish extrovert. Common sense is his guide; compromise is his method. He has never made any money; his wants are few (he once described them as "two tailor-made suits a year, three meals a day, and a reasonable amount of good liquor"). He is without airs, without bluff, and without any talent or taste for high society. But he has a courtly, Southern manner, and intense ambition. He is the man who would be President if Harry Truman died.

Topside Shake-Up. But for the accident of Franklin Roosevelt's death, Byrnes would now be a lawyer in Spartanburg, S.C. (pop. 32,249). He had been passed over for the Vice Presidency at Chicago; he had been passed over again for Secretary of State when Ed Stettinius got the job. Shortly after Yalta, tired and worn out, disgusted and fed up, Byrnes quit as War Mobilizer. But on the second day of the Truman Administration he was back at the White House, conferring with the man whom he had known in the Senate. He lay low during San Francisco, but after it was over he got the job which everybody had prophesied he would.

Ed Stettinius had redecorated the high-ceilinged walls and put two telephones in the Secretary's private bathroom. Jimmy Byrnes left the old, grey pile of masonry on Pennsylvania Avenue alone, but he changed the topside of the staff. It is now extraordinarily varied.

At the top is Under Secretary Dean G. Acheson of Groton and Yale, an impeccable lawyer, a man with an elastic mind, a political middle-of-the-roader. Next comes Counselor Ben Cohen, of the University of Chicago and Harvard, a thinker, a man of strong ideology (New Deal), a shy, unobtrusive worker who looks and acts more like a gentle professor than a man who has drafted most of the important new laws of the last decade.

Third of the top triumvirate is Assistant Secretary Dunn, a man of two reputations. Inside the Department he is known and admired for his thorough knowledge of Department procedure. Many on the outside consider him a man who married wealth (Armour) and adopted arch-conservative views. Jimmy Byrnes has found his departmental knowledge invaluable. (At a Potsdam session one day, Molotov and Eden suddenly began talking about Varkiza, the Greek village where the armistice in the civil war was signed. Lost in a fog, Jimmy Byrnes turned to Jimmy Dunn and blurted: "What the hell is Varkiza?" Jimmy Dunn was able to tell him.)

Besides Dunn, the only other member of Ed Stettinius' team whom Byrnes kept in his old job was Assistant Secretary Will Clayton, an ex-cotton broker, millionaire, friend of Jesse Jones, and shrewd economic horse trader currently negotiating postwar loans with the British (see INTERNATIONAL). For Assistant Secretary in charge of Latin American affairs, he picked barrel-shaped Spruille Braden, who talked tough to the Argentines. For Assistant Secretary in charge of administration he chose 33-year-old Colonel Frank McCarthy, fresh off General Marshall's staff.

Last week Secretary Byrnes completed his team of eight. He elevated his old friend and Spartanburg law partner, Donald Russell, to an Assistant Secretaryship, put him temporarily in charge of liaison with Congress. For Assistant Secretary in charge of press and cultural relations, he came up with a surprise: glib, smart William B. Benton, Yaleman, millionaire, onetime Manhattan adman (Benton & Bowles), vice president of the University of Chicago, chairman of the board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vice chairman of the Committee for Economic Development, and a man of continuing business interests (Muzak).

The Policy. These are the men who will help Jimmy Byrnes shape U.S. foreign policy. During the war years, U.S. policy had often been secretive, opportunistic, sometimes apparently nonexistent. Now it was coming clearer.

In its broad outlines, it has two cardinal points: 1) U.S. leadership in world cooperation ; 2) safeguarding of U.S. interests --to the point of being blunt and even abrupt, as in the case of Lend-Lease termination. Some specifics: P: Beyond bases necessary for its defense, the U.S. has no territorial objectives outside its boundaries. But it does want the right to trade freely, and it wants to see all nations enjoy representative democratic government.

P: The U.S. has and wants no quarrel with Russia. But the U.S. will require the Soviet Union to live up to the letter of all international agreements--as the U.S. will require of itself and all other nations.

P: The U.S. will do what it can, but on a limited, no-blank-check basis, to help its war allies rebuild their economies.

P: The U.S. is committed, along with Russia and Britain, to the punishment and control of Germany and Japan until all danger of their making war again has passed.

P: The U.S. is as determined as is the Soviet Union to have a voice in the settlement of all international problems.

Some parts of this policy had been formulated and laid down long before Harry Truman and Jimmy Byrnes took office. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a hand in its beginnings; so did Cordell Hull and Ed Stettinius. But it was a complete reversal of U.S. policy as it had been at the end of World War I. Harry Truman and Jimmy Byrnes know, as well as most of the U.S., that in the Atomic Age it is either one world or no world at all.

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