Anti-Auntie

James F. Byrnes was fed up too. With steady patience, the U.S. Secretary of State had listened to Foreign Minister Molotov's distortion of U.S. motives. He had watched poker-faced when Molotov (whom the British Foreign Office privately calls Aunt Molly) rudely bounced out to snub speeches he violently disapproved and with an expression of "the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of," sat them out in the corridor (see cut).

Last week Molotov bounced out again when Greece's Premier Constantin Tsaldaris addressed the Conference. The same day Molotov used the draft of the Italian peace treaty for a speech which undoubtedly pleased the Italian Communist Party (with whose Secretary, Palmiro Togliatti, Molotov had just been closeted), but pleased scarcely anybody else.

Completely ignoring the $900 million aid the U.S. has given Italy since 1943 and U.S. insistence that Russia scale down its Italian reparations demands, Molotov charged:

"Strong foreign states [i.e., the U.S. and Britain], which possess large amounts of capital together with the means to exert pressure . . . use these. . . in the economic enslavement of Italy by foreign trusts and cartels. . . Strong foreign states . . . still further enriched themselves during the war. . . "

"Provincial Prince." Up jumped Jimmy Byrnes and gave Aunt Molly a precise piece of his mind: "Repeated abuse and misrepresentation . . . have been leveled against America from this floor. . . . What great power enriched itself during the war? I know of none. . . . America seeks no territory and seeks no reparations. . . . The U.S. must also repudiate [Molotov's] suggestion . . . that the economic clauses proposed by the U.S. and based upon the principle of equality and most-favored-nation treatment are part of an effort to exploit the ex-enemy countries for the selfish advantage of the U.S. . . .

"Economic equality permits each nation to carry on its economic relations with others along lines of its own economic welfare. . . Would anyone suggest that [the ex-satellites], which were the principal objects of German economic penetration and encirclement, should . . . merely substitute for Germany some other country [i.e., Russia] upon which they would be almost entirely dependent for supplies and for markets? It is out of such arrangements, and not out of nondiscriminatory trade, that enslavement and exploitation arise."

Pravda hurried to Molotov's defense. Said the official organ of the Soviet Government: Byrnes is a "provincial prince" who "forgot he [was] not at a meeting in the State Department on the affairs of Panama and Honduras, where he could remove his coat and put his feet on the table."

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