Ignorance & Error

Twenty-five years ago, in the magazine Foreign Affairs (see PRESS), the late Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, looked behind and ahead and made some observations on history. "There is a general conviction," he wrote, "that there has been something wrong about the conduct of diplomacy under which peoples have so often found themselves embarked in war without intending it."

Misrepresentation, thought Elihu Root, was at the bottom of such accidents--misrepresentation, and "ignorance and error [making] wild work with foreign relations. . . . Given the nature of man, war results from the spiritual condition that follows real or fancied injury or insult."

In 1922, with one big war over, the world looked like a "community of nations" to Elihu Root, and from that fact he took cautious hope. But even then hope had an acid taste: "The [world] community has grown just as communities of natural persons grow. . . . The neighbors generally must govern their conduct by the accepted standards or the community will break up.

"No nation whose citizens trade and travel--that is to say, no nation which lives in neighborhood with other nations --need consider whether or not it will be a member of the community of nations. It cannot help itself. It may be a good member or a bad member, but it is a member by reason of the simple fact of neighborhood life and intercourse. The Bolshevik rulers of Russia are illustrating this. They have been trying to repudiate all the obligations resulting from their country's membership in the community of nations, and one result is that intercourse is impossible."

Never did Root's words ring truer than they did last week. At the General Assembly of U.N. another Secretary of State, George Marshall, rose to launch a new debate on the course of history. The Soviets' Andrei Vishinsky answered him and (said the New York Times) "his vehemence left many of his listeners stunned and heartsick" (see INTERNATIONAL).

In the U.S., and in other free countries, men could hear and read the speeches of the ministers, and the press debate that they set off. In the U.S.S.R., where foreign intercourse is still impossible, men had no such unrestricted opportunity to reach for the truth. There Andrei Vishinsky's speech was the gospel: George Marshall's full text could not be heard or read. Beyond the Iron Curtain, misrepresentation, ignorance and error were making wild work with foreign relations.

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