Flashes of Light

This week, President Harry Truman gravely confirmed the bleak facts of mounting tension between the U.S. and Soviet Russia. He summoned a special joint session of Congress to hear a report from him in person on the critical foreign situation.

A few hours before the announcement came from the White House, Secretary of State George Marshall had met behind closed doors with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Said Marshall: "The hour is far more fateful now than it was a year ago. By intimidation, fraud and terror, Communist regimes have been imposed upon Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Totalitarian control has been tightened in other countries of Eastern Europe, and these states have been linked together in a network of alliances. Other European peoples face a similar threat."

All last week in the halls of Congress, on the street corners, U.S. citizens had begun to talk about the possibility of war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

In Washington, Administration officials spoke in tones of unmistakable concern. At a press conference in the State Department's second-floor auditorium, a sober Secretary of State told newsmen that the situation was "very, very serious." Next night, before the Federal Council of Churches in the echoing Gothic nave of Washington's great unfinished cathedral, the Secretary repeated his warnings.

This time the foremost Republican student of foreign affairs, John Foster Dulles, joined in solemn discussion of the danger. The U.S., Dulles told the audience, must beware of any tendency to "become panicky and strike out violently." At the same time, he said, the U.S. must not "become fascinated, as by the gaze of a serpent, and become paralyzed into inaction lest the least movement might lead Russia to strike." At the White House the same day, President Truman admitted that his hopes for peace had been shaken in the past year. Then he carefully added: "I still believe we can get world peace. We must have it because we can't afford to destroy the whole world in another war."

There were demands for energetic action. One voice raised was that of ex-Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes. He urged immediate re-enactment of Selective Service, the building of a powerful new Air Force, a flat declaration to the Russians that the U.S. would act immediately in the event of further aggression. Cried Byrnes: "Are we prepared to meet a world crisis? I say we are not."

Were things suddenly as black as they seemed to be? New York Timesman James Reston gave an answer that summed up the feelings of many a U.S. citizen. "We have been walking in darkness, if not in danger for a long time," he wrote. "The Communist triumph in Prague and the sudden death of Jan Masaryk were merely flashes of light that showed us how dark were the skies over central and eastern Europe."

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