"Their Situation Is Terrible"

This week in Washington a worried little group of Britons and Canadians sat down to discuss with their U.S. opposite numbers what measures could be taken to save Britain from economic disaster (see INTERNATIONAL). To much of the U.S., sunny and prosperous in the late summer, the British crisis had an unreal look to it. Many a citizen could only take it on faith that behind the talk of the dollar gap, Britain's inadequate production and devaluation of the pound lay a dire threat to the stability of the Western World. In Washington, where men faced one another across the conference tables, the crisis was closely documented in bushels of unhappy statistics.

Britain's team of Cripps & Bevin, sick men from a sick nation, had looked glum as they left for the U.S. The advance party of British experts, already on the scene, was cautiously tiptoeing around any controversy that might re-ignite any U.S. tempers. For their part, the U.S. planners were taking no chances that they might be accused of telling Britain how to run its own affairs. The uproar of angry criticism in the U.S. and British press had all but died away.

The U.S. welcome to the visitors was sympathetic but wary. In it was some of the exasperation of a man whose best friend is down on his luck: there was a readiness to help, a realization that the friend's desperate situation wasn't exactly, or entirely, his own fault--and some annoyance. Dwight Eisenhower, in a casual press-conference remark at a family reunion in St. Louis last week, caught some of that mood. Said he: "Their situation is terrible and they must have sympathy, but we must realize that we are not a bottomless pit."

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