Traveler's Tale

Philip Jessup, who went to the Far East in December by slow boat, had hurriedly flown home. The U.S.'s long-nosed, soft-eyed roving ambassador had traveled 26,000 miles, looked in on a dozen Asiatic countries. He had nothing to say about his trip for publication. But last week, by obvious coincidence, the newspapers car ried reports about the Far East emanating from a "well-traveled source."

What the unnamed "traveler" reported was that south and east Asia, populated by more than one-fourth of the people in the world, was ripe for a Communist har vesting unless the U.S. bestirred itself.

In Korea, Indo-China, Malaya and Burma, the traveler said, the cold war was "hot." Mao Tse-tung's Peking government was using Hitler's technique--threatening reprisals against relatives in China unless Chinese in other Asiatic countries showed their loyalty to the Reds. The massing of Red troops along Asiatic borders was often enough to paralyze any incipient anti-Communist policy. Transplanted Chinese populations, Chinese-language newspapers, even wealthy Chinese were going over to Communism in wholesale lots.

The Weak Sisters. The Asiatic countries themselves--most of them "weak sisters"--showed little interest in democracy.

Theirs was a "bandwagon kind of thinking.". Caught between East & West, they were preoccupied with one neck-saving question: "Who's going to win?"

In Formosa, the traveler reported, he had found Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government still riddled with the same old feuds and mutual distrusts. He had found the U.S.-backed government of Southern Korea dictatorial and incompetent; Indonesia, harboring 2,000,000 Chinese, threatened by inflation, pervaded by a sense of hopelessness; the Philippines in economic difficulties, harassed by Red guerrillas.

He had found India and Pakistan, suspicious of the U.S., facing each other with explosive hate. If war broke out there, "the fat would be in the fire." Burma, he found, lived in fear of what could happen on her frontier zone. Siam (see cover), with 3,000,000 Chinese, was "more like a willow than an oak."

The Loud Ties. The key spot and the most dangerous one was Indo-China. On its northern border stood Mao Tse-tung's troops, giving encouragement to the guer rilla chief, Ho Chi Minh. Indo-China was coveted by the Reds not alone for its strategic advantage. Mao Tse-tung, faced with famine at home, had his eyes on IndoChina's spreading fields of rice. But in Indo-China, the traveler thought, there was also some cause for optimism. Emperor Bao Dai, despite his passion for "sports coats and loud neckties," was intelligent and an energetic leader. So far, with the aid of 130,000 French troops, he had forestalled internal collapse.

The 620 Million People. The well-traveled source thought there was some hope in the traditional fear and dislike of Southeast Asiatics for the Chinese, and their hostility toward Communist doctrines. The U.S., he thought, could step up anti-Communist propaganda. He saw no point in a Marshall Plan for Asia, for he found no disposition on the part of 620 million people--white, brown, yellow and black--to unite. But he did favor some economic aid through the President's Point Four program, and military aid to combat guerrillas with guerrilla-like counterattacks.

Except. in his proposition that the U.S. might profit by Southeast Asia's anti-Chinese feelings--a policy that could backfire as disastrously as any other antinational or anti-racial approach--the traveler seemed to have had his eyes open. The discouraging impression which the traveler left was that it was impossible to outline a decisive program for the containment of Communism in Asia. The U.S. was still not far away from the handwringing stand it held while the Communists in China gave the Western world its most disastrous defeat in the cold war.

This week, behind closed doors, Jessup will report to members of the foreign affairs committees of both houses.

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