The Re-Examinists

Secretary of State Acheson sighted along his nose at his Republican critics last week. Speaking to a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women, he said what he thought of such men as Robert Taft, who had had the temerity to suggest a "reexamination" of U.S. foreign policy (TIME, Nov. 20). Sniffed the Secretary:

"We are told [by Senator Taft that] it is very rude to refer to anybody as an isolationist . . . that all isolationists are extinct, that they are just as dead as the dodo. But there is a new species on the horizon and this new species I call the 're-examinist,' because the re-examinist says, 'I want to re-examine all our policies.' "

With the air of a man who was sure he had hold of a simile any schoolboy could understand, the Secretary continued:

He would compare the re-examinist to a farmer who pulled up his crops in the morning to see how they had done during the night, or to the man & wife who asked themselves each morning whether they were really in love. Such persons are isolationists after all, he said, because they were "incapable of constancy of purpose, incapable of leadership where mutual confidence is required."

Descending from the heights of pedantic semantics, the Secretary triumphantly reviewed U.S. foreign policy, past & present. "In the light of what I am saying," he demanded, "does it make sense to say, 'I want to re-examine our programs, I want to look at this all over again to see whether we should have started it'?"

The obvious answer came in an indignant chorus from Republicans: yes. And it came not only from those whom Acheson was trying to isolate as "isolationists." Vermont's Senator Ralph Flanders, a supporter of bipartisanship in foreign affairs, declared: "There is going to be a re-examination of foreign policy by Congress. That is simply one of the facts of life, and the Secretary of State had better take cognizance of it."

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