Nice Friend

The Administration's long-standing explanation for the secret Yalta deal was not a pretty story, but it was nicely detailed. Yalta was pictured in subsequent official communiques and speeches as the place where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, sitting together as brotherly men concerned with establishing enduring world peace, drew the blueprint for the United Nations. Stalin, a friendly fellow at heart, needed a little encouragement to make sure that he would help out in the war against Japan. Hence the West's generosity* at Yalta to the U.S.S.R.

This week Dean Acheson dropped a bombshell--an explanation of Yalta that was a strange and startling contradiction of the "brotherly-fellows" theme of the older story. "The grave danger," said Acheson, ". . . was that [the Russians] would really wait until the [Pacific] war was over and until we had expended our effort and blood to win the war, and [then] they would come in and do what they wished.

"Unquestionably, the Russians had it in their power not only to take what was conceded to them but much more besides ... so that this agreement gave them the basis for a legal claim to something considerably less than they might have taken without a legal claim."

Where this left the old story Dean Acheson did not say. And for the moment, at least, the committee seemed too startled at his revelation to decide who had the truth--Dean Acheson on June 4, 1951, or Roosevelt, Churchill & Co. in the piping, peace-planning days of 1945.

*Which gave Russia the southern part of Sakhalin Island and all the Kuriles, plus control of Port Arthur and Dairen and of the strategically invaluable railroad across Manchuria.

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