Unprecedented Response

They came by assorted routes, but they came--in unprecedented numbers--to the same conclusion: President Eisenhower's speech was a significant and historic event of the cold war.

On Capitol Hill, men of both parties agreed with Texas' Lyndon Johnson, Senate minority leader: "The President is speaking with the true mind and heart of the American people." From far-off Singapore came the estimate of globe-trotting Adlai Stevenson: "An admirable . . . expression of the American position."

In Tito's Yugoslavia, 9,000 people queued up in front of the U.S. Information Service building for translations. Budapest's USIS office reported handing out translations at the rate of 50 an hour.

Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the speech "massive and magnificent" (though Labor's Nye Bevan, sharpest British critic of the U.S., dissented on the ground that Eisenhower was conceding "nothing at all"). In France, the non-Communist press applauded ("historic discourse . . . appeals to good will") while the Communist press struck the only sour note ("preachifying is mingled with . . . unreasonable demands"). In Italy, Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi called it "honest and vigorous." Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, coming to the end of his U.S. visit, was enthusiastic; so, back home, was his Socialist opponent, Eric Ollenhauer.

India's neutralist press generally groused about Western colonialism, but hailed Eisenhower's vision of a super Point Four program. In Formosa, part of the press wistfully wished that Eisenhower had mentioned Formosa; but all agreed that the President's address was farsighted. And in Russia, oddly enough, this firmest of U.S. policy pronouncements got one of the gentlest reviews Moscow has accorded a Western cold-war policy statement. Moscow papers printed selected extracts with no immediate recrimination.

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