One Man's Doubt

Bob Taft had been running a slight temperature for a month, and he had severe pain in his right hip. After four days in the Army's Walter Reed Hospital, he flew home to Cincinnati and checked in at Holmes Hospital. There, one evening last week, he wrapped a blue robe around his bright yellow pajamas and dictated a speech. The next night, in the brilliant Hall of Mirrors of Cincinnati's Netherland Plaza hotel, Taft's second son, Lawyer Robert Taft Jr., stepped before a dinner of the National Conference of Christians & Jews and read his father's text. The words were scarcely out of young Bob's mouth before there was explosive reaction from all around the world.

"Abandon Any Idea." The excitement (see above) centered on part of what Senate Majority Leader Taft wrote about the United Nations and its role in Korea. Said he: "I believe we might as well forget the United Nations as far as the Korean war is concerned. I think we should do our best now to negotiate this truce, and if we fail, then let England and our other allies know that we are withdrawing from all further peace negotiations in Korea . . . It seems to me that from the beginning we should have insisted on a general peace negotiation with China, including a unification of Korea under free Koreans, and a pledge against further expansion in Southeast Asia.

"If we once make this present truce, no matter what we put in the agreement about further negotiations for a united Korea, it is no more likely to occur than a united Germany . . . I believe we might as well abandon any idea of working with the United Nations in the East and reserve to ourselves a completely free hand."

Events in Korea and elsewhere proved that the U.N. is not an effective force to deal with real aggression. The U.S. and its European allies, he believed, recognized the U.N.'s weakness when they established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--actually, if not legally--outside the U.N.

"I Do Doubt." Taft was distinctly not recommending that the U.S. completely abandon the United Nations. One section of his speech was a clear, if limited, endorsement of the U.N.: "I believe in the United Nations myself . . . It does have many methods by which, through peaceful persuasion, it can deter and prevent war. It has important agencies which are concerned with the improvement of conditions throughout the world."

Taft repeated his old reservation about basic U.S. policy: "The present Administration has the job of trying to maintain [a] worldwide alliance against Soviet Russia. I hope that it can be carried through, and only raise here the doubt as to whether it is in fact possible over any long period of years . . . It is pretty hard for the United States to claim the right to cut off trade channels [with Communist nations] which have existed for centuries. I have no doubt about the desirability of the policy . . . but I do doubt its possibility."

Taft's speech certainly was not an expression of the Eisenhower Administration's policy, nor was it a break with the Administration. He took pains to say that Dwight Eisenhower's foreign policy makers were doing their best "to meet what seems to me the most difficult problems of foreign policy the United States has ever faced." Perhaps the basic reason why the speech caused so much furor was that, since last Jan. 20, Taft has carefully restrained himself from sounding off publicly on his own views, has devoted his energies to being a skillful majority leader.

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