Shadow of the Red Dragon

An urgent call from Washington brought Speaker Joe Martin flying down from Massachusetts in a hurry. Senator Styles Bridges, conducting the opening hearings of his investigation into Kaiser-Frazer's C-119 contract (see BUSINESS), left his gavel with Vermonter Ralph Flanders and rushed off to the White House. President Eisenhower received Martin, Bridges and seven other Republican House and Senate leaders in the Cabinet Room. He had called them together, he explained, to dis cuss a rider which the Senate Appropriations Committee had unexpectedly at tached to the $1.1 billion appropriation for the Departments of State, Justice and Commerce. The rider proclaimed that, if any aggressor government, i.e., Communist China, should be admitted to the United Nations, the U.S. would forthwith cut off all financial support for U.N.

Bad Precedent. Such a manifesto, the President explained, amounted to a U.S. threat to friends and foes alike in the U.N. Cutting off funds, moreover, would be tantamount to U.S. withdrawal from the world organization, a precipitate act which might destroy the U.N. It might establish a bad precedent, too: other nations could use the same threat as a sort of ex-officio veto power to hamstring the U.N. And, more immediately important, the timing of the resolution was bad, might easily do damage to the tense Korean truce talks.

In place of the rider, Eisenhower volunteered a personal pledge: his Administration would not only vote against the admission of Red China to the U.N., but would actively oppose its admission.* That did the trick. Next day Senate leaders substituted a resolution virtually the same as one adopted by the Senate two years ago: "It is the sense of the Congress that the Communist Chinese government should not be admitted to membership in the United Nations as a representative of China." The resolution passed the Senate unanimously, endorsed by the whole sweep of senatorial persuasion, from Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey to Illinois' Everett Dirksen.

A Few Words. The President's pledge, and the Senate's resolution, put the U.S. on record on the question of U.N. membership for Red China. But they did nothing to ease the tensions between the U.S. and its allies. Last week, in the wake of the President's congressional crisis, Britain's U.N. Delegate Sir Gladwyn Jebb took it upon himself to say a few words on the subject for the edification of the graduating class at Haverford College. Said Jebb: "It is surely not very logical to accept the presence in the U.N. of the Soviet Union, while refusing even to contemplate at any time the presence there ... of the government, which does in fact, whether we like it or not, control the whole mainland of China."

Actually, a softer approach to Red Chinese membership in the U.N. has been indicated in the past by at least one member of the Eisenhower Administration. Wrote John Foster Dulles in his book, War or Peace: "If the Communist government of China in fact proves its ability to govern China without serious domestic resistance, then it, too, should be admitted to the United Nations." That, however, was written more than three years ago--before the Chinese Reds swarmed into the Korean war. Last week it was plain that the U.S. position was quite different.

* But leaving unclear whether the U.S., as a permanent member of the Security Council, would veto Red China's admission.

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