Making Mischief or Peace

The statesmen of the three Western powers and Russia sat down once again this week at the rock on which their mighty but brief unity of wartime was shattered--the peace table. In Berlin, for the first time in five years, the U.S., British, French and Russian Foreign Ministers convened in formal session.

The Foreign Ministers met in the very room in the massive onetime Hohenzollern palace where the generals who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 were sentenced to hang on butcher's meathooks until dead. The ceiling above them bore a garish painting of the Last Judgment with a direful Gabriel blowing a gilded trumpet.

The prospects were like the setting--somber. Dulles, Eden and Bidault went to see whether Russia was ready to live more peaceably and honestly with the democratic world. But they were privately afraid that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had come to make not peace but more mischief.

At the opening session, France's small, sleepy-eyed Georges Bidault took the floor. "Clearly, our meeting should be devoted to European problems," said he. "We do not see why the fate of Austria should depend on that of Korea, why there should be established a link between the unification of Germany and a change in the international accords governing Communist China . . . Our debates should deal with concrete problems susceptible of quick solution."

Bidault ticked off the West's terms for a German settlement: 1) A go-ahead for West Germany's rearmament and her entrance into the family of European democracies through EDC.

2) Unification, but only if preceded by free all-German elections.

Britain's Anthony Eden calmly seconded Bidault's words. Then Vyacheslav Molotov took the floor. He started off with the discouraging demand that the Foreign Ministers first discuss an invitation to a conference to include Red China. While Eden made temples with his hands and Bidault toyed with his left ear, Molotov let loose a quiverful of barbs at the U.S. U.S. bases abroad have been built to menace the U.S.S.R., said he, but the plan is "doomed to inevitable failure"; the U.S. has committed "gross violations" of the Korean truce agreement; the U.S.

ban on strategic trade with the Communist world was harming mankind; the U.S. was inciting German militarists to fresh "aggression" in Europe.

Dulles, asking for time to compose his answer to Molotov's attack, passed his turn to speak until next day. "The problem now," said he, "is to get the conference back on the track of its main purpose, Germany and Austria." "A little bit disappointing," said the British. On that unpromising note, Berlin's first unpromising day ended.

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