Reading: Optimistic

Geneva, anticipated by some with too much hope and by others with too much fear, now belonged to history, or at least to the history books.

If Geneva was to be measured by the letter, nothing was agreed to there--only an agreement to discuss disagreements again in October.

But if Geneva was to be measured by the spirit, as all the participants insisted it should be, then quite a bit was achieved.

The Russians very evidently came to Geneva not to reach settlements, but to strike an attitude: the attitude of reasonable men willing to let bygones be bygones, even if most of the bygones they wanted overlooked were their own. They came asking for respectability. And they figured that they would get it merely by being there and showing themselves well-behaved. Thus the Russians could not lose. They had to give up nothing to get what they wanted. So they gave up nothing, and showed themselves amiable.

It was an approach that admirably matched the atmosphere of summer, 1955, a period of seeming calm which reflects not so much a great mass shifting of convictions as a universal exhaustion with crisis. The risk for the West in going to Geneva was never that of being trapped into a bad trade (the time was too short, the historical precedents too recent), but of being put in the wrong light. But at Geneva the West--and particularly Dwight Eisenhower--overleaped all that.

Instead of demanding, in a suspiciously carping voice, that the Russians prove themselves no longer bad, Eisenhower freely accepted their professions of meaning well, and only asked that they show themselves good. This proved harder.

Geneva's most dramatic moment was President Eisenhower's offer to trade military secrets and aerial surveillance with the Russians. It was one of those happy combinations of imagination and practicality that seize the moment. Russia's incapacity to answer it gave the West the psychological victory at Geneva.

But Geneva was more than a competition in public relations. It was a unique chance to assess those increasingly less mysterious Russians. It was a chance for the Russians themselves to come out into the sunlight: the world, as well as the Russians, gained by that. And it was a time of reading of intentions. The reading was optimistic. "There ain't going to be any war," proclaimed British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, arriving home. "A new era," said Russia's Bulganin. "There is evidence of new friendship in the world," said Eisenhower.

The fact is that all four powers shared one ambition at Geneva: to relax world tensions. No one of them was in position either to impose, or to make, major concessions, but they could agree to moderate their voices. In doing so, the West was not trusting in Russian smiles but measuring the need of the Russian leaders to lower the cold war's temperature. Not because the Russians said so, but because the West felt their circumstances compelled the Russians to mean it, the West concluded that the chances of a war started by the Russians is continuing to diminish. This was the reading of Geneva.

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