The Clarifying Echoes

As they echoed around the world last week, two of the season's most quoted Christmas messages came through clearer than they had in the original.

In his Christmas greeting to the world, Pope Pius XII proposed a three-point disarmament plan, composed of: 1) banning nuclear tests, 2) renouncing the use of nuclear weapons, and 3) establishing an armament control system. After running the Pope's proposals through the propaganda mill, the Communist press exploited the first two points, which the Soviet Union favors, and ignored the third, which the U.S. considers essential. (Part of the U.S. press, by failing to read carefully the Pope's intricate prose, distorted his message almost as much as did the Communists.) Last week, the Voice of America acclaimed the Pope's plan and denounced the Communists for twisting it. The point hammered home by the Voice: Pope Pius clearly linked all three of his proposals, did not advance them separately. That put him in clear agreement with the Western position that renouncing nuclear tests and weapons is useless unless there is effective international control.

Also echoing and re-echoing was President Eisenhower's Christmas message to the nations behind the Iron Curtain, in which he said: "The American people recognize the trials under which you are suffering . . . and share your faith that right in the end will prevail to bring you once again among the free nations of the world." In Moscow, Communist Boss Nikita Khrushchev roared that the message violated the "Spirit of Geneva," was "crude interference" in the affairs of other nations (see FOREIGN NEWS).

In reply to Khrushchev, the White House pointedly repeated its Christmas wish of liberty to the Soviet Union's satellites. After talking with the President and the Secretary of State, Presidential News Secretary James Hagerty said: "It was made abundantly clear at Geneva to the Soviet rulers that the 'Spirit of Geneva' could not and did not involve any relaxing of the peaceful purpose of the United States to achieve liberty and justice for the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . The peaceful liberation of the captive peoples has been, is, and, until success is achieved, will continue to be a major goal of United States foreign policy."

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