It Might As Well Be June

Sitting before her television set one day last week, Mrs. Luke Choplin of Independence, Mo. watched with fascination as Prince Rainier took Grace Kelly for his bride. While Mrs. Choplin kept her eye on far-off Monaco, linemen toiled away equipping her house with extra telephone wires to accommodate a New York Times reporter who had arranged to use the Choplin home as a communications center on Margaret Truman's wedding day.

Between Grace on TV and Margaret over those telephone lines, Mrs. Choplin might almost as well have passed up the newspapers, for last week's headlines--even the non-nuptial ones--seemed to be primarily dedicated to the proposition that it might as well be June. In Manhattan World Bank President Eugene Black, who calls himself a conservative banker "committed to the future," sunnily predicted that the national incomes of the U.S. and Western European nations would double "in just over 20 years." In the Middle East Egypt's aggressive Prime Minister Nasser and Israel's combative Ben-Gurion both promised U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold to enforce a ceasefire along the Gaza strip and the Negev. In London the touring Russians, Khrushchev and Bulganin (or Bim and Bom, in the oblique language of Russian jokesters), got the kind of social, personal and diplomatic chill that only the British can apply (see FOREIGN NEWS).

All in all, the honeymoon mood got so overpowering that it was hard to believe it really wasn't June until Khrushchev genially informed his British hosts that a Russian Tupolev jet transport "covers the distance from Moscow to London in three and a half hours," and coupled this statement with pointed reminders of the existence of hydrogen bombs and intercontinental guided missiles. Just about then, everyone remembered that it really was still April--which Poet T. S. Eliot long ago called the "cruellest month."

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