To Hearten the Lionhearted

Nowhere during his twelve-day global tour did Vice President Nixon see a more impressive gathering assembled to greet him than at journey's end last week. On hand, as Nixon's Air Force Constellation touched down at Washington's MATS Terminal after 27,477 miles, were State's Secretary John Foster Dulles and Under Secretary Herbert Hoover Jr., some 20 G.O.P. Senators and Representatives marshaled by Senate Minority Leader Bill Knowland. Republican National Chairman Len Hall, and diplomats from the six nations Nixon had visited on his voyage around the world. Travel-weary but smiling, Dick Nixon greeted old friends, but kept his conclusions to himself until he could fly to Gettysburg for a report to the man who had sent him hopping from the Philippines to Viet Nam, Formosa, Thailand, Pakistan and Turkey.

Behind him the Vice President left crackling reaction to his long-distance debate with neutralism's high priest, Pandit Nehru (see FOREIGN NEWS). In Manila, on the first stopover of his journey (TIME, July 16), Nixon had re-emphasized U.S. views on "the fearful risk" of neutralism and the wisdom of collective security. In London, 6,667 miles away, attending the conference of British Commonwealth Prime Ministers, Nehru's sensitive ears picked up a personal implication. Retorted he: Nixon-Dulles pronouncements on neutralism constituted neither a democratic nor a happy approach to good international relations.

"Very Antithesis." Informed of Nehru's comment on his arrival in Karachi, Pakistan, Nixon said: "I think if Mr. Nehru would read my speech carefully . . . [he] would find that my speech is the very antithesis of undemocratic procedures . . . My answer to Mr. Nehru would be that anyone who suggests that Communist assistance ... is not inconsistent with independence and freedom is not reading correctly the lessons of history."

In Washington, election-conscious Democrats were quick to jump into the debate. Tennessee's Estes Kefauver took the Senate floor to complain that the Nixon-Dulles policies may "drive India and the other nations of Asia who follow her lead into more open friendship with the Soviet system." Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey suggested that Nixon, in sounding off about Nehru in Karachi, had used "the wrong place to say the wrong thing at the wrong time." Although some State Department deskmen agreed that it was indelicate diplomacy to answer India's leader from the capital of his unfriendly neighbor, the Administration policymakers figured that Nixon had said substantially the right thing at the right time.

Duty & Dilemma. What Nixon had been specifically dispatched to say was a warm word of reassurance to U.S. allies in Asia and the Middle East. The U.S. is willing to help such Janus-like neutrals as Nehru, Nasser and Tito, who negotiate with East and West at the same time. But State is painfully aware of a basic dilemma: every dollar granted a freewheeling neutral irritates loyal allies who sometimes grouse that the two-face bargainers get the best of both worlds. The Vice President's job was to reassure such stout allies as the Philippines, Pakistan and Turkey that the lionhearted still receive the lion's share of U.S. assistance, that noisy neutrals do not do nearly so well. But as the free world's top power, the U.S. must still be allowed to deal in its own way with friend, neutral or enemy. Nixon's welcome at MATS Terminal was demonstration that the Administration considered his delicate mission nicely completed, deserving of a "well done."

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