Report on Suez

While party politics popped behind them, a handful of Democratic members of Congress reluctantly left their Chicago meetings early this week, boarded an Air Force plane sent to fetch them and flew to Washington for a special briefing on U.S. attitudes on the world's gravest international problem. At the White House, they were ushered into the Cabinet Room for an 80-minute bipartisan discussion about the Suez Canal.

In summoning House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Minority Leader Joe Martin, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, Minority Leader William Knowland and foreign relations leaders in both houses, the President sought no commitments. He had no immediate plan to call a special session of Congress during its pre-election recess. Instead, the group had been assembled to hear the issues discussed by John Foster Dulles before he flew to London for this week's Suez conference, and to get some idea of how grave the situation is.

Though Britain and France had alerted naval vessels, and Britain had sent troops winging into the Mediterranean area for a show of force against Egypt's Nasser, the U.S. does not want to use troops in a Suez flare-up, instead has been busy cautioning impatient allies and seeking peaceful routes toward settlement. The policy had for the moment succeeded; when the 22 nations sit down to discuss the Suez, there would be less emphasis on threats, more on finding a base for negotiations, including the adept suggestions this week of Gamal Nasser himself (see FOREIGN NEWS). Though he had small hope of a real decision in London, Dulles saw the conference there as at least an important forum of free discussion. Yet neither the U.S. nor any other nation attending seemed able to offer a next step if the conference failed.

Heading back to the caucus rooms in Chicago or their bailiwicks across the U.S., the 22 legislators attending the briefing had one important point to remember. Though the U.S., as President Eisenhower had expressed it at his press conference last week, hopes that "good sense will prevail," there was grave danger that it might not. And if peaceful approaches do not resolve the Suez crisis, the nation--politics-happy Democrats and Republicans included--might be faced squarely with the necessity of surveying sterner measures.

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