Last Words

The story of the greatest political betrayal of recent times promised to become an international bestseller last week (in all but Communist countries, where it was barely mentioned, and then only in a denunciatory way). A prepublication print order of 50,000 copies at $2 was already selling fast.

Although the 150,000-word report was primarily concerned with Soviet military intervention in Hungary, under the terms of the committee's appointment last January, it was a lucid, balanced, but devastating exposition of every phase of the Hungarian Revolution arid its origins.

The five authors of the report came from widely separated parts of the world and had been educated in profoundly different cultures, but they had one thing in common--they were all from what the U.N. calls "small nations": Australia, Ceylon, Denmark, Tunisia and Uruguay. The bulk of the work of preparing the report fell on the shoulders of Keith Shann, able young (39) Australian statistician-turned-diplomat, who on the day of publication flew back to his post as Australian Ambassador in Manila. To Shann's credit, he maintained a detached attitude in the presentation of fact and conclusions, but it is probably not without certain feeling that he and his fellow "small nations" print Premier Nagy's last broadcast words: "I should like in these last moments to ask the leaders of the Revolution, if they can, to leave the country. . . They should turn to all the peoples of the world for help and explain that today it is Hungary and tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, it will be the turn of other countries because the imperialism of Moscow does not know borders, and is only trying to play for time."

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