Question of Faith

On the floor of the Senate one day last week Ohio Democrat Frank Lausche recalled a luncheon given by the Foreign Relations Committee in honor of the U.S.S.R.'s visiting First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan. The questioning, led by Lausche, turned to the crash of an off-course U.S. Air Force C-130 transport in Soviet Armenia last September; Lausche doubted the Soviets' insistence that they knew nothing about eleven crewmen still unaccounted for. Mikoyan looked Lausche in the eye and said: "You have no faith in us." Last week the State Department put out a tape-recorded transcript (see Foreign Relations) that proved again and unforgettably that Communists give words a special meaning of their own. The Kremlin had denied that the C-130 had been shot down. But the transcript was the sound of Soviet jet pilots gabbing excitedly to each other by radio as they shot down that same unarmed C-130

At the Communist Party's 21st Congress in Moscow last week, Nikita Khrushchev pleaded for a "thaw" in the cold war based upon mutual good faith. The evidence of good faith, by his standards, was his invitation to President Eisenhower to visit the U.S.S.R. The evidence of his true intent was his attack on U.S. leaders as "merchants of death," his warning to U.S. allies that they are making their countries potential Russian targets by harboring U.S. bases. The point was made doubly clear by the boast of Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky (see FOREIGN NEWS) that U.S.S.R. missiles could strike anywhere on earth, and that U.S. missiles were "too short."

By contrast, the Western notion of good faith was symbolized at West Germany's Cologne-Bonn airport when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, en route from successful visits to London and Paris, was personally welcomed by West Germany's rocklike Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Said Dulles warmly: "It is not necessary to re-examine the fundamentals. They are fixed, solid and unshaken." The crucial point: whatever the "tactical flexibility" deployed for the inevitable Big Four talks on Germany this spring, the West is still fixed, solid and unshaken on the basic proposition that to Communism there is no truth, and faith can be extended only to agreements that can be checked, patrolled and examined every step of the way.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.