Mission Accomplished?

"Jaw, jaw is better than war, war," Sir Winston Churchill once said. This maxim last week guided one of his successors in office, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, as well as the crowd that welcomed Macmillan home from his unsuccessful mission to Moscow.

The British had at first been hurt, angered and resentful at Khrushchev's "toothache snub" of Macmillan, and at the brutal cold-war speech Khrushchev delivered in Macmillan's temporary absence from Moscow (TIME, March 9). Learning of the world's displeasure at his remarks. Khrushchev had jauntily waved them aside as "only an electioneering speech."* In the final days of Macmillan's visit, the Russians turned mellow again. "You know our point of view, we know yours," said Khrushchev to Macmillan as they parted.

Not by Force Alone. The British credited Khrushchev's change of manner to Macmillan's unruffled stand. The British have always insisted that they are good at this kind of talking, and Macmillan, fighting flu internally and Nikita's slings from without, went through his ordeal with unflagging style. In private he firmly conveyed to the Soviet leader the danger of misunderstanding the West's determination to remain in Berlin. In public he answered Khrushchev's call for a non-aggression pact by proposing that "our disputes should be settled by negotiation and not by force." In the final communique his aides put in a few words, which the Russians did not bother to object to, in favor of discussing a "thinning out" of troops along the Iron Curtain. This was designed to take some of the steam out of Labor's election-year drive for "disengagement" in Central Europe. Without reading it, the two chiefs of government rushed through the signing of the final communique. When Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd remonstrated, Khrushchev replied: "Time is money. We have officials for reading the texts."

The most telling talking Harold Macmillan did in his ten days in Russia may have been the eloquent little speech he delivered in Moscow, at Soviet invitation, to a TV audience estimated at 10,000,000. First suavely complimenting their country on having become the world's "second industrial power in total industrial production," Macmillan delivered the jolting information that "we in Britain still produce twice as much as you per head." Listing some recent achievements of "our little island" (radar, jet engines, penicillin, the first telecasts), he told his listeners in words artfully designed to contrast their lot that "since the war we have built over 3,000,000 permanent homes. Most of these outside the centers of town are separate houses, one for each family, and have a garden."

"The Gospel," said Macmillan, "says man cannot live by bread alone. We believe that man has a spiritual destiny also. Every individual should have freedom to develop his personality. On this foundation our whole political system is built.

"We hold that the state exists for man. The British system is essentially flexible. Its fundamentals are free and secret elections, freedom to discuss and argue, compromise and tolerance in public affairs, and the absolute separation of the executive and the judiciary . . . This system has spread. What used to be called the British Empire is now the Commonwealth of 600 million people of every race and creed. It is an association of people who found that they shared the same ideas about the organization of human affairs. Since the war five nations have joined it, and we expect others to follow."

Hear! Hear! Arriving home, Macmillan received something close to a hero's welcome. "Well played, sir,'' said a freight handler at the airport. Pollsters found that 82% of Britons approved his trip. In the House of Commons the Tories, led by Sir Winston Churchill, fresh from a Mediterranean holiday and growling, "Hear! Hear!", rose, waved their order papers and cheered his entrance. Labor's Hugh Gaitskell, who had applied to go to Moscow before Macmillan did, and had been outwitted, could only urge that the Prime Minister forget preliminary foreign minister talks and go straight for the summit. "The right thing now," said Macmillan, "is to try to get a negotiation going. If--and there are always ifs--this should mean the beginning of negotiations rather than unilateral decisions, then I think that we have a hope of making substantial progress."

While the British press, recovering from its original pique at Khrushchev, began crowing about Russian backdowns, concessions and shifts--none of them apparent to the naked eye--what had the mission accomplished? Maybe Khrushchev had learned a thing or two. The British thought they had too: 1) that Khrushchev really runs the show, consulting no one; 2) that Khrushchev is basically uninterested in German reunification and wants only recognition of the East German status quo; 3) that Khrushchev believes world power is now tipped his way and the West is just too self-deceived to admit it; 4) that Khrushchev himself, as well as the Russian people, is dangerously ignorant of the rest of the world; 5) that Khrushchev was "extremely disinterested" in the wider aspects of disengagement.

Nominated by the Times of London as Dulles' successor as "go-between" among the Western allies, Macmillan, now favoring a cap instead of the black and white fur hats that made such a hit in Russia, prepared this week to fly to Paris and Bonn to reassure his wary NATO partners that no deals had been started in those last two days of the jaw-jaw in Moscow.

* In the so-called election at issue, Candidate Khrushchev was naturally unopposed on the one-party ballot, and got 99.5% of the vote.

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