In Jeopardy

The Geneva negotiations changed abruptly from boring to disturbing.

As the Western foreign ministers, summer-suited and bright-eyed, came bouncing back to Geneva, they found that the climate was no longer the one they had dressed for. A cold and steady wind was now blowing off the steppes of Russia. They had reassembled convinced that the Russians, eager for a summit, would in conciliatory fashion remove the offensive overtones to their Berlin ultimatum; this would be called progress, and a summit would result. Instead, gloomy Andrei Gromyko arrived demanding an increased price for summit talks, and at week's end, for his imperturbable stonewalling, he received the Order of Lenin on his 50th birthday.

Gromyko demanded, as an "indispensable" condition of an interim Berlin settlement, the creation of an All-German Committee, i.e., West Germans and Communist East Germans in equal numbers, to explore German unification. Would there be Big Four control? asked the West. No, answered Gromyko, "free of Big Four control." France's Couve de Murville warned that "to link problems which are quite distinct is to put the whole negotiation back in jeopardy." Gromyko's answer was so elaborately frustrating that Couve de Murville threw up his hands, complained: "We are in the midst of confusion. We don't know what the discussion is all about."

Despite the planned obfuscation of Gromyko's words, his aims were clear. An All-German Committee would for the first time give Communists a chance to intrude in the affairs of West Germany, able to employ Lenin's basic formula: divide and scatter authority in the enemy camp, disrupt basic institutions, create dissension until the will to resist is destroyed. In effect, the Russians had picked up one item from the original Western proposals (which had been carefully conceived as part of interlocking concessions leading to German reunification) and demanded that it be considered out of context. If anyone naively believed that the Russians had the true interests of German unity at heart, he had only to listen to Nikita Khrushchev junketing in Poland last week. Said Khrushchev: "The frontier that we will defend now is between East and West Germany. This frontier is as sacred to us as any frontier of the socialist countries."

Disowned Memo. Alarmed by the Soviet proposal, distressed by W. Averell Harriman's plea for some kind of "acceptance of the East German regime," sure that the West at Geneva was engaged in "capitulation by installments," convinced that there would be no such difficulties "if Dulles were alive," Chancellor Konrad Adenauer dispatched a worried aide-memoire to the allies that seemed to suggest that Geneva be ended as a bad job and that President Eisenhower and Khrushchev proceed at once to the summit. This reversal of Adenauer's previous opposition to the summit alarmed everybody.

"Ill-timed and dangerous," said the French, hitherto Adenauer's stoutest defenders. Adenauer, looking again at the implications of his memo, promptly disowned it, charged that he had been tricked into signing it by his own Foreign Ministry. Groaned a West German newspaper: "Confusion prevails." But more than an old man's confused anxiety was involved; West Germans--including Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt--were in anguish over Geneva. "The Western position," said a German spokesman, "has been reduced from a package to a parcel to a postcard."

Sensing disarray in the Western ranks, the Russians went out of their way to butter up France's Charles de Gaulle, and to open a systematic campaign of vilification of Konrad Adenauer. The harried Chancellor was already in a quarrel with the British. At this point, Manhattan Banker John J. McCloy, onetime U.S. High Commissioner to Germany, paid a three-hour call on the Chancellor as a "private citizen," and told him how much he deplored the Anglo-German rift. Adenauer answered that he "would be very happy to go to London" to settle it, and the British Foreign Office promptly replied that "Chancellor Adenauer is welcome here any time."

Giving Way? From Adenauer's ill-phrased memorandum, the Western ministers borrowed the notion that the Big Four should set up a mechanism to discuss German reunification, with "advisers" from both halves of Germany. With this they hoped this week to counter Gromyko's tricky All-German Committee.

It was not much, and it was symptomatic of an unsteady Western position, which had given away too much at the start--largely because of British desires to keep talking at any cost.

Where in all this was the U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter? He had everyone's sympathy for being thrown into a hard job at a crucial time. He had shown himself lucid, patient and fair. But, grumbled some observers, he seemed to conceive his role as a mediator among his jumpy allies, constantly reconciling them to a common policy. This was a necessary exercise, but at this stage of the melancholy Geneva proceedings, it did not give the impression of a U.S. lead comparable to U.S. strength.

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