Interview in Libertyville

On the floor of the U.S. Senate last week, the Republican minority leader rose in partisan wrath. "Well-placed, well-timed torpedo!" cried Illinois' Senator Everett Dirksen, hotly declaring that Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson had helped Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wreck the summit conference by presenting Khrushchev with the thought that he could ignore Ike and deal better with the next U.S. President.

The excitement was caused by a story printed by Paris-Presse-L'Intransigeant on the same day that Khrushchev arrived in Paris for the conference. In an interview with French Reporter Robert Boulay, who talked to Stevenson last April 16 at Libertyville, 111., Stevenson was quoted as recommending Western concessions on Berlin, reduction of U.S. armed forces in Germany, and a willingness to use the Rapacki Plan (which the U.S. opposes) as a basis for gradual withdrawal from Europe of both Russian and NATO troops. An argumentative interviewer ("Your answer surprises me"), Boulay wrote what he said was an accurate account of his talk with Stevenson. Among the quotes :

B. What is the most important thing in present world politics?

S. The suspension of atomic experimentation . . .

B. Could this be arranged?

S. Such agreement ought to be possible to achieve by mutual concessions.

B. On Berlin? 5. Yes . . . The present Berlin situation cannot be continued. Strategically, the presence of 11,000 American soldiers there does not mean anything.

B. Should I understand then that you are ready to consider a decrease in American military manpower in Berlin?

5. Yes.

According to Boulay, Stevenson then went on to criticize the late U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his successor:

"For the last ten years there has not really been any U.S. Secretary of State.-During all that time the real Secretary of State of the United States has been the German Chancellor Adenauer.''

When the ruckus broke over the Paris-Presse story, Stevenson at first denied that he had ever seen Boulay. "This report of an alleged interview is grotesque; I have given no interviews to any Paris paper in the past year." Then Stevenson acknowledged that he had entertained Boulay at Libertyville, but insisted that he was grossly misquoted. "The views Mr. Boulay attributed to me," he said, "had nothing to do with my opinions and do not in any way correspond with my opinions today. The most charitable explanation of such irresponsibility, of such presumption and such a lack of courtesy is that his English was poor and my French hardly better."

In Paris, Reporter Boulay, 39, gave his side of the case. He said he had taken no notes during the interview but had written them down immediately afterward. A respected reporter who speaks fluent English, his specialty is French domestic politics, but he is also an old hand in international politics and has covered every important international conference in Europe since 1949. Boulay came to the U.S. on a State Department tour, one of the conditions of which was that he publish no interviews while still in the U.S. A few days after his Stevenson visit, he told a Mansfield, Mass, editor: "I do not know what to do. This is important information but I was told not to publish it." Said he last week: "Mr. Adlai Stevenson is walking slowly in the path of truth. In his first denial he seemed unaware of my visit to him and of the conversations we had. Now he recognizes having met me. I do not contest the right of Mr. Stevenson, like any politician, to change his mind. Today Mr. Stevenson regrets his declarations to me. I don't regret having reported them."

* That reckoning would have included the last two years of the tenure of Democratic Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who for that period was generally considered to be a prisoner of his critics.

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