In Search of Grandeur

In the August heat, the American side of the cold war was momentarily envious of the Soviet space performance, flash-angry over a hijacked plane, and irritated by Castro. But a kind of consensus seemed to have been reached about Berlin --that the issue had to be pressed, and that if it was. something might well be won. Reporters at his press conference were hard put to get any headline news out of President John Kennedy's deliberately muted statements about Berlin. In Paris. NATO's foreign ministers wound up talks about ways to beef up Western Europe's forces, with the U.S. promising. if necessary, to send six additional Army divisions--but with no firm decision to hasten a showdown.

On the Communist side, it was a week of Khrushchev huffing and puffing: now Nikita exulted in the impressive achievements of Cosmonaut Gherman Titov and the Russian scientists who plotted his course; now he brandished the claim of a Soviet bomb equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT; now he scoffed at Western strength ("Gentlemen capitalists, your arms are too short'').

Still, for both East and West, it was a week in which the Berlin crisis continued moving closer to the long talk as opposed to the big bang. Reporting to President Kennedy after his return from Paris, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk seemed convinced that the Berlin crisis would next move to the conference table, not the battlefields.

But the key question remains: Since negotiations necessarily imply concessions, what does either side, deeply committed as they are, really have to negotiate about? On that point, Khrushchev last week set off on a new tack. The whole German question, he cried, revolved around ''our fight for the recognition of our grandeur."

The grandeur of Communism was a curious point to raise. For it is the Russians who talk about inevitability, and sound convinced about their ability to win the world to their view. The grandeur of Communism was best measured last week not in the decibels of rocket rhetoric, but by the instinct for choice made by thousands of men, women and children.

Into West Berlin flowed more than 12,000 refugees from East Germany, in a great and historic flight from tyranny. In recent weeks, the number of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro's sugar-cane Communism has notably increased. Significantly, the refugees include fishermen, carpenters, and farmers desperate enough to cross more than 90 miles of water in small boats. They, too, in their anonymous way, had something to contribute to the subject of grandeur.

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