Without Solutions

Behrendt's cartoon was memorable--but in fact, the eagle, the lion, the lamb and the bear were far from harmonizing about peace on earth. And it was a gloomy day when President John Kennedy arrived in Bermuda last week for his fourth series of somber talks this year with Britain's Harold Macmillan. Sitting in Hamilton's pale pink Government House. Kennedy and Macmillan conversed for as long as five hours at a stretch--with only a few minutes out for tea--but. inevitably, they were able to produce little in the way of hard solutions to the world's woes.

Kennedy and Macmillan reviewed the current rash of trouble spots--Goa, the Congo, South Viet Nam. Netherlands New Guinea--but they soon settled down to the continuing, fundamental problem of how to meet the Russian threat against Berlin. Both Kennedy and Macmillan admitted that they were perplexed by the motive behind Khrushchev's recent line on West Berlin. The Russian Premier could be toughening his stand either because he does not want negotiations or because he wants to go into negotiations with a hard position to use as bargaining leverage.

Macmillan suggested that Llewellyn ("Tommy") Thompson. U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, sound out Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to see what is on Khrushchev's mind. If Khrushchev sincerely wants to negotiate--and not just to generate propaganda--Macmillan said that the next step might be a meeting of the foreign ministers in late February or March to prepare the way for an eventual climb to the summit. President Kennedy readily agreed to the plan. A fervent believer in summitry, Macmillan would dearly like to attend a conference on

West Berlin, but the British have let it be known that they would support a man-to-man meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

U.S. and British experts compared analytic reports of the Russian nuclear tests, found that the scientists of the two nations agreed that the Communists had made substantial progress. President Kennedy told Macmillan that it may be necessary for the U.S. to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Although he is under strong ban-the-bomb pressure at home. Macmillan endorsed U.S. atmospheric tests.

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