Europe Revisited

While platoons of U.S. leaders shuttle across the Pacific with metronomic regularity, America's allies in Europe look on with a growing sense of chagrin. Europe, traditionally the primary focus of American foreign relations, seems to many of its leaders to have been relegated by Washington to stepchild status. Not since June 1965 has a U.S. President or Vice President visited the Continent despite the swift and subtle changes that have overtaken Europe. Last week Hubert Humphrey set out on a two-week, seven-nation European swing aimed at demonstrating that the U.S. has not cut its ties because of overconcern with its transpacific interests. Far from it. The Administration is only too well aware of Europe's problems --and only too eager to resolve those that affect the U.S. The Vice President's voyage of rediscovery was an important first step in Washington's effort to do so.

Ceremony & Grand Cru. Humphrey arrived on the Continent in the same week that the last American flags were lowered at Rocquencourt, the NATO headquarters outside Paris on which French President Charles de Gaulle had posted an April 1 eviction notice. Simultaneously in Geneva, the Kennedy Round of tariff talks between the U.S. and the European Common Market were nearing an April 30 deadline with many problems still unresolved.

Near by in Geneva's Palais des Nations, where Soviet and American disarmament negotiators have been trying for six years to forge a nuclear non-proliferation pact, European concern was focused on the possibility that such a treaty could forever foreclose the Continent's option of becoming an equal thermonuclear power. Over those specific negotiations, with which Humphrey was immediately concerned, hung the intertwined questions of Viet Nam and East-West rapprochement. Through it all, the Vice President--plainly relishing his liberation from the domestic creamed-chicken circuit--enjoyed more grand ceremony and grand cru wine than could be served in a year of Washington receptions.

Now or Never. Accompanied by his wife Muriel, more than 50 reporters, staffers and Secret Service men and an argosy of silver bowls, spoons and forks to bestow on his hosts, Humphrey deplaned first at Geneva. From Kennedy Round negotiators he heard glum reports that the talks had reached an impasse over Washington's reluctance to lower tariffs on imported chemicals and European resistance to lowering duties on American farm products. Humphrey warned that if agreement was not reached by the deadline at month's end, the U.S. Congress--now in an increasingly protectionist mood--was not likely to renew the 1962 Trade Act that authorized the five-year tariff negotiations. Warned Humphrey: "It's now or never."

More hopeful--if only because they do not face a deadline--are the prospects of a successful conclusion to the nonproliferation talks. At the heart of that hassle is a question of jurisdiction: the six Common Market members be long to Euratom while Russia and the U.S. (along with 93 other nations) belong to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the organization that the two superpowers want to serve as inspector of the treaty.

Cookies & Confidences. From the Alps, Humphrey swept down to the lowlands of Holland and a warm reception from Queen Juliana and Foreign Minister Joseph Luns, who reassured the Vice President of Dutch cooperation and friendship. Luns also offered "some advice regarding Viet Nam." As usual, it was stop the bombing. At the Queen's country palace outside The Hague, the Humphreys shared cookies and confidences with Juliana.

Flying on to Bonn, the Vice President confined himself to private conferences with his longtime friend, Vice Chancellor Willy Brandt. Later, at a lunch with American mission chiefs from Western and Eastern Europe, Humphrey struck a note of new flexibility in U.S. policy toward Europe. "The essence of statesmanship," he said, "is not a rigid adherence to the past but a present and probing concern for the future." Promising "a partnership not of seniors and juniors but of equals," he suggested that the Johnsonian Great Society was as valid for Europe as for the U.S., proposed an "Atlantic Youth Program" to coordinate the Peace Corps-style programs of all the Western allies as well as an "Atlantic Conference on Urban Problems."

Toward Closer Ties. Humphrey left the major German-American differences for his meeting this week with West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Since the downfall of Ludwig Erhard last November, the new Bonn coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists has taken a more independent stance toward Washington and moved simultaneously toward closer ties and broader trade with Eastern Europe. At the same time, the Germans are fearful that Washington may make agreements with Moscow that would bypass German interests in favor of entente.

Though Bonn reluctantly agreed to buy $500 million in medium-term bonds from Washington to offset the cost of maintaining 225,000 U.S. troops on German soil, many Germans are loath to pay the quid pro quo. They still fear that Washington will ultimately withdraw its troops to ease the U.S. balance-of-payments bind. That withdrawal, the Germans argue, would invite a Soviet invasion--and absurd as it sounds, many of them believe such quodlibets.

Point & Poverty. It was not until he reached Italy that the Vice President ran hard against the virulent anti-Americanism that has burgeoned in Europe since the Viet Nam war began to escalate. On his way to Rome's Teatro dell Opera to hear Verdi's Ernani, the Vice President and his hosts were the targets of a plastic bag of yellow paint, apparently thrown by a bearded member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation. It was a reminder--along with the smoke bombs and raucous demonstrations that followed later--of the fact that Italy's Communist Party is the largest in the West.

Cooperation was the keynote in the Vice President's audience with Pope Paul VI. From Rome, Humphrey headed for Florence to view the damage of last fall's floods and the effects of the $650,000 of American art-rescue efforts he had helped to organize. There, as he pondered this week's round of skull sessions with Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson, West Germany's Kiesinger and France's De Gaulle, Humphrey could look back on a hectic week of 14-hour work days in which he had ful filled the first part of his mission: "Listen and learn." The next step, for the U.S., even more than for its reverse Columbus, will be to act upon his findings.

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