UNITED NATIONS: The Piece of Paper

In a carefully guarded back room, behind the huge stage of Paris' Palais de Chaillot, representatives of six nations—Canada, China, Belgium, Argentina, Colombia and Syria—tried for over a week to work out a compromise on Berlin. (The press called them the "neutral nations," although they were all, as the Irish say, neutral against Russia.) The Russians still wanted the Berlin case thrown out of the U.N. Security Council.

The small powers decided that they needed more time for their mediation efforts. To achieve delay, they asked both Russia and the West to "explain circumstantially" why the blockade had been imposed to...