FOREIGN RELATIONS: Tough Talk

Secretary of State James Francis Byrnes, who was born on the wrong side of Charleston’s famed King Street, still remembers how to talk tough. Last week he did.

He bluntly told the Russian-backed Bulgarian Fatherland Front Government, in which Communists hold the strategic posts, that the U.S. is not satisfied that the Government is “adequately representative of” all of Bulgaria’s democratic elements, or that the elections scheduled to be held this week will be “free from the fear of force and intimidation.”

Jimmy Byrnes was thus carrying out to the letter the Big Three agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, which called for free and open elections in all of Europe’s liberated countries and promised diplomatic recognition to governments set up through such elections. If Bulgaria does not comply, he said, the U.S. would refuse recognition. In effect, since Bulgaria is a Russian satellite, he was telling another of the Big Three to uphold its end of the Yalta-Potsdam bargain.