On an Air Force Constellation named the Dewdrop, Secretary Dulles arrived last week in Manila for the eight-power conference that would try to work out a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Although he is the most extensively traveled U.S. Secretary of State in history, Dulles had not been in the Philippines since 1950. He emerged from the plane smiling but somewhat disheveled, to receive a 19-gun salute. This, he said, would be "one of the most important international conferences of our time."
The meeting was important, no doubt, and the importance was enhanced by recent free-world defeats in Indo-China, Geneva...