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Over the clipped green fields of Flushing Meadow last week, only a few miles distant from the hazy skyline of Manhattan, the encircled flags of U.N.'s 55 nations flapped fitfully in a bland September breeze. Within the limestone and beaverboard temple of U.N.'s General Assembly had gathered the delegates of almost all the world's powers, great, middle and minuscule. Their agenda bulged with more than 60 issues and proposals—from The Bomb to how to make life more comfortable and diverting for visiting delegates.
But in reality there was only one great issue in the minds of the men of U.N., and, speaking strictly, it was not even on the agenda. It was simply whether the men & women who have suffered the horrors of two world wars in 30 years could manage to live out their natural lives in peace.
Since World War II ended, the odds on peace had chillingly narrowed. U.N.'s Security Council could find no way, for instance, to stamp out powder trains like the one that was sputtering in the Balkans.Twenty Soviet vetoes in a year and a half had left the Council feeling both impotent and irritable. Russia refused to meet the majority on plans to control the atomic bomb.
Pathetic Fallacy. In the world beyond Flushing Meadow and the U.N. agenda, there was creeping crisis on a global scale—in Asia, in Europe, and in the minds of many men. Peace treaties had indeed been signed with Italy and other Axis satellites, but the countries still faced questions as grave as any that had been settled. No treaties with Germany and Japan were in sight. It had been Franklin Roosevelt's Grand Design, epitomized in his gamble at Yalta, that the West could reach an understanding with Soviet Russia. In continuation of the wartime alliance (and in exchange for a Western wink at Moscow's absorption of millions of hapless non-Russians and 275,000 square miles of territory for greater "security"), the Kremlin was expected to cooperate in the world's steep climb back toward recovery and peace. The U.N. Charter had been signed in such unrealistic hope. For One World was the 20th Century's pathetic fallacy. Since the war's end there had been two worlds— one (the greater one) headed, by reason of its unparalleled power, by the U.S., which craved nothing so much as universal, permanent peace; the other, consisting of Russia and her satellites, dedicated by reason of its revolutionary doctrines to the eventual conquest of the peace-loving world.
Mighty Opposites. Last week these mighty opposites defined the issue at U.N. in a clash so dramatic that henceforth only the willfully unrealistic could fail to see it. The protagonists were Secretary of State George Marshall and the spokesman of the Russian delegation, Soviet Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Andrei Yanuarevich Vishinsky. The ultimate issue was peace v. eventual war. The immediate struggle was for control of the soapbox—for that, the Russians had demonstrated, was how they thought of U.N. The question was: How could the peace-loving nations prevent the Russians from using this potential focus of power and international moral rostrum to keep the nations divided and make peace a diminishing allusion?