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Now to the assembled delegates Secretary Marshall offered proposals which would in effect pull the veto fang whereby the Russians were able to paralyze the "collective will" for peace, and would set up a Little Assembly which would clear away Russian road blocks. George Marshall had made himself perfectly clear to the delegates at Flushing Meadow. He took his seat amidst crashing applause. Only the Soviet delegates sat silent and heavily hostile. They had lost the ball.
Moment in History. Andrei Vishinsky had intended to make a speech of his own that day. Instead he sent a messenger scurrying to Assembly President Oswald Aranha, of Brazil, to ask for 24 hours delay.
U.N. delegates sensed a moment in history. Next day it came.
Vishinsky's speech stretched to a full hour and a half. He spoke in Russian. Most delegates heard his speech in translation, through earphones clamped over their heads.
The voice, now hoarse, now high-pitched, now menacing, now withering, was the voice of Vishinsky; the hand that manipulated the speaker was the pudgy hand of Stalin. It was a voice new to the U.S. But Europe had been hearing it for 30 years. It was the voice of revolutionary Communism, shouting that Russia was being encircled and calling for the overthrow of capitalism. It was the voice of Prosecutor Vishinsky of the Moscow purge trials, shouting monstrous falsifications as matters of legal fact. It was the voice of Hitler, screaming that Germany was threatened by her smaller neighbors. Delegates who strained for a phrase or a word of conciliation towards the West were stunned by the fury of Vishinsky's excoriation. In the bitterest speech ever delivered in U.N., he gave them what some had heard him saying only in moments of nightmare. Vishinsky was amuck.
He cried:
"Mr. Marshall proposes to establish a standing Committee of the General Assembly under the title of 'the Interim Committee of the United Nations General Assembly on Peace and Security' to maintain 'constant attention' to the work of the Assembly and in order to deal with continuing problems.
"In spite of the reservations in the American proposal to the effect that this committee would not impinge on the matters which are the primary responsibility of the Security Council or of special commissions, there is not the slightest doubt that the attempt to create the Interim Committee is nothing but an ill-conceived scheme to substitute and bypass the Security Council. . . .
"We wish to be sure that the severe lesson given to the aggressive states during the second World War has not passed away leaving no traces, and that the fate of the aggressors severely punished in the last war will serve as a stern warning to those who, disregarding their obligations to develop friendly relations among the nations and strengthen peace and security in the whole world, are preparing both secretly and openly a new war.
"War psychosis instigated by the efforts of the militarist and expansionist circles of certain countries, the United States of America occupying the foremost place among them, is continually spreading and assuming all the more menacing character. . . .