The Augusta Courier

SHADES OF
DEAN ACHESON
(FROM THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS)

The late Will Rogers once observed that the United States had never lost a war or won a conference.

That was a succinct way of saying that our gains on the battlefield were lost by weak diplomacy.

Secretary of State Dulles is inviting another diplomatic defeat by his equivocal approach to the forthcoming political conference on Korea.

Mr. Dulles said yesterday that he is unwilling to buy Korean unification at the price of admitting Red China into the United Nations. But he refused to say he would use the veto to keep Red China out.

That namby-pamby attitude doesn't offer much hope that the United States will make a real fight against the forces organizing to support Red China. And unless that organization is countered by at least an equal force, the fight will be lost.

We have no quarrel with Secretary Dulles on most issues. But while his views may be sound, he doesn't seem to have the iron in his system which is essential in the tough job he has. That weakness has been indicated by his failure to do a real house-cleaning job in his own Department.

Except for a few changes at the top, the Department is much the same as it was under the Acheson regime, and many of the same people who sacrificed Nationalist China are handling similar problems now at the operating level. Most of these people are not pro-Communist. Their fault is they are not pro anything, not even pro-American, if it calls for any effort or imagination on their part.

This defeatist attitude is reflected by the State Department and Mutual Security personnel in Western Germany and West Berlin.

The only real initiative we have shown in the cold war came when President Eisenhower announced that American food supplies would be made available to the hungry people of Eastern Germany who are revolting against their Communist masters.

But our overstuffed bureaucrats just can't be bothered by anything so prosaic as feeding the hungry. It is quite beneath their dignity.

When our Berlin reporter asked how the food-distribution plan was working out a few days ago, the American official whom he addressed threw up his hands and said, "I'm sick and tired of hearing about this food problem."

But the hungry came, nonetheless.

The halt, the lame, and the blind came.

There were aged men and women, some in wheelchairs. There were babies in carriages.

There were men on 1 leg as well as 2 and some without any.

People came with suitcases, knapsacks, or just flimsy paper bags.

But because some of the American officials were not concerned about the problem, adequate preparations hadn't been made and many were disappointed.

We'll not win the cold war, or any other kind of a war, when our efforts are sabotaged by snobbishness and laziness.

This is one of the things the people voted against last November which hasn't been changed, and, like the bad apple in the barrel, it is doing great damage.