1958: United States

A summary of United States foreign affairs, political events, and legislative and judicial developments in 1958 is presented below.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Relations with U.S.S.R.

Disarmament and German unification were the principal controversies between East and West during 1958; other problems included the use of nuclear weapons and tests, the neutralization of Germany, and the renunciation of force in the Middle East.

Following the resignation in February of Harold Stassen as his Special Disarmament Advisor, President Eisenhower set up a four-man 'brain trust' to advise the U.S. government on future disarmament policy. With the approval of the President, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles named to this group Alfred M. Gruenther, Robert A. Lovett, John J. McCloy, and Walter Bedell Smith. Ambassador James Wadsworth, deputy U.S. delegate to the United Nations, was designated chief U.S. representative in future disarmament negotiations, reporting directly to Dulles rather than to the President.

Proposed 'Summit' Talks.

Toward the close of 1957, in a series of notes to the NATO powers on the eve of their Paris meeting, Premier Nikolai Bulganin of the Soviet Union requested that the East and West join in a round of high-level talks. The NATO chiefs expressed a willingness to promote such talks, but there was considerable doubt as to their effectiveness. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles cautiously wavered between flat rejection of the Soviet proposals and unqualified acceptance of them.

Early in January the Soviets delivered a new series of notes from Premier Bulganin calling for a summit conference. They were apparently timed to steal the spotlight from President Eisenhower's State-of-the-Union message and were delivered when the NATO powers were still trying to frame their replies to the previous Bulganin notes.

Secretary Dulles, characterizing the new notes as principally propaganda, declared that there should not be a summit meeting unless there were adequate preparations for it and a reasonable assurance that it would accomplish some desirable result.

President Eisenhower dispatched a 4,000-word reply to Bulganin's note, in which he agreed in principle to summit talks, but asked for progress in lower-level negotiations first. At the same time it appeared that Dulles' earlier inflexible attitude of opposition began to dissipate in favor of such a summit meeting, provided the proper conditions were obtained.

In the meantime, the United States moved forward on a broad diplomatic front to break the deadlock with the Soviet Union in preparation for a possible summit conference before the end of the year. Dulles called ambassadors from the Iron Curtain countries home to consult on methods of bringing the Kremlin back to the conference table on a sound basis.

Late in January Soviet Ambassador Georgi N. Zaroubin paid a farewell call on Vice President Nixon before leaving for Moscow. The official announcement stated that the two men discussed only an exchange-of-persons agreement, as well as some other cultural subjects which were under negotiation, but many observers felt that the U.S.S.R. was attempting to determine the prospects for talks on other subjects as well.

At the same time U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. Llewellyn E. Thompson, Jr., had an interview with Gromyko in Moscow to determine the reaction of the Soviet government to President Eisenhower's recent proposals.

Soon a second note to President Eisenhower arrived from Bulganin. The 17-page document suggested a nine-point agenda for a summit meeting, and consisted of a repetition of Soviet proposals previously made and a negative attitude toward Eisenhower's eight proposals of January 12. It also opposed the suggestion that a foreign ministers' meeting be called in advance to pave the way for a summit parley. The U.S.S.R. was then asked to come forward with evidence that such a meeting held hope of advancing the cause of peace and justice.

In a statement made shortly after the arrival of the new Soviet Ambassador, Mikhail I. Menshikov, Dulles dropped the Administration's demand that a foreign minister's meeting must precede any new summit conference.

The U.S.S.R. then proposed that a foreign ministers' meeting of nearly 30 nations be held within two months to prepare for an East-West summit conference, suggesting that the meeting be attended by the 15 NATO powers, the eight members of the Communist Warsaw Pact, and several neutral countries of Asia and Africa. The proposal failed to satisfy President Eisenhower, who felt that it barred from the agenda practically everything the United States wanted to include in summit discussions, such as German reunification and political freedom in the satellite countries.

At the end of February Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko summoned Ambassador Thompson and other Western ambassadors and handed them an aide-mémoire proposing a meeting of foreign ministers as soon as possible to determine the agenda and participants for a summit meeting.

However, Secretary Dulles turned down the Soviet proposal as unacceptable to the United States because it lacked any reference to a discussion of German reunification and called for equal representation between East and West at the foreign ministers' meeting. Terming the Soviet formula ambiguous, he challenged the U.S.S.R. to demonstrate it wanted a decision-making summit conference instead of a spectacle.