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Show Wider Vista of U. S. Policy Hinted , Nation May Be Embarking On Major Teacefare' Effort By BAUKIIAGE News Analyst and Commentator. WASHINGTON. It was a sizzling day in the capital. The town moved slowly like a lazy setter stretching and hunting the shade. Even the trees were half asleep. The air pushed hard against your brow and cheeks. The asphalt yielded to one's footfalls like brown grasses in a trodden field. But we had to attend the regular press and radio conference of the secretary sec-retary of state. Nature languished, but we knew the dispatch room was spluttering and sparking in sharp shudders with the news of an anguished world. America we sensed (but didn't understand quite how) was em barking on a colossal undertaking. s We walked down the air-cooled corridors of this new state department depart-ment building which in wartime housed the brass hats of the high command. For those working for peace, it is a little depressing to pass those stark murals depicting war at its worst or best, which is probably the same thing. We were still interested in the implications im-plications of the statements on for- lb eign policy. Each statement pulled a little wider the curtain on the theater which was neither a theater of war nor a theater of peace. Again and again the questions ques-tions came in like darts. Efforts Ef-forts to pierce what we all felt wTas a screen concealing vistas Baakhage much widfr ,thfn the formal statements state-ments had yet revealed. Was there a greater plan lying behind this program for aid to stricken countries the program outlined by Secretary Marshal at Harvard? The question was asked although we knew that even if the secretary had a vision wider than ours, he could not reveal it yet. His answer, frank enough under the circumstances and not unexpected, unexpect-ed, was that if there was some further fur-ther plan behind the one already revealed piecemeal, he was not going go-ing to talk about it. He did reveal that Rnssia was not outside the pale of America's Amer-ica's rehabilitation efforts in theory at least. This was surprising sur-prising to some who had studied stud-ied President Truman's, Marshall's Mar-shall's and Ben Cohen's most recent statements, and yet not so surprising as we recalled the nature of other talks, not public, pub-lic, which had hinted at larger things. Is this a real effort to achieve a fair understanding with Russia? (Rapproachement is the diplomatic word.) Words. I am wondering whether those unspoken un-spoken words of the secretary of state could possibly describe the immensity im-mensity of America's task, the task which is envisioned in the plans which Secretary Marshall "would not talk about." 1 say this because I have learned a new word which, it seems to me, might bear within it a vital, a hopeful concept. Like Hauptmann, in "The Sunken Bell" when he said: "Tear! All the gladness, all the sorrow of the world sparkles within it." Think of the dynamic quality of other words: Fame Riches Fair Play Charity Honor! This new word of mine (which Marshall might have used, had he known it) is "peacefare." It was used in a paragraph of a "letter to the editor" in the New York Times. The writer was A. M. Meerloo, wartime chief of the psychological psy-chological branch of the Dutch war ministry and a member of the inter-Allied inter-Allied psychological study group in England. This is the paragraph: "In those (wartime) days, when the success or failure of the war was at stake, psychologists and specialists spe-cialists in allied fields mobilized every ev-ery weapon at their command to wage psychological warfare. Why cannot we now, when the peace is at stake, mobilize as carefully for psychological peacefare?" All right, there you have it "peacefare." Not simply "psychological" "psycho-logical" peacefare now, but economic econom-ic and political and moral peace-fare. peace-fare. That is what I am hoping and praying the unspoken plan of Secretary Secre-tary Hull will embody. A hard, long, expensive campaign. But one launched not against anybody any-body but for everybody; a campaign to stop war to save humanity. I say "everybody" because Marshall Mar-shall pointed out that he envisioned Russia as a part of this plan for the economic rehabilitation of Europe. Eu-rope. Without this economic rehabilitation, re-habilitation, there can be no rehabilitation re-habilitation of the body politic or the body (and soul) moral. It must be a campaign to banish ban-ish fear fear of the atomic bomb which we possess for the moment; fear of the far more terrible weapons of destruction that any madman might put to use. It is a campaign to banish the hale bred by fear. A campaign to nourish the body so that bodily things may be forgotten and man may pursue his spiritual destiny toward to-ward freedom, toward decency, toward to-ward a world where the major effort ef-fort is dedication to the common good. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before. Nations have loaned money for the purpose of earning a neat dividend or to wring some political advantage from an impecunious princeling or bankrupt government. Many fair promises and high sounding ideals have been written into covenants signed only to be broken when opportunism dictated dic-tated a reverse English. Eut here Is something new and different. Something rather bright and idealistic 'has been added, what we hope Is an honest effort to wage peacefare, to outroot the malice of the few, in the spirit of charity toward to-ward alL It may be all eyewash, I know. I've seen a lot of castles fall. But my feeling is that If we get out of the scoffer's scat for a moment, if we drop the cynic pose and put peacefare into the national vocabulary, vocabu-lary, we may make It work. |