Faith in the Summit

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SOME BRITISH ATTITUDES

IN JULY 1958, when for a time a summit conference seemed imminent, James Reston of The New York Times explained why the conference would be held in spite of American misgivings. "The truth is," he wrote, "that President Eisenhower has agreed to attend what he and his principal advisers profoundly and unanimously believe to be the wrong meeting at the wrong time and place on the wrong subject. The explanation is equally simple. It is that British public and parliamentary opinion forced the President's reluctant acquiescence, just as pressure from the British Labor Party was the decisive factor in arranging the last summit meeting with Premier Khrushchev in July 1955, at Geneva."

Whether or not Mr. Reston was right in attributing so much influence to British opinion, it is certainly true that during the last decade British politicians and the British press have been more enthusiastic supporters of summit conferences than have those of any other Western country; and there is no reason for doubting that this enthusiasm reflected the prevailing public opinion in Britain. After Winston Churchill first proposed a "parley at the summit" in an election speech in February 1950, and more particularly after his speech in the House of Commons on May 11, 1953, calling for an informal and private "conference on the highest level," support for summit conferences and faith in them as a means of resolving the tensions of the cold war increased rapidly...