The Pittsburgh Press (February 6, 1946)
Stokes: Slugging it out
By Thomas L. Stokes
WASHINGTON – This is no particular effort to find a silver lining, but it does seem healthy that the United Nations Organization has reached the “you’re-another” stage.
That is, world leaders are acting a lot like members of Congress or Britain’s Commons, instead of like suave, polite, old-school diplomats gifted with double talk and procrastination.
It is much better to bring the hard problems – and they are tough – out into the open. Let both sides argue and even shout at one another, if they choose, rather than wrap their issues neatly in wads of protocol and tuck them away in a drawer. Such neat little packages often have turned out to be dynamite in disguise that goes off years later with a terrible bang.
It’s better to have the bang now, verbally, than later in atomic bombs and V-bombs and the like.
To Sen. Vandenberg, Michigan Republican, must go much credit for making the UNO assembly a “town meeting of the world” when the charter was drafted originally at San Francisco. He was insistent on that, and insistent also that the assembly have power to investigate situations all over the world, just as our Congress does in our domestic affairs.
Just like in Congress
But UNO has gone a step further, at the start.
For the public debate idea has been carried right into the higher sanctum, the Security Council – and not at all politely – in discussions of the troublesome Iranian, Greek and Dutch East Indies problems.
Mr. Bevin shouts at Mr. Vishinsky, and Mr. Vishinsky throws it back. After one of these spats, it is reported from London by Scotty Reston of the New York Times, Mr. Vishinsky took Mr. Bevin off to the Soviet Embassy for a drink – and they toasted the working classes of England and Russia.
Just the way it is here in Congress so often with men who lambast each other on the floor.
These public discussions let the world in on these problems, let the world know the issues involved, which is of itself a start toward a solution. But, more than that, they let the rest of us see that these international statesmen are just men, too, men who have been a little luckier perhaps than others in getting ahead in the profession of politics, not supermen or master minds at all.
When they get down to a problem they talk it all out just about the way members of the city council do, or the state legislature, or Congress, with gestures, loud noises and occasional epithets.
Debunking of politics helpful
It leaves the reader with the impression that perhaps government on the world level, if we stick at it and give it a real try and improve the machinery as we go along, can be just as successful as national government has been with us, even though we may expect periods when things seem to go all awry, as they are in Congress now. But Congress has been with us a long time and will be for a long time.
The debunking of international politics going on now in London, that is, the revelation that it’s much like politics at lower levels, is helpful. It all used to seem beyond comprehension to the ordinary mortal when they dressed it up in fancy clothes, kept it behind locked doors, and clothed it in a language that the average fellow could not understand, and so gave up trying.
And did you notice the pictures the other day of Mr. Bevin and Mr. Vishinsky side by side? Perhaps you had to look at the captions a second time, For Mr. Bevin looked more a Russian, with his heavy rumpled appearance, and Mr. Vishinsky looked more like a member of the House of Lords, or the head of a Wall Street banking firm.
Maybe we are not so different as we think.