A certain stubborn, if not disquieting, fact shines duskily through the cherry blossom-garlanded ceremonial, the ritualistic professions of Atlantic solidarity and the cabinet diplomacy of the foreign ministers at NATO’s tenth anniversary council in Washington. The fact is that the Atlantic Big Three-de Gaulle’s revivified France, Macmillan’s England, held in uneasy suspense by the Tory Party’s electoral necessities, and the United States under a newly energized President-present three sharply differentiated faces to Khrushchev’s East.
The differences, running strongly beneath the surface of NATO comradeship, have been brought into contrasting light by glimpses into the Prime Minister’s urgent defeatism, exposed privately while in Washington, together with President Eisenhower’s “no bluff, no blackmail” rebuke to Macmillan’s placatory attitude in his press conference of March 25, plus reliable advices on the French President’s staunchly realistic provisos concerning the Summit.
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