THE WEEK

• On October 9, the Department of Defense, acting under a White House directive inspired by the State Department, issued an order choking off further statements by military commanders on the “sensitive situation” in the Formosa Strait. The order was a sign that some officials of the State Department wanted to get going on their perennial task of losing by diplomacy what strength and resolution have won. At Peiping’s announcement of the Quemoy cease-fire, our commanders in the Pacific had cheerfully laid it on the line. The comment of Lieut. General Laurence Kuter, Air Force Pacific chief, was typical: “The cease-fire was the result of the failure of the announced and boasted Chinese Communist intent to take the offshore islands.” Brigadier General Bork, head of our Formosa mission, was just as frank and pleased: “They backed down because they failed to gain their objective. The blockade is permanently broken.” The commander of a Nike missile battalion mentioned, very publicly, that his weapons were fitted with nuclear warheads. Such talk, the State Department feared, might so embarrass the Chinese Communists that they would be unwilling to sit down with us and accept our shirt at the negotiating table.

• Vice President Nixon’s ringing denunciation of the “defensive, defeatist, fuzzy-headed thinking” which, between 1945 and 1952, lost “all or parts of fourteen nations and over 800 million people to Communism” was a partisan retort to the Democratic Advisory Council’s ill-timed attack on the Administration’s conduct of foreign affairs. Precisely because of that it is portentous. Stating that the people have “had enough” of “retreat and appeasement,” Mr. Nixon reminded them of the 1952 Republican pledge, so long ignored by Administration spokesmen, to seek the liberation of the satellite nations. Is the Administration coming to think that a hard anti-Communist line is due, after so long a lapse, to become not only sound policy, but good politics?

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Department of Defense

• On October 9, the Department of Defense, acting under a White House directive inspired by the State Department, issued an order choking off further statements by military commanders on the “sensitive situation” in the Formosa Strait. The order was a sign that some officials of the State Department wanted to get going on their perennial task of losing by diplomacy what strength and resolution have won. At Peiping’s announcement of the Quemoy cease-fire, our commanders in the Pacific had cheerfully laid it on the line. The comment of Lieut. General Laurence Kuter, Air Force Pacific chief, was typical: “The cease-fire was the result of the failure of the announced and boasted Chinese Communist intent to take the offshore islands.” Brigadier General Bork, head of our Formosa mission, was just as frank and pleased: “They backed down because they failed to gain their objective. The blockade is permanently broken.” The commander of a Nike missile battalion mentioned, very publicly, that his weapons were fitted with nuclear warheads. Such talk, the State Department feared, might so embarrass the Chinese Communists that they would be unwilling to sit down with us and accept our shirt at the negotiating table.

• Vice President Nixon’s ringing denunciation of the “defensive, defeatist, fuzzy-headed thinking” which, between 1945 and 1952, lost “all or parts of fourteen nations and over 800 million people to Communism” was a partisan retort to the Democratic Advisory Council’s ill-timed attack on the Administration’s conduct of foreign affairs. Precisely because of that it is portentous. Stating that the people have “had enough” of “retreat and appeasement,” Mr. Nixon reminded them of the 1952 Republican pledge, so long ignored by Administration spokesmen, to seek the liberation of the satellite nations. Is the Administration coming to think that a hard anti-Communist line is due, after so long a lapse, to become not only sound policy, but good politics?