The Week

Vice President Richard M. Nixon came up to New York City last week to warn a convocation of the nation’s mayors that they could not count upon the federal government to give them additional help in financing municipal projects. He brought no reassurance, however, that the people would be allowed to keep enough of their incomes to take care of their own local needs.

The New York Times’ Harrison Salisbury, who has always astounded us by his ability to proceed from unassailable facts to a cockeyed conclusion, has outdone himself in a recent report from Tirana, the capital of Albania. As Mr. Salisbury himself notes, Albania has been an iron-clad, not to say ferocious, Stalinist dictatorship ever since the closing days of World War Two. Visitors have been resented, even deported. The politest sort of Western interest in the tiny nation has been reviled and rejected by the local commissars and bureaucrats as prima facie evidence of a sinister “bourgeois” plot. So who is to blame for Albania’s troubles? Why, says Mr. Salisbury, it is the West: not only have we kept Albania in “isolation,” we have also been guilty of “writing it off.” For confusing effects and causes this clearly takes the cake. An upside-down cake, of course.

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Vice President Richard M. Nixon came up to New York City last week to warn a convocation of the nation’s mayors that they could not count upon the federal government to give them additional help in financing municipal projects. He brought no reassurance, however, that the people would be allowed to keep enough of their incomes to take care of their own local needs.

The New York Times’ Harrison Salisbury, who has always astounded us by his ability to proceed from unassailable facts to a cockeyed conclusion, has outdone himself in a recent report from Tirana, the capital of Albania. As Mr. Salisbury himself notes, Albania has been an iron-clad, not to say ferocious, Stalinist dictatorship ever since the closing days of World War Two. Visitors have been resented, even deported. The politest sort of Western interest in the tiny nation has been reviled and rejected by the local commissars and bureaucrats as prima facie evidence of a sinister “bourgeois” plot. So who is to blame for Albania’s troubles? Why, says Mr. Salisbury, it is the West: not only have we kept Albania in “isolation,” we have also been guilty of “writing it off.” For confusing effects and causes this clearly takes the cake. An upside-down cake, of course.