T H E TABLET A pril 25th, 1959. VOL. 213. No. 6205

THE TA B UT A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria FOUNDED IN 1840 APRIL 25th, 1959 NINEPENCE

Published a s a N ew spaper

A School Centenary: A Point for Headmasters

Church History at School: A Pica for the Sixth Form Syllabus. By W. J. Battersby

African Aspirations: “ Dégorger la Blancheur.” By Richard Gray

SPRING BOOKS SUPPLEMENT Reviews by Desmond Fitzgerald, J. J. Dwyer, Robert Speaight, D.W., Gerald Vann, O.P., À. A. Stephenson, S.J., Dernrot Morrah, Peter Watts, Thomas Gilby, O.P., George Scott-Moncrieff, Janet Bruce and Anthony Lejeune

ENTER MR. HERTER

!T*HE memory of President Roosevelt, that pre­

eminently successful politician from a wheeled chair, should be sufficient to abolish any fears that the new Secretary of State, Mr. Christian Herter, is a man hovering on the verge of ill-health because he walks commonly with two sticks. At sixty-four he has an experience cf public affairs which reaches right back to the Republican victory in 1920. When the American spoils system is criticised, there is this point in its favour, that it brings young men in early. Massachusetts was an important Republican State which had provided the President when Coolidge succeeded Harding in 1923, and Mr. Herter was embarked early on a Republican party career. It was to take him through the Governorship of Massachusetts after ten years as a Congressman in Opposition during the fateful period from Pearl Harbour to the defeat of the Democrats in 1952. Although in the ’twenties he was one of the Mr. Hoover’s lieutenants, he showed his independence of mind and international outlook, and first came into close relations with Mr. Dulles when working to associate the United States with League of Nations organisations at a time when this was a minority view among Republicans.

He becomes Secretary of State when there are still nearly two years to go before President Eisenhower hands over to another President, and it is a measure of how far the United States have lost the initiative that no one expects much in the way of new and positive policy, but only that Mr. Herter will handle the crises as they arise on their merits. This means that he will maintain the general pattern under which we are living, keeping the alliances, particularly with Britain, and keeping the President from inclining too much to the strictly professional views of the Generals in the Pentagon, who give the impression that they are quite prepared to conduct relations with the Soviet Union, and believe they would do it better than the State Department ever will.

In all the valedictories for Mr. Dulles, the tributes are rather to his great personal qualities, his unsparing devotion, his firmness of mind and power of resisting pressure ; and there is less unanimity about the wisdom of his policies since 1953. The chief criticism is that he could have negotiated from strength to secure a convention on nuclear disarmament when the United States was still a long way ahead of the Russians, but that he calculated instead that the Russians would not be able to catch up, and certainly not at the pace they have. If this is the true account, and it is always open to anyone to assert gratuitously what the Russians would or would not have done, the explanation is not far to seek. Stalin did not die till 1953, and for the previous ten years, when he first began to trick the Poles out of their independence, he had so acted as to destroy any American confidence. He had confirmed the impression that he would take full advantage of every weakness, but the Berlin airlift and the Korean War both showed that he was unwilling to fly to conclusions where he encountered sufficient resolution. This became, and has remained, a guiding principle of American policy.

It is a surprising thing, seeing that fifty years ago the American Army had very little prestige among Americans, what an immense position the Pentagon has come to hold. We shall understand this better if we do not represent it to ourselves in military terms, but think of the men in the Pentagon as technologists and scientists, men who control scientific powers of destruction, and are therefore formidable, especially when they have developed a personal interest in the performance of the weapons they have been encouraged to make. The rivalry of the Pentagon is a reflection on the State Department as a Department which events have overtaken. Its members have the sensation, even more than the British Foreign Office staff has, of a rapid expansion over the last forty years which has yet not been sufficient to keep the Department in the same position of