Word: summitted
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Over the four weeks since the Big Four foreign ministers first assembled in Geneva's Palais des Nations, the Western position had boiled down to a single basic proposal: the U.S., Britain and France would give Khrushchev a summit meeting in return for Russian agreement that the Western powers are entitled to maintain occupation forces in Berlin, and to unhindered access to the city via East Germany...
...Herter well knew, however, this did not imply an iota of change in Gromyko's stand. And as if to make that clear, the Soviet Foreign Minister for the first time adopted a threatening note over Western insistence that there must be progress at Geneva to justify any summit talks. Said Gromyko: "Should any state put up ... obstacles to a summit meeting, that state will take responsibility for the consequences...
...undercut the Western position still further came unmistakable signals from Britain that, to Tories and Socialists alike, the Geneva stalemate simply made a summit conference more urgent than ever. Said Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: "We cannot abandon the people of West Berlin ... On the other hand, we have to be reasonable and try to work out new arrangements . . ." At a miners' rally in Wales before a crowd of 50,000, mercurial Aneurin Bevan, the man who would be Britain's Foreign Secretary if Labor should win the next election, cast responsibility to the winds. "There is no justification...
...Charge? Perhaps Nikita Khrushchev had never wanted summit talks enough to pay any substantial price for them. But however badly he wanted them, the Western performance last week was likely to encourage him in the belief that he need not pay much of anything at all. Skillfully as they had defended their positions in the first weeks of the conference, Herter and his colleagues had now seriously to consider whether anything short of a Western walkout at Geneva could convince Moscow that it had anything to lose by playing it tough...
...clear fact that was emerging from the Geneva talks is that if the West has little to hope for at the summit, it has little to fear either. The Western position has proved sturdy despite the allies' much-publicized suspicions of one another. Perhaps significant concessions by one side or the other might come out of a summit meeting. But, as Geneva has shown, they are not likely to be the result of impulse or mistaken trust by either side...