In any case, when President Roosevelt announced at a press conference on March 19th that we would host a world food conference, it was big news. It was especially newsworthy that day in the State Department, which had not previously known that it was planning a world food conference.

Certainly the 1943 food conference was regarded as news by the newsmen gathered round the President that day, and the resulting questions and answers produced one of those hilarious occasions which President Roosevelt always seemed to enjoy so much. Asked if the conference would be in Washington, the President said he hoped not because it would be dreadful to subject the delegates to Washington. He thought it should be held in some small town, to encourage the delegates to get to know each other.

Asked if newsmen would be permitted to cover the food conference, the President said he hoped not, and laughed. We are seeking efficiency in the food discussions, he said. Then, of course, he was asked whether reporters were not efficient. Sometimes, said the President, they were too efficient and this slowed down the

discussions.

If all this sounds rather up-to-date, so does the furor which developed from the President's announcement that he would not permit reporting at the Hot Springs Conference. Under Roosevelt's guidance, said Arthur Krock in the New York Times of April 4, 1943, "this Administration has been more assiduous in attempts to suppress unwelcome news than any other this correspondent has observed in action." Quoting a colleague, he went on: "The President's notion of a free press is quite different from our own. We talk of freedom of information, really, whereas he talks of how to get his point

across. His interest is in how a free press can best be used." I remind you that these timeless opinions are from the ancient history of 20 years ago.

But the most eloquent protest came from an Army wife who complained to the President in a letter to the Kansas City Star that, "You don't seem to want us housewives, via the newspapers, peeking over your shoulders while you measure in the baking powder and the toasted breadcrumbs of the future. We've got to eat the stuff..

"

Whether by design or by accident, the fact that the Hot Springs Conference was surrounded with soldiers resulted in far more publicity than the organizers of a conference generally manage to procure for it by the more normal means of piquing the curiosity of journalists. Newspaper readers and radio listeners were privileged in those weeks to learn something about the postwar food problem because the press corps, outraged at its exclusion from the proceedings, descended on Hot Springs determined to report every scrap of information it could get.

Once the conference got going, the American delegation persuaded the White House to loosen up on security arrangements and let reporters mingle with the delegates in the hotel grounds— though not to attend the conference sessions. But no one ever found out-because no one ever asked whether President Roosevelt's press conference remarks about excluding reporters were made to keep them out or to excite their interest. My own guess is that the purpose was to get more coverage rather than less.

The State Department may or may not have learned about the Hot Springs Conference first in the newspapers, but it certainly lost no time in getting on with the job. Nowadays we plan

a gathering like tomorrow's World Food Congress more than a year in advance. But President Roosevelt's first announcement was in March and the conference was in full swing 2 months later, in May. Judge Marvin Jones, soon to be United States War Food Administrator, lent his distinction and his political experience to the exacting task of chairing the conference. And buried deep among the technicians in the Canadian delegation was a bright young career diplomat named Lester Pearson.

In the midst of the uproar about news reporting, the Hot Springs Conference got down to business in framing proposals that were news indeed. An Interim Commission, chaired by Lester Pearson, was set up to produce a specific plan for a permanent organization in the field of food and agriculture. Three months after the war was over, the labors of Mr. Pearson and his colleagues had produced, at a meeting in Quebec, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The story of the infancy and the adaptation and maturation of the FAO-the gradual shift from emphasis on the collection and exchange of information to emphasis on executive direction of operational programs over the past 18 years-is too well known to this audience to bear repetition here.

Progress of Civilization by Stages

I think we can agree it is a good thing that the pattern of peace was allowed to develop in a fragmented way. In the first place it is much easier to reach international agreement in the relatively "safe," relatively nonpolitical subjects with which the specialized agencies deal. In the second place the world of the 1940's and 1950's was far from ready for an enforcible peace system, and progress in one field of endeavor could not be made to depend on simul

taneous progress in all the others. In the third place the excuse for creating another international organization-adding another fragment to a world pattern for peace-is the very progress of science and technology. Each scientific breakthrough produces international cramp and tension until it is matched by an institutional breakthrough in the same field.

Thus nobody thought of starting a malaria eradication program until, less than 20 years ago, the scientists demonstrated in Sardinia and Egypt and elsewhere that malaria could in fact be stamped out. Then it suddenly seemed ridiculous not to eliminate it from our planet altogether.

Before the invention of the radio there was no need for an international body to divide up the spectrum of radio frequencies. Now so many new uses are elbowing each other in that narrow spectrum that we are to have a big conference in Geneva this autumn to reserve a bloc of frequencies for experimentation in outer space.

Until very recently all the weather bureaus could do in the way of international coopera→ tion was to exchange the information each collected with its own national facilities. But now we can take big strides in combining three new kinds of technology-picture-taking meteorological satellites, communications satellites, and high-speed computers to collect weather information from all over the world, interpret it, and draw a world weather map fast enough to stay ahead of the quick changes in the weather itself. For the first time a World Weather Watch becomes a feasible proposition. And thus does new technology set new tasks for international organization.

Civilization does progress by stages. It is good that, within the frontiers of specialties like

agriculture, health, and the physical sciences, we are beginning to demonstrate that men can get along with each other without an intolerable amount of friction and confusion-just as we are beginning to demonstrate within the frontiers of nations that men can get along with each other without an intolerable amount of bloodshed.

It is good that scientists can speak the same language, even through an interpreter; that physicians can cooperate with each other in a global war on disease; that farmers can teach each other how to get higher yields without politics getting too much in the way.

So we salute the growth of the FAO and its sister agencies, and we shall continue to press for steady improvement in their operations.

All this is good, but it is not enough. The spawning of new technologies is not all beneficent. The technology of atomic fission and fusion can provide electric power for national development; it can also incinerate all life in the Northern Hemisphere.

The parochialism of each major field of knowledge is not necessarily an improvement on the more familiar parochialism of nationstates, unless the demonstration of experts working with each other on food and health leads in fact to nations working with each other to keep the general peace.

A civilization which guarantees people enough to eat and longer life-and then exposes them to lethal radioactivity-is not moving onward and upward. It is moving sidewise toward a precipice. So the ultimate worth of every specialized or functional body must be measured partly by whether it helps develop the general or political bodies charged with peaceful solution of international conflicts. Every step to strengthen the specialized