This was a holding action, and it annoyed Eden, though not as much as what Smith did next: He declared his desire—no doubt with American domestic opinion firmly in mind—to make his reservation public. Eden countered by saying he would not release his own proposal to the press, so that Smith would not feel compelled to announce his reservation. “For some reason or other this apparently annoyed the Americans,” he wrote in his diary, an understatement of the first order. Smith was outraged by what he called, in a cable to Dulles, Eden’s “exhibition of impatience and pique.” Despite the foreign
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