Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin A Close-Up of Smiling Mike' CHAMBERLIN SOVIET AMBASSADOR to the United States Mikhail ("Smiling Mike") Menshikov recently made a round of...
...Apparently, "Smiling Mike" loses no opportunity to live up to the classical 17th-century definition of an ambassador: "An honest man sent abroad to lie for the Commonwealth...
...Menshikov, with a great show of patient objectivity, explained that the Soviet Union did not claim, yet, to be a paradise but was making great economic and' social progress...
...So, when someone asked, him whether Boris Pasternak would be allowed to receive the Nobel Prize, "Smiling Mike" launched off into a long disertation about what a poor novel Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone was...
...To be sure, his two speeches, one delivered to a limited-invitation audience under the auspices of the World Affairs Council, the other at a much larger meeting under the joint sponsorship of the Harvard Law School Forum and United Nations Council, were completely uninformative...
...The question that seemed to cause "Smiling Mike" most concern at the World Affairs Council reception was worded somewhat as follows: "Mr...
...There was a little flutter in the audience and "Smiling Mike" took a brief time-out to adjust his defense mechanism...
...The envoy never lost his temper or refused to answer...
...When a similar question about Hungary was put bv some young man speaking with an accent perhaps a Hungarian refugee there was prolonged demonstrative applause and there was audible jeers when the same lame justification was trotted out...
...With some hemming and hawing and a "more in sorrow than in anger" pose he then conceded that the Hungarian people had some grievances, which could and should have been adjusted peacefully...
...It was in answering questions that "Smiling Mike" displayed considerable versatility, imagination and adeptness in the art of evading anything inconvenient by blandly talking about something else...
...His manner and method would probably carry greatest weight with ignorant and un-sophisticated conservatives...
...For he looks the opposite of the American mental image of a Communist...
...How successful is this technique, as contrasted with the surly aloofness of most of his predecessors in Washington...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin A Close-Up of Smiling Mike' CHAMBERLIN SOVIET AMBASSADOR to the United States Mikhail ("Smiling Mike") Menshikov recently made a round of appearances in the Boston-Cambridge area...
...MVD was written all over him...
...Let's forget all about it...
...Some fastidious persons may have raised their eyebrows at the timing of the Ambassador's speeches which closely coincided with the second anniversary of the Hungarian fight for freedom But after watching the diplomat in action on two occasions it was easy to see how he acquired his nickname...
...Then the Soviet Government at the request of the Hungarian Government, and acting in strict accord with its treaty obligations had to intervene and put these bad people down His approach was suffused with the attitude: "This was an 2 fortunate business...
...I overheard such remarks as "He is a master of evasion," and one young woman burst out with a laughing "There he goes again" when the Ambassador suggested with a straight face that the "German people" should decide their own unification-as if the Germans to the Soviet Zone hadn't tried to do this, only to run up tanks, in 1953...
...So far as I could judge from the reactions of the audience in Cambridge, not very successful...
...Another inquirer asked: "If Communism has created such a paradise in Russia, why was the workers' district on the Czsepel Island one of the main centers of resistance in Hungary...
...he merely turned to something else...
...But in general, putting questions to "Smiling Mike" was something like attacking a tank with a peashooter...
...The going for "Smiling Mike" was somewhat rougher at the larger meeting, because the audience was generally younger...
...But some wicked fascists got into the act, and began to go around hanging not only Communists, but "peaceful scientists...
...Menshikov repeated without a hair's breadth of deviation, down to the use of standard abusive cliches, the main propositions of Soviet foreign policy, as laid down in Khrushchev's speeches and in Soviet notes and official pronouncements Perhaps his orthodoxy was stimulated by the presence on the platform on both occasions of a mysterious person who said nothing and who was not introduced to the audiences...
...Confronted with a statement from Soviet Minister of Culture Mikhailov that works which do not coincide with the aims of Soviet society are not published, Menshikov replied that Soviet citizens have much more freedom than people in other countries...
...Ambassador, how do you reconcile the admirable sentiments you have been expressing about peace and the right of all peoples, large and small, to decide their own affairs and choose their own political and economic institutions with something that happened just two years ago: the crushing of the Hungarian freedom movement by the overwhelming force of the Red Army...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 41
