The Method in Khrushchev's Madness

...However, in the weeks that Khrushchev has been gone, the Soviets and their satellites have not budged an inch from the line that he had laid down...

...These, however, were all tactical points which did not require the presence of the Soviet Premier...

...The Khrushchev who could snappily tell David Susskind that he demanded the respect due the Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers was utterly unperturbed at having to wait outside his house for three quarters of an hour until Fidel Castro turned up for dinner...

...Here Richard C. Hottelet, a Columbia Broadcasting System correspondent who covered the UN sessions daily, indicates that behind the much-publicized table-thumping and shoe-waving is a long-range Kremlin strategy designed to reduce the effectiveness of the UN and its Secretary General in any future crises such as the Congo...

...Hammarskjold might help get it started...

...Opinions may still vary over how much Khrushchev gained or lost, but one political fact already emerges: As things stand now, the ability of the United Nations to move into a power vacuum, as it moved into the Congo last summer, has been paralyzed...

...The Soviet bloc also keeps hacking away at Secretary General Ham-marskjold...

...If Khrushchev and his strategists had felt that he moved in the wrong direction or went too far, his departure would have provided a convenient excuse to correct the mistake...

...Khrushchev's purpose in coming to New York is probably more clearly defined in the concrete terms of the Congo crisis and its direct implications than in the light of more general objectives, such as embarrassing the United States and winning over neutrals — although both sets of considerations are closely linked...

...There had been talk that Ham-marskjold might use his diplomatic skill in such highly charged issues as South Africa's apartheid: there had been a faint hope that if negotiation of the Algerian problem were possible at all...

...Simultaneously, the Soviets will try to prevent other powers or groups from interfering with their plans...

...Certainly he shocked all those who prefer to see international diplomat) carried on rationally and with decorum...

...The Communists denounce as illegal the special field missions that Hammarskjold has sent to places like Laos, Lebanon and Jordan in order to alleviate tension and to establish a calming UN presence...

...Seen in this light, Khrushchev's pranks during his latest trip to the UN acquire clearer and more logical outline...

...Soviet and satellite speakers heap abuse upon Hammarskjold and his staff in every committee at every opportunity, whether the subject is refugees, surplus food, legal concepts or a procedural dispute over Oman...

...Consistency has never been an obsession in the Kremlin, nor has a presumptive loss of face ever deterred Moscow from changing course to catch the prevailing wind...

...Many observers of Nikita Khrushchev's historic United Nations visit felt that it was all bluff and boorish-ness...

...No doubt these countries figured very prominently in his plans, but the verb "to woo" tends to oversimplify a multiple and complex approach in which flattery is only one of many elements...

...But to the less sophisticated, to those who are making their first appearance on the world stage, to some of the uncommitted nations who have no particular stake in punctilio, the spokesman for the Soviet Union conveyed an impression of brute strength...

...Pride, manners and inhibitions were tossed aside as Khrushchev plunged into the newest diplomacy with all his animal vigor...

...The campaign is pressed systematically, purposefully...

...But it is admitted privately that the Soviets have already achieved part of what Khrushchev came to accomplish...

...could be seen leaning over backward not to give him any cause to do it again...

...His receiving the Algerian nationalists, granting them de facto recognition and promising them help was a political act...

...People who know the Secretary General well say that this pressure will not move him to resign—nor will it influence his action in the Congo or his exercise of authority inside the Secretariat...

...They had installed trusted collaborators in positions of influence...

...But throughout his stay, he acted as he pleased— dropping and again quickly asserting his dignity...

...The UN undertaking, starting from nothing...

...What was it that justified his non-stop campaign of 25 days at the UN while all manner of problems piled up at home...

...The General Assembly did, indeed, override Soviet objections in several votes and turn up majorities for the Western position in various procedural decisions—most importantly in refusing to discuss the admission of Red China at this session...

...Most observers felt that Khrushchev had come largely to woo the neutral, wobbling or newly emerging states, many of whose leaders he had drawn to New York...

...It now rests entirely with the United States and the free nations to provide imaginative leadership, to infuse the UN with the strength and purpose that will change the present climate, asserting in the field of economic growth, political conciliation and security a pattern of United Nations action that Khrushchev will not be able to challenge without isolating himself from the majority of mankind...

...His pantomime balcony interviews on Park Avenue were pure burlesque, and his visits to waiting reporters at the gate of his Glen Cove estate might strike any normal person as simply asinine...

...In each case Mos-cow will seek to provide both an intensification of the problem and its "solution...

...Since he persisted in his efforts nevertheless, it may be assumed that he saw the likelihood of an indirect return large enough to offset the humiliation of the inevitable direct setback...

...They are still aiming for a special session of the General Assembly next spring, as Khrushchev originally proposed, and it is altogether possible that they will get it for him on his terms...

...The hopeful concept of preventive diplomacy in the name of all nations to limit the spread and the effects of the cold war has been rendered null and void...

...At that time his warning that the UN would meet the fate of the League of Nations if it flouted Soviet wishes (uttered in connection with Laos) was buried in the rosy optimism that surrounded Camp David...

...He wanted a top-level plenary debate as soon as possible on his disarmament plan, his declaration on colonialism and the Soviet accusation that the U-2 and the RB-47 incidents proved the United States guilty of aggression...

...Khrushchev also clearly fell short of achieving his maximum goals in several other respects...

...Once he started pounding his desk the neutral nations were visibly less inclined than ever to take sides in questions that could give rise to controversy...

...In the deliberations everyone has kept his shoes on and no one has hammered on his desk, but hardly a day has gone by without a bitter attack upon Hammarskjold personally or upon his organization...

...Certainly churlish, clodhopping comedy is the most apt general description of his public behavior, reaching its lowest point in the fantastic episode during which he beat his desk with his shoe, after pounding on it with both fists in kettledrum fashion had failed to give him enough satisfaction...

...The lid is still on in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, but everything about them justifies the fear that they could become another Congo...

...The great Soviet opportunity for expansion today lies in the existence or the creation of power vacuums...

...In using Cuba to destroy the Organization of American States and to cancel the Monroe Doctrine, the Kremlin is working to eliminate the most potent opposition to its further efforts in Latin America...

...Nikita Khrushchev was faced with the sudden transformation of the UN from fig leaf to functioning entity, setting a precedent that justified Moscow's most serious conclusions...

...A vacuum can be contrived geo-graphically as in Berlin, or in the political dimension as in Khrushchev's regrouping of nations to form a "neutral camp...

...The Soviets had begun their Congo operation before the Belgians granted independence...

...Khrushchev himself listed three main political targets in the General Assembly...

...Some people dismiss Khrushchev's boorishness as at least a tactical error, and use a kind of numbers game to prove their point...

...so was kissing Fidel Castro in Harlem and not going to Havana...

...The\ refuse to pay for UN activities of which they disapprove, such as the UN Special Representative for Hungary and the UN Commission for the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea...

...What had the ruler of the Soviet Union come to New York to accomplish...

...But none can have been more surprised by the summer's events than the men in the Kremlin...

...Even before he left it was clear that he had placed his mark on the United Nations...

...Khrushchev also operated more pointedly on a bilateral basis...

...At the same time he has added his voice to that of the other Communist nations in demanding elimination of the principle that individual countries will be represented on the UN Secretariat staff according to the level of their contributions...

...These may be the product of historical development, accompanying the frantic surge of nationalism as in Africa, or latent in bitter social dislocation under a crust of order and stability as in Latin America...

...By making Hammarskjold a controversial figure they have seri ously reduced, if not destroyed, his effectiveness for crises in the future...

...That this is no hasty conclusion but a carefully weighed policy judgment is reflected in the warning Khrushchev addressed to the UN during his American trip in September 1959...

...Since his departure, however, a pattern has emerged reflecting what many observers had suspected all along—that the mad buffoonery of this remarkable little man held a cold core of political method...

...In ridiculing and paralyzing the United Nations lies Khrushchev's best chance of regaining a free hand, or at least ensuring a future free hand elsewhere in the world...

...Like a gambler in an Old West saloon who kicks over the table when the game goes against him, Khrushchev may be said to have cut more an impressive than a ridiculous figure—especially when, after breaking up one session of the Assembly in disorder—something that had never happened before— everyone, including the United States...

...He posed as a man strong enough to disregard or destroy whatever stands in his way...

...Showing great bonhomie toward all who seemed receptive...

...By Richard C. Hottelet The Method in Khrushchev's Madness Behind the UN antics lies a drive to create power vacuums the Soviets may fill alone WHILE NIKITA Khrushchev was leading the Soviet delegation at the 15th United Nations General Assembly, his whirling dervish antics kept the air too full of dust to see what he was about and what he had accomplished...

...With regard to the Congo, where the cost of the United Nations programs will total hundreds of millions of dollars, the Czechoslovak representative has accused members of the UN mission in the Congo of having transmitted "big sums" to the "enemies" of the central (Lumumba) Government...

...Leading this enterprise was a strong-willed man who was not hobbled by detailed instructions but whom the characteristically vague directives of the Security Council left free to interpret the needs of the hour in the light of the UN Charter and of his conscience...

...soon took form as a monumental enterprise...

...The United Nations also seemed a convenient means by which the Soviet Union could openly influence and direct Congolese affairs...

...makes it most unlikely that the Assembly would override the veto...

...and well-informed neutral sources see reason to believe that the bloody mutiny of the Force Publique which started the Congo on the road to chaos was planned and instigated by the Soviets...

...Looking ahead in Africa, there is every prospect of further trouble...

...When the breakdown came, the UN must have appeared to Moscow as the ideal instrument with which to sweep out the last of Belgian in-influence...

...In the field of disarmament Communist spokesmen are making the same extreme demands, threatening, as before, to walk out of the discussions whenever they feel the time is right for them...

...The budget committee, which deals with what one might consider the dry and undramatic details of money and housekeeping, gives off showers of sparks as the Communist delegates try to immobilize the Secretary General by cutting off his funds...

...In the face of rising costs and expanding functions, they want next year's budget cut by a flat 25 per cent...

...He has described UN moves as "dirty acts," Hammarskjold's directives as hypocritical and arbitrary, and declared that the Soviet bloc could not be expected to finance "the imperialist conspiracy in Africa and elsewhere in the world...

...In general, the fact that Khrushchev was not immediately 100 per cent successful does not mean that he failed...

...The vacuum which the Kremlin wanted to help create in the heart of Africa—so that it might then be filled with Soviet power— was suddenly filled by the United Nations...

...Success and failure can be judged only in terms of the real endeavor...

...Instead, they want Communists to share a tripartite equality of placement with Western nationals and neutrals—which would, of course, insert more men at all levels of the Secretariat to carry out Soviet directives...

...Since Khrushchev left, most of the work at the UN has been divided among the full Assembly and its seven committees, to which most agenda items are assigned for preliminary treatment...

...He saw the UN as a collective agency for peace, intervening to keep the tensions of the cold war from sweeping into low-pressure areas such as the Congo...

...Neither appeals to Dag Ham-marskjold's "chivalry" and "courage" nor the most injurious, personal insults succeeded in forcing the Secretary General's resignation...

...Khrushchev's flailing and ranting seems to have no connection with his effort to win friends...

...Were that to happen, the Soviet Union could be counted on to veto the kind of UN operation that blocked its own plans for the Congo this summer: and if an appeal from such a stalemate were taken to the General Assembly, the mood of this 15th session, which Khrushchev helped to set...

...As for reshaping the Secretariat into an impotent, three-headed monster, it was obvious to Khrushchev that this or any similar scheme for amending the UN charter to suit his wishes would be blocked by a Western veto even if he could drum up a numerical majority in the General Assembly and in the Security Council...