toward the end of night

...But it remains, to surprise us for the moment, that they speak for African states, those symbols of the new nationalism, and stand behind Hammarskjold, the archetype of supra-nationalism, while Mr...

...In 1954, Krishna came in himself to drink an orange crush and brought his Asian friends, the Burmese and the Indonesians...

...the lounge turned Anglo-Indian...

...the new states go, if they go at all, to the reserved, rigidly dis-partisan Secretary General, whose dedication seems to be the summoning of the new world to the rescue of the old...

...For this world is mostly the possession of Dag Hammarskjold...

...it is, after all, a socialist world...

...It is possible at such moments to conceive him hating himself and weeping when he turned his troops on the Hungarians, confessing at that horrid end a failure of his dream that all men might be trusted to make their own mistakes...

...There woulD be little difference between our society and his if we could not trust other people to make their own mistakes...

...This peculiar city has developed a special civilization of its own, unreal, of course, but not necessarily more unreal than other contemporary civilizations...

...A sample of UN-ese: Two international civil servants are leaving their diving bell for the boiling waters of New York...

...Khrushchev, heir to the conception of the international working-class, is his enemy...

...Its air, summer and winter, is uniform and dehydrating...

...There are even, in fact, moments when he appears to think of a world where there are no policemen and all men are free...

...And these occasions brought back the time when Tallyrand persuaded the Congress of Vienna that Czar Alexander of Russia was so outsize by himself that he must be "grouped" and surrounded and thereby obscured by other heads of state who were his equals only by diplomatic fiction...

...We may, to be sure, be talking only about Kerenskys...

...But heads that can be squarely counted on one side or the other are not heads of much consequence in the new United Nations...

...there is an unrelieved and tedious prospect of unbroken surface...

...What," says one, "did you decide about that matter...

...to his surprise and amusement, his new African brothers all took their seats in sack suits and Paris cut...

...But now he comes here to solicit customers who are, many of them, graduates of the London School of Economics and thus children of Harold Laski and who thus find his manners offensive and must recognize at once that he is a Marxist-Leninist the way the president of the Bell Telephone System is an apostle of David Ricardo...

...What was more to the point, the Africans voted to support Hammarskjold on the Congo, taking their stand at a moment of his particular beleaguerment and comforting us with the knowledge that Mr...

...A wise observer of the United Nations was saying after the Congo vote that he who would move there to his own profit must recognize that, when certain flags go up, an automatic salute is to be expected from the majority...

...Khrushchev seems to have suffered more than anything else from the defect of those very qualities which must contribute most to his popularity at home...

...At the moment when he pounded his flat hand on the table and arose to interrupt Prime Minister Mac-millan, the Chairman of the Supreme Council of Soviets looked like no one so much as the Father Karamazov in the quarters of the elder Zossima when every action designed to draw attention to himself became an embarrassment...

...All the open glass cannot abate the sense of living always indoors and under artificial light, a sense heightened by New York's condition as a city without trees...

...There are far worse things than a world which, if it has slipped from our hands, has also slipped from Khrushchev's...

...Anyone who, like Mr...

...He is an extraordinary fellow, and certainly, when the fit is not upon him, the most adventurous, the most open, the most attractive man in public life, and, in fact, a rare case to come upon in private...

...and Khrushchev, who is no more immune to seduction by the superficial, was certainly as inclined to welcome him...

...The city of the United Nations also has its peculiar conventions...

...The new Africans, being French colonials, drink vermouth cassis, and wear ties with small Eiffel Towers upon them, and seem, with Guinea a Marxist exception, somewhat Gaul-lista...

...Both Great Powers are now in the position of going to a track where horses are running with whose trainers they have no advantage of contact...

...Its dominant figure is young Alex Quai-son-Sackey, the Ghanian Ambassador (Oxford and the University of Tours), with, as Rothwell says, his hyphen, his London tailor, his Scotch-and-water...

...This, of course, is a convention entirely without weight across the street from the United Nations...

...For it is very much another country...

...His excesses of gesture merely lit up by contrast the emergence of a United Nations as a force with its own strength independent of the great powers...

...And yet, every time he has sat in the Assembly and faced the loss of a vote, it is somehow Nikita Khru-chev's dreadful compulsion to cry out that he is awesome and that he is sovereign and to turn and look around to whistle up his vassals and to shout then that the stake is nothing larger than the dignity and majesty of the Soviet Union...

...I suggested," says the other, "that the minister talk to the high commissioner about it...

...The largest work of art on the premises is a mural of twisted, naked bodies, building, thinking, creating, expressing—the commission and gift of Generalissimo Trujillo...

...The world which is slipping through our fingers seems to us incalculable...

...The United Nations may be a fiction, but its characters, after due immersion, act according to the dictates of that fiction and avoid it to their peril...

...When President Olympo gives a small and hopefully decorous party at the Plaza with Nikita Khrushchev MURRAY KEMPTON, columnist for the New York Post, has covered most of the recent doings in and around the United Nations...

...Quaison-Sackey put on his tribal dress for the ceremonies welcoming the new African states...

...Who else would stand on his balcony and listen to the defiance of pickets and shout "Down with Gromyko" back at them in Russian...

...One had to listen to Fidel Castro to hear a speech of pan-Soviet-ism entirely orthodox...

...These are the japes of a man whose target is all established routine and order...

...No one who reads those visions of the underground city where the survivors of the atomic apocalypse commence again to rebuild civilization can escape peopling those pages with United Nations inhabitants in a United Nations building...

...It has even developed its own language, UN-ese...

...The Great Powers do not acquire clients any longer, Khrushchev's acquisition of Castro being a freakish exception...

...They voted in the main with the United States, somewhat to our surprise, against the seating of Mao Tse-tung's Communist China...

...It is no longer theirs to decide...

...he was required to do very little...

...The new African states dominate the stage not merely because they are new and picturesque—they are less picturesque than strangers would have expected them to be—but because they represent the drift of the world away from the great powers and their fixed and frozen positions...

...Khrushchev, relaxed, was all but indistinguishable near the Sudanese...

...the colors are pale decorator...

...To an eye accustomed only to assigning heads to one side or the other, the speech of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, with its valid call for "restitution for years of injustice and crime committed against our continent," looked like a transcript of the Soviet line...

...This world does not sit in uniformly entrancing quarters...

...The lounge, they agreed, had been, not eight years ago, like some Settlers Club in Nairobi, its habitues white hunters who stepped out from time to time to seek some trophy—usually a shot at India's Krishna Menon...

...But Nkrumah, with infrequent excursions, stuck very closely to his native soil...

...A few blocks away, in New York, the world seems frozen, old ladies in the lobby of the Hotel Plaza hissing Nikita Khrushchev to the extreme limit of decorum and Nikita Khrushchev shouting "boo" back at them...

...Are Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev so entirely plausible...

...On the other side, the Soviet Union and its gang, Khrushchev and his vassals, Castro and his subterraneans, hard enemies facing frightened, nervous, and embarrassed ones...

...the world which slips through Nikita Khrushchev's fingers seems to him still calculable, according to a theory he dimly recollects from night school, and that may be his most serious mistake...

...Khrushchev can on occasion read them as badly as we can...

...The United States does not make mistakes quite so conspicuously because the United States, whether through wisdom or carelessness we are unlikely ever to know, does not care to become so involved...

...For this was Dag Hammarskjold's session when it opened, as Khru-schev's truculent, menacing "so far" acknowledged, and it should be his session at its end...

...Khrushchev, is non-interference by established powers...

...The Nineteenth Century's notion of diplomacy, for all the damage of history, is hardier than anyone could have thought...

...The strangest and most conspicuous of these dictates that, when Nikita Khrushchev comes to the General Assembly, he sits as the equal with, say, President Sergio Olympo of Togoland, once branch manager of a soap company...

...in attendance, the host and all other guests are knocked against the walls while a herd of journalists and their mechanical instruments rolls through in search of Khrushchev...

...On the one side, the United States and its gang, the longshoremen carrying their signs, "Khrushchev Pollutes Our Waterfront," the manager of the Hotel Shelburne cursing Fidel Castro, a great nation defending its dignity with its dignity's forfeiture...

...Anti-colonialism is such a flag...

...When Nikita Khrushchev laughs, everything which is non-conventional and yearning to be free laughs with him...

...But, in the United Nations, the same world seemed fluid, transitory, dangerous, of course, but at least adventurous...

...the West came less and less, the British not at all after Suez...

...Now the lounge is African...

...The world is spinning away from both the great powers...

...his words would, for example, have had an effect entirely different if he had merely mentioned the misfortune of Tibet...

...At such tracks, wise men do not bet at all...

...and it was a consequence of Castro's posture that, by going too far, he destroyed a sound speech...

...But, in the great hall itself, the conventional illusion of a General Assembly where all men sit equal works surprisingly well...

...It is a world at once revolutionary and uncommitted, spinning away from our gravitational pull and from Khrushchev's too, on its own orbit.And it could be traveling somewhere towards the end of the long night we have experienced since the war...

...Khrushchev, insists on playing himself rather than his appointed part runs the dreadful risk of at once seeming out of character...

...Just before this session of the Assembly opened, Bruce Rothwell of the London News Chronicle went over his memories with the bartender of the Delegates Lounge and found the whole history of the United Nations in these recollections...

...we must expect it to be neutralist and to declare for an end to colonialism and for disarmament and disengagement, but we forget at peril of misjudgment that it is also fiercely independent...

...they lost and we held our own...

...toward the end of night by MURRAY KEMPTON United Nations, World NO ONE should think about this block of green glass and marble without writing above the record of his reflections the dateline, "United Nations...

...but so, unfortunately for Mr...

...Gromyko is a loyal Bolshevik, but he he is also an old UN-ian...

...We did not bet in the Congo while the Soviets were betting on Patrice Lumumba...

...Secretary of State Herter forthwith assigned Nkrumah to the Soviet bloc...

...He is a Russian where Stalin was a Georgian and the Czars German...

...rampant, he risked seeming only a disorderly person...

...Even Andrei Gromyko was reported shocked at this display...

...There remain automatic salutes to flags...

...Yet it remains in practice an unexpectedly convenient fiction...

...All through the week of September 19, New York looked at a world of two distempered giants...

...Standing on the balcony of his Park Avenue headquarters and playing one of those scenes so calculated to win the appreciation of the largest city of the most comic nation on earth, he sings the Internationale in response to Hunter College girls singing God Bless America across the street and makes it sound like a Russian national anthem...