UNITED NATIONS: The Bad Loser

Whenever men recall the 15th General Assembly of the United Nations in years to come, the image before their mind’s eye would be that of Nikita Khrushchev, grinning like a delinquent adolescent as he pounded his desk and shouted. By his own doing, Khrushchev last week engraved himself upon the world’s memory as a man indifferent to or contemptuous of civilized restraint and parliamentary procedures, a dictator deluded by the conviction that his vast power frees him from the obligation to show a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.

Khrushchev seemed to suffer from a totalitarian’s inability to listen to any point of view but his own. But then, he is not used to sitting quietly in parliamentary bodies where everyone may speak freely in turn. As the week began, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. emboldened by the Assembly’s 70-0 vote endorsing his policies in the Congo, briefly but eloquently punctured Khrushchev’s proposal to abolish the office of Secretary-General in favor of a veto-ridden three-man directorate. Implicitly accusing the Soviets of trying to oust him because he had opposed their attempts to subvert the Congo in defiance of U.N. resolutions, Hammarskjold took up their challenge. Said he: “I would rather see the office of Secretary-General break on strict adherence to the principles of independence, impartiality and objectivity than drift on the basis of compromise.”

As the vast majority of delegates in the high-domed Assembly hall broke into applause, Khrushchev, with a mocking leer, began to hammer his clenched fist on his green-topped desk. Whirling in surprise, stolid Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko stared at his boss for a second, then hastily assumed a dutiful grin and began to pound away himself.

The Cheerleader. A few hours later Khrushchev resumed his cheerleading at an attraction more to his liking: a 4½-hour anti-U.S. farrago by Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Castro made the first of several hundred misstatements of fact when he declared royally that “we” will “endeavor to be brief.” As he speechified on and on, more than half his audience, notably including India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, gradually drifted out of the Assembly. But Khrushchev with grim determination hung on, saluted savage Castro blasts at the U.S. by raising his right arm. Each time he did so, the Communist and Cuban claques in the Assembly, including reporters strategically scattered through the press gallery, set up a wild cheering calculated to convince radio listeners in Havana that Fidel was sweeping the world’s assembled statesmen off their feet. No Conclusions. Khrushchev’s overriding purpose last week—if he had one—was to establish himself as the friend and protector of all the uncommitted. His plan to replace the office of Secretary-General with a three-headed executive composed of one Westerner, one Communist and one neutralist was more than just a scheme to get rid of Dag Hammarskjold and reduce the U.N. to impotence; it was also calculated to appeal to neutralist vanities. So was the disarmament ploy that he unveiled at midweek: an offer to resume the discussions that Russia walked out of last June, provided that the ten-nation Disarmament Committee was expanded by five to include Indonesia, Mexico, Ghana. India and the U.A.R. Outside the Assembly chamber, Khrushchev tirelessly wooed such neutralists as Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito and Ghana’s President Nkrumah at a dizzying succession of cocktail parties, dinners and calculatedly casual encounters.

But among the African countries, Khrushchev only raised hackles by his obstinate attempt to act like a spokesman for a group that had already rejected his right to do so. With the exception of Ghana’s Nkrumah (who suggested that perhaps the U.N. should have three deputy Secretary-Generals), no one showed even faint enthusiasm for the Soviet plan to reorganize Hammarskjold out of a job. Khrushchev’s airy claim that he and Tito had “fully” patched up their longstanding quarrel was belied by his own implicit admission that, in fact, they had not come to terms on i) their deep ideological differences, 2) Khrushchev’s plan to get rid of Hammarskjold. And even

Nkrumah, emerging from his third session with Khrushchev in a week, admitted somewhat unhappily that so far their discussion had produced “no conclusions.”

Get Cool, Boy. Khrushchev’s temper seemed to worsen as the week wore on; he had the air of a man looking for a target. The target appeared in the shape of Britain’s urbane Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. who flew into New York last week determined, against the advice of his own Foreign Office, to dispense calm and conciliation.* (Just before his departure from London, Macmillan confided to a fellow Tory that his message for Khrushchev was epitomized in a song from West Side Story: “Get cool. boy. Got a rocket in your pocket/ Take it slow and, Daddy-O, you can live it up and die in bed.”)

Macmillan’s first major task in New York was an embarrassing one: burying the hatchet with Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. As Sir Anthony Eden’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Macmillan had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Britain’s 1956 Suez invasion, which sought to topple Nasser. Now, swallowing his pride, Macmillan made a penitential journey to pay a call on Nasser, posed awkwardly for photographers beside the dictator of the Nile, who grinned.

Translation, Please. Late in the week, Macmillan rose in the General Assembly to outline his proposal for new technical studies of disarmament problems. His speech was a masterful display of the British parliamentary manner, inflicting heavy damage on an opponent in the kindliest possible manner. While Khrushchev scowled, Macmillan paid tribute to Dag Hammarskjold, then proceeded to deplore on behalf of “the peoples of the world” the collapse of the Paris summit last May. At that, Khrushchev slammed his fist on the table, shot his right arm into the air and bellowed raucously: “You send your planes over our country. You are guilty of aggression.”

Spinning in their seats, scores of delegates, including India’s Nehru, stared at Khrushchev incredulously. Unruffled, Macmillan went on to gibe at Soviet talk of colonialism in Africa. Where are the representatives of Britain’s former colonies?, he asked. “Here, here, here and here”—pointing around the big semicircle where sat the delegates of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Ghana, Malaya. “The Soviet authorities would do better to explain why they have consistently denied the right of self-determination to the people of East Germany.” Khrushchev glowered. Macmillan went on to lay the blame for the failure of past disarmament negotiations on Moscow’s refusal to accept workable controls. Khrushchev’s roar rang through the chamber. “You accept our disarmament proposals,” he shouted, “and we will accept any form of controls.”

Still shouting, Khrushchev bounced to his feet and waved his stubby fist in Macmillan’s direction until he was gaveled into silence by Assembly President Boland. As the boss of all the Russians slumped back into his chair, Macmillan remarked: “I should like that to be translated if he wants to say anything.” A wave of nervous laughter swept the Assembly, and when Macmillan at last finished, he got more applause than any speaker since the opening of the Assembly session.

The Uses of Thunder. But though they sympathized with Macmillan, some of the neutralists were distressed by the cold-war thunder his speech evoked from Khrushchev. In shrewd awareness of this effect, Khrushchev continued to denigrate Britain’s Prime Minister. Chatting with newsmen as he awaited Macmillan’s ar rival for a private conference with him, Khrushchev, with deliberate offensiveness, compared him with a man whose policies Macmillan, as a prewar M.P., had bitterly opposed—Neville Chamberlain. Said Khrushchev: “Chamberlain said he had come to terms with Hitler and there would be no war. Macmillan said he had talked with Adenauer and there would be no war.” Face to face with Macmillan in a two-hour talk, Khrushchev was more courteous—but so intransigent that Macmillan canceled plans to return to London in favor of a weekend strategy conference with Dwight Eisenhower.

With the titans staring each other down, the neutralists seized their chance to be helpful. Most of their ideas seemed to be aimed at appeasing Khrushchev in order to display their even-handedness between East and West. With the support of some African delegates embittered by alleged rude treatment at the hands of New York waiters and cab drivers, Indonesia’s showboating President Sukarno told the Assembly that he favored Khrushchev’s proposal to move U.N. headquarters away from New York to an “uncommitted nation.” At week’s end, Tito summoned all the top neutralists to a “neutralist summit meeting” at the Yugoslav U.N. mission—Sukarno, Nehru, Nkrumah and Nasser. After three hours’ talk, they agreed on a General Assembly resolution urging a meeting between Khrushchev and President Eisenhower.

Once More the Gavel. This was the best break Khrushchev had got all week. A meeting with Dwight Eisenhower, without any Khrushchev concessions or apologies in advance, would be a Soviet diplomatic victory. Apparently encouraged, Khrushchev decided to thunder some more. He turned up at the U.N., got the floor, seizing on a Nepalese motion calling for full Assembly debate on the question of Red China’s admission to the U.N.

Padding up to the rostrum, Khrushchev began with a deceptively calm appeal to the neutralists. Said he: “There cannot be any disarmament without China. There cannot be any normal work of the United Nations without China.” Then, as the spirit moved him, he embarked on wholesale denunciation of the West and all its works. While the usually impassive Dag Hammarskjold smiled down from his seat a few feet above the rostrum, Khrushchev flailed the air with a clenched fist and shouted that Hammarskjold was “a creature of the imperialists.” A few moments later, in a lightning transition, he labeled Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco “the hangman of the Spanish people.”

Spanish Delegate Jose Felix de Lequerica sprang shouting to his feet, treating Khrushchev to a taste of the same medicine he had administered to Macmillan. Furiously, Khrushchev babbled on, ignoring both Lequerica and the gaveling of Assembly President Boland, until at last he noticed that his microphone had been turned off and translation of his speech discontinued. To Boland’s gentle reminder that it was out of order to make personal attacks on another chief of state, Khrushchev snarled: “What would happen to the U.N. if you do not admit China and if we were to go away from the U.N.—we, the socialist countries—and if we were to organize our own U.N. . . . This is what would be the burying ground of the U.N.—its tomb. There would be no more U.N. but only blocs of states that are at war with each other. We do not wish that.”

For a few moments more, pudgy Nikita Khrushchev ranted on. Then he stalked out of the Assembly, answering the applause of the Communist claque by applauding himself as he went. Behind him, he left the dazed Assembly to adjourn for the weekend.

More and more, Khrushchev sounded like a man who had lost his strategic bearings and was striking out indiscriminately at targets of opportunity in the vague hope that, sooner or later, he might strike a vital spot.

* Speaking to the home folks from New York, he said he wished that everyone would get back to the pre-summit mood: “It needs a little loss of face, if you like.”