PERIPATETICS: Visit to a Mountaintop

In less than a month Pandit Nehru had traveled 10,000 miles, from Washington to New York to San Francisco and back again to New York. As his trip neared its end, he seemed to grow less & less tired despite the incessant strain of meeting people and making speeches. “Why, in India,” he remarked to exhausted newsmen who trailed him across the continent, “I work much harder. This is nothing.”

A Wonderful Guy. Nehru had seen a panorama of power and plenty. He had visited the great Norris dam of TVA—”a legend in my country,” he said—and the assembly line of the International Harvester’s tractor plant near Chicago. He had leaned across barbed-wire fences of Illinois farms, to see the smug, snug barns, to marvel at a two-row mechanical picker clanking into a rich cornfield. He sat down in a neat white frame house to a threshers’ dinner (chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, corn, carrots, apple pie with cheese). Once he stopped off for a bemused inspection of a drugstore and an A & P.

Last week, Nehru drove to Princeton, spent an hour with Albert Einstein. Back in Manhattan, Nehru relaxed like any tourist, took in some Broadway shows. First he saw Lost in the Stars (a musical drama about South Africa’s racial problem). Then he managed the feat of getting tickets to South Pacific (they were presented to him by Co-author Oscar Hammerstein II), raptly watched Actress Mary Martin sing and prance through I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy. Later, in her dressing room, he met Miss Martin (who wore a flowing negligee). Said India’s Prime Minister: “Enchanting. Delightful.” Said Miss Martin: “This is such an honor.” During the intermission, the Prime Minister submitted to a minor slight: teen-age autograph hunters rushed Cinemactress Ann Sheridan before tackling him.

Everywhere Nehru went, people crowded to see him. Nehru spoke vaguely but sincerely against ill will and fear among men. He delivered—and was applauded for—some resounding platitudes (“We can avoid war by working for peace”). He told Americans about Mahatma Gandhi: “He believed we must never justify a good end by bad means.” He asked for friendly aid for building up free India: “We don’t want something for nothing, [but] we need help on terms we can meet.” India, he said, is “only temporarily poor.”

The Prime Minister still would not openly align India with the Western democracies against Communism. But Washington hoped that what Pandit Nehru had learned about the U.S. during his visit might prove more important in years to come than any present commitments he might have made.

A Child of the Mountains. At White Sulphur Springs, where he spent a weekend as guest of Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, Nehru explained some things he had learned. At a brilliant dinner (among the guests: Banker Winthrop Aldrich, Railroader Robert Young, Publisher Eugene Meyer), Johnson introduced Nehru as “a man of rare truth.” Nehru rose to speak, as usual seeming only to be thinking out loud. “I am a child of the mountains . . .” he said. “Sometimes you are on the mountaintops and can see the fields and the sun. Then, often enough, you are in the valley, but you can see the mountaintop. That is enough. I had been told, I must confess, that most Americans are very hard, very businesslike. I have found no hard side. I have found Americans very emotional and sentimental . . .

“We have come down a long trail . . . We may stumble, but we will get up … Raising India to its feet means hard work. Not so flashily dramatic, but quiet hard work. We may be on a mountaintop sometimes, and again in a valley below. This visit here is like a visit to the mountaintop, and I shall remember it when I am in the valley below. . .”

As he flew homeward this week, Americans were still far from sure what the truth was that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stood for; but they sensed in him, if not rare truth, a rare heart.