The Shark at Bay

Manhattan ship news reporters generally are as adept at prying information out of incoming celebrities as the pilotfish is in deriving sustenance from the shark. Last week these bay-roving reporters latched on to a big one. They got some food for thought but remarkably little nourishment.

The big one was slender Alexander Semenovich Panyushkin, 42, Soviet Russia's new ambassador to the U.S. (TIME, Nov. 3). Ambassador Panyushkin was one of 1,164 passengers aboard the luxury Cunarder Mauretania. As far as the newsmen were concerned he might have been the only one.

Hopes. The newsmen were waiting on the liner's aft veranda deck, shivering slightly in the 39DEG cold, when Panyushkin, hatless and inconspicuous in a long blue overcoat, hove into sight in tow of a Cunard pressagent. When he spotted the group, he fled to a lower deck. The reporters followed, and cornered him.

"I have very bad English," the ambassador began. He smiled pleasantly. A newsreel man assured him that his English was better than Molotov's. If that flattered him, he did not show it. But he managed to get out that he had been Soviet ambassador to China from 1939 to 1944, that his wife, Ekaterina, would join him in January.

Now the questions came fast. Where was his home town? He did not seem to understand. Where was he born? That was easier: "In Kuibyshev, on the Volga River." "We know all about the Volga," a brassy chap informed him. "We have a song called The Volga Boatman" "Very nice song," observed the ambassador.

"Mr. Ambassador," he was asked, "how do you feel about peace? Do you have high hopes?" "Hopes, yes. Not high." What about the devaluation of the ruble? "Is very good for Russia." And the end of food rationing? "Is very nice."

Did he think American newspaper attacks on the Soviet had been unfair? He couldn't say anything about that. "But you do hope to promote better relations between the two countries?" Panyushkin's answer: "Everything is possible under the sun."

Bread. Shipmates had noted that Panyushkin, who suffers from stomach trouble, had carried his own black bread and Russian white wine, that he had caviar with his dinner and that he was a good tipper (amounts unspecified). When newsmen got through with him, Ambassador Panyushkin was taken in charge by a State Department representative, the Russian Consul General and six Soviet attaches.

That night he was met in Washington's Union Station by handsome Stanley Woodward, White House and State Department chief of protocol, who welcomes every new chief of mission to Washington. Three days later Panyushkin presented his credentials to Acting Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett, conversed twelve minutes with him. Facing reporters once again, he was asked about the state of U.S.-Soviet relations. "It is a duty of all ambassadors," he replied, through an interpreter, "to try to have normal reciprocal relations."

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