Friend from the East

Pakistan's Premier Mohammed Ali, a cricket player who also likes baseball, reached the U.S. on a state visit last week too late for the World Series but much impressed by the Cleveland Indians' defeat. "You have proved to me," quipped Ali, whose country is at odds with Nehru's nation, "that the Indians are overrated."

On his 18-day visit, Mohammed Ali plans to make a dozen talks, to see Old Faithful and Mt. Rushmore's heroic sculptures, and to get a medical checkup, a Columbia honorary degree and a tribal welcome from the Blackfeet Indians. This week in Washington he will confer with President Eisenhower on "matters of mutual interest." This month the U.S. plans to send Pakistan its first arms shipment under the new mutual-aid pact.

In all Asia, the U.S. has no better friend than hustling, bustling Mohammed Ali, 45, who runs the world's sixth largest nation (pop. nearly 80 million). "I'm on the side of the U.S.," he has said. "I think personally that the U.S. is doing a great job, and I want to say so."

Son of a rich Bengal landowner, Ali served as an envoy abroad from the time of Pakistan's creation until last year. On a brief trip home, to his surprise, he was chosen Prime Minister--partly because he had not been entangled in politics during his six-year absence. He shook hands with hungry Pakistanis on Karachi's streets, earnestly said: "I am one of you, and I will do all my best."

Pakistan, which was near turmoil when he took over, has become a stable U.S. ally. Ali is cheerfully confident of solving Pakistan's almost insoluble problems: shortages of food, money, industry and skills.

Mohammed Ali developed his unabashed crush on America while serving as his country's ambassador (1952-53). He picked up U.S. slang, went often to watch the Washington Senators, took to bowling with his embassy staff. He drove around most of the 48 states with his pretty wife and two teen-age sons, collecting American gadgets, idiom and ideas.

At his first press conference as Premier, he baffled Pakistan with such phrases as: "That's the $64 question." Pakistan seems taken with his breezy ways; he goes about unescorted, sometimes wears loud sport shirts and a baseball beanie. Recently he even ordered Pakistan traffic, long patterned to the British rule of driving on the left, to move over to the right-hand side of the road, U.S. style.

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