Smiling Mike

The speaker at last week's National Press Club luncheon in Washington was introduced as an "All-American Russian." He was short, of average build, blue-eyed, grey-haired, wearing a neat and conservative suit; his air of aplomb as he looked around the crowded room was that of a subdued advertising executive. He spoke good English, and as he began to read the text of a formal speech he ad-libbed that he liked to ski, swim, play tennis; he broadened that into "good sportsmanship" and that into "good neighbors" and that into "peaceful coexistence."

Then Mikhail Alekseevich Menshikov, 55, new U.S.S.R. Ambassador to the U.S. and first U.S.S.R. ambassador to address the Press Club since Litvinov did it in 1941, got down to the nub of his mission. "If our countries not only normalize their relations but start to live in friendship, their combined efforts will help to clear the atmosphere on our whole planet." The gimmick: a parley at the summit. "The very fact of convening such a conference will have a beneficial influence."

Even when unrehearsed questions came pounding in, Menshikov answered or evaded deftly and pleasantly.

Q. If Russia is so strong internally, why are purges necessary?

A. I can say that we are very strong. I don't know what purges you have in mind.

Q. What about the longstanding phony U.S.S.R. charge that the U.S. used germ warfare in Korea? A. You have something here like the $64,000 question.

And when Menshikov was all through, the Press Club gave him a standing round of applause that added a laurel to the new Kremlin legend of "Smiling Mike."

Love Those Kids! Menshikov arrived in the U.S. by Soviet jet transport a month ago. "I have been sent to your country as ambassador of peace," he proclaimed, and as he began to gravitate around official Washington, usually accompanied by his handsome wife, often talking about "my four kids," he seemed bent on making a case for it. Menshikov paid beaming calls upon Eisenhower (twice), Nixon (once), and Dulles (twice). He skirted precedent by calling upon members of the President's personal staff, first off Sherman Adams, explaining with a big smile that "I'm not very strict on protocol."

Menshikov courted the U.S. loyal opposition by dining with Adlai Stevenson and giving him some tourist tips for his coming trip to the U.S.S.R.--"I will give you my assurance that you will be welcome everywhere." He began to touch bases on Capitol Hill, calling one by one upon Democrats Lyndon Baines Johnson, Mike Mansfield, Sam Rayburn, Republicans William F. Knowland and Joe Martin, even dropping in one day last week to see Ohio's Republican Representative William H. Ayres, who had written to ask if it would be all right to show some G.O.P. ladies around the Soviet embassy. Answer: Sure. Says Menshikov about the Soviet embassy: "Even schoolchildren come here now. We show them movies."

Love That Line! Such was the eye-popping pace of Menshikov's diplomacy that almost nobody had time to find out what Smiling Mike was made of. He was born in the village of Posevkino in the Voronezh district of Russia in 1902, graduated from Moscow's Plekhanov Institute of National Economy in 1929, hobnobbed up through the Kremlin bureaucracy to become an aide to Foreign Trade Expert Anastas Mikoyan. As UNRRA representative in Poland (1945), Menshikov used U.N. prestige to help dignify Communism's grip, angered idealistic U.N. staffers by twisting U.N. ideals to Kremlin ends; as U.S.S.R. Trade Ambassador to Egypt (1948), he was in charge of negotiating the first Soviet-Egypt trade deal that opened the way toward the Soviet trade-aid arms infiltration of the Middle East.

Menshikov's biggest diplomatic achievement : a quiet, tactful, inconspicuous campaign as Ambassador to India (1953-57) to persuade Indian officials from Nehru on down that the Soviets were not dogmatic but only reasonable folk who wanted to help. He negotiated a five-year Russo-Indian trade deal, helped get a slow-building but photogenic propaganda Russian steel mill for India, did a bang-up job of setting up Bulganin and Khrushchev's triumphal Indian tour, and even gave Nehru, on behalf of the Kremlin, a personal twin-engined Ilyushin plane. Said one Indian editor: "He didn't hit the headlines all the time, but he made a deep impression where it counted in the government."

In sum, new Soviet Ambassador Menshikov is one of the ablest, perhaps the ablest, of the Kremlin diplomats, a man dedicated to the proposition that no infiltration works quite as well as amiable respectability. He is a man expertly versed in change of pace; yet he is nonetheless a hard-core Red. In Asia, he was denouncing "certain colonial powers, particularly the United States." As if the cold war were a U.S. aberration, he says now: "The Soviet Union has no intention of imposing its ideas on any people by force." From sunup to bedtime, he goes about his rounds with a U.S.-style, U.S.-accented smile.

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