Be Kind to Americans

After a month at the Black Sea, Nikita Khrushchev was tanned and full of beans, homilies, pleasantries and high spirits. Except for his bluster at a group of German editors about nuclear annihilation, he radiated good will toward the rest of the world. In fact, he seemed to be on a Be-Kind-to-Americans jag.

On the very day that he received an insistent personal request from President Eisenhower, asking about the fate of eleven U.S. airmen shot down over Soviet Armenia last September, Khrushchev got into his limousine and drove out to the $5,000,000 U.S. exhibition site in Moscow's Sokolniki Park. Accompanied by U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., who had only an hour and a half's warning to be on hand, and trailed by a horde of Soviet and foreign journalists and an ever-growing crowd of curious workmen, Khrushchev ranged over the bulldozer-torn exhibition area, squeezing under low girders and heaving his hefty bulk across muddy drainage trenches with a nimbleness that belied reports that he has been ill.

Copycat. He was fascinated by the main architectural attraction--a sleek geodesic dome of gold-coated aluminum panels, 200 feet in diameter, abuilding at one end of the site. "This dome is really something," he chuckled again and again. He posed for pictures with some Italian workmen employed on the project, and called to Thompson: "Come and join me. After all, the Italians are your allies."

Watching workers hammering at the panels, Khrushchev picked up one of their discarded rivets, pondered its alloy, and pocketed it with a sly smile: "Look, I am stealing this. I think the United States can afford the loss of one rivet." Then he moved on, admiring the cut of a worker's quilted nylon and Fiberglas jacket, watching how it zipped. "Very practical. I like the cut," he grinned. "We must get the pattern--or, if not, borrow this one."

Unannounced, he showed up a few nights later to catch the American Holiday on Ice show at the Lenin Sports Palace with his son Sergei, as well as First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and cronies from the Central Committee. Afterward, in a private room at the back of the hall, Khrushchev gave a caviar-and-smoked-salmon party for the cast, scattering bear hugs and backslaps among hearty toasts in brandy. There was no talk of politics.

Busy Host. Next morning seven U.S. veterans of World War II, in Moscow for a reunion with Russian troops they had met when the two armies came together at the Elbe River, were ushered into the Kremlin for more of Khrushchev's camaraderie. He autographed their short-snorter bank notes, received with thanks a map showing the point where Soviet and American troops first met before V-E day. When Alexander Lieb of Sherman Oaks, Calif, gave Khrushchev a ballpoint pen as a souvenir, Nikita, laughing, handed over a more expensive fountain pen in return.

Between visits with the Americans, inexhaustible Nikita received an Indian editor, an Indian scholar, Indonesia's President Sukarno, and discussed things with an official from Finland. Then he hopped into his plane and flew away on a trip to Kiev, while in Geneva sober-faced Andrei Gromyko sat down to do battle with Western diplomats.

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