Gitche Gumee Revisited

On matters cultural, Nikita Khrushchev is simply not with it; modern art gives him indigestion, and he regards jazz as so much noise. Last week the Kremlin's Red Square reached all the way back to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow trying to convert The Song of Hiawatha into a Communist ballad for disarmament without inspection or controls.

Addressing 2,000 delegates from 100 countries who assembled in the tepee--Moscow's Palace of Congresses--for a Red-sponsored peace conference. Khrushchev recalled that Longfellow summoned "the tribes of men" with the plea: Bury your war-clubs and your weapons . . . Smoke the calumet together. "I do not smoke," added Big Chief Nikita, "but really, I would be happy to light the calumet together with the leaders of all powers."

So would the chieftains of the West--but not on Khrushchev's loaded terms. In his speech, before bemedaled female Heroes of Socialist Labor, youthful innocents from Africa and sari-clad matrons from India, Khrushchev rehashed Moscow's charge that controlled disarmament is a form of espionage that "no self-respecting country can accept"; suggested that Scandinavian or Benelux troops plus Polish and Czechoslovak garrisons replace U.S., British and French forces in West Berlin; condemned the current U.S. series of nuclear tests in the Pacific. For good measure, Khrushchev waved his newest war club and boasted that Soviet scientists have developed an anti-missile missile.

Boos & Hisses. Washington doubted that Russian technology could thwart a retaliatory thrust by U.S. missiles, and quickly answered Khrushchev's other charges. Khrushchev's denunciation of U.S. nuclear tests, said the State Department, was sheer hypocrisy, considering the fact that Russia broke the test-ban moratorium last fall. Furthermore, the Western Big Three, added Secretary of State Dean Rusk for the 11th time, will not pull out of West Berlin.

More surprising than the official U.S. rebuttal was some back talk in Moscow itself. One restrained critic was Canon Lewis John Collins of London's St. Paul's Cathedral, a leading British unilateral disarmer who was accompanied on the trip from London by such other ban-the-bombers as anti-American Pundit Kingsley Martin, ex-editor of the New Statesman and Nation, and Physicist John D. Bernal, a Lenin Peace Prize winner. Collins received a hostile reception when he coupled criticism for the "wickedness" of U.S. nuclear tests with Moscow's "grave error" in becoming the first nation to resume tests last fall. A professor of political science from Chicago's Roosevelt University, Dale Pontius, 55, stunned the pro-Communist audience when he declared:

"If you continue calling one power a warmonger or a wild beast of imperialism without denouncing your own governments when they pursue activities that endanger the safety of the world, you may get emotional satisfaction by such onesided denunciation, but you are not helping the cause of peace."

Another member of the 150-man U.S. delegation, Homer Jack, 46, director of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, was booed and hissed when he denounced U.S. and Soviet atomic tests with equal bitterness, but when he contrasted the freedom of SANE to criticize the U.S. Government with the regime-controlled propaganda of his peace congress hosts, there was only shocked silence. Later, when a group of British, U.S. and Scandinavian youths started a ban-the-bomb march near the meeting hall, police snatched their banners and threatened to deport them as "provocateurs."

"Tricks & Gambols." The provocation consisted mainly of reminding Khrushchev that his professed willingness to smoke the peace pipe was being received with increasing skepticism by even those who do not sit at Western powwows. As Khrushchev should have known, even Hiawatha discovered the need for controls over war clubs.

As Longfellow told the story, Hiawatha one day trustingly left the lodge unguarded only to find that Pau-Puk-Keewis, "whom the people called the Storm-Fool," had entered his home, killed his pet raven, then ransacked the place. After an arduous hunt, Hiawatha slew his treacherous enemy. Only then: Ended were his wild adventures, Ended were his tricks and gambols, Ended all his craft and cunning, Ended all his mischiefmaking.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.