One morning last week, a group of Russian journalists checked out of Manhattan's Commodore Hotel and took off across town for the liner Queen Elizabeth and the start of their long voyage home. Behind them lay a 19-day guided tour of the U.S., past such assorted landmarks as Disneyland, Ben Blue's Santa Monica nightclub, a bank in Des Moines, more newspaper plants than they probably cared to inspect, and the President of the United States.
As such international junkets go, this one was distinguished more for pure rubbernecking than for the ritual clash of opposing ideologies. "Nobody tried to sell them a thing," said the tour leader, New York Times Reporter Harrison Salisbury. The tour was arranged by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Union of Soviet Journalists on an exchange basis (a U.S. press group will go to Russia this summer). The only role played by the U.S. Department of State was to permit the visit. And the travelers' only escort was Reporter Salisbury, who was nominated by the A.S.N.E. because he spent five years in Russia (1949-54) as the Times's Moscow correspondent and speaks Russian.
Gin & Ginger. From beginning to end, said their guide, the Russians behaved like "schoolboy tourists." There were minor difficulties, of course. Pavel Erofeev, administrative secretary of the Union of Soviet Journalists, and the delegation's pin-money treasurer, refused to convert his $3,000 expense-money draft into traveler's checks, demanded cash (he got it). Teetotaler Erofeev also had transcontinental trouble ordering the soft drink recommended by Teetotaler Salisbury; Erofeev kept asking for ginger ale, but his hosts, misinterpreting his basic English, kept bringing him gin rickeys and gin-and-tonic. "The Russians were charmed by Disneyland," said Salisbury "and they left San Francisco starry-eyed. On the bus back to the hotel, one of them hummed happily a song of his own composition: 'San Francisco, San Francisco, what a wonderful city it is ... But it isn't Russian.' "
In Chicago, the visitors were taken on a motor tour of the suburbs, passed a trailer court and asked how much rent the tenants paid and how they disposed of their sewage. Daniil Kraminov, editor of the weekly Za Rubezhom (Abroad), was interviewed by Sun-Times Columnist Irv Kupcinet, and noted, with some malice, an example of nepotism in the U.S. press: "Our delegation visited the New York Times, and we learned how you have to be a son-in-law to get promoted. Adolph Ochs made his son-in-law publisher and now [Arthur Hays] Sulzberger is making his son-in-law publisher." Said Kupcinet: "Isn't the editor of Izvestia, Aleksei Adzhubei, the son-in-law of Chairman Khrushchev?" Kraminov (after a pause): "But Adzhubei is a first-class journalist."