In the hushed halls of Lake Success, the customary conglomeration of diplomats, students, experts on everything, and housewives with nothing better to do had gathered for the 174th meeting of the United Nations Security Council. A matron in a garden party hat, who seemed to have materialized in plump perfection from a Helen Hokinson cartoon, roguishly asked a U.N. guard: "Is this the way to the Big Tent?" In one of the main conference chambers, a husky man with a mallet walked up to a side wall and started to hammer away. The four-inch cinder blocks crumbled under his blows. Soon a vast, vandalistic hole gaped in the wall.
The man with the mallet was not Andrei Andreevich Gromyko, as some wags suggested. He was a mason and he was making a new exit under orders from the U.N. fire marshal. But when he finished, there would be a new door for Gromyko to walk out of.
The Voice. All the forms of evasion and obstruction—from dilatory diatribes and procedural pettifoggery to the simple no and the plain walkout—were Andrei Gromyko's special assignments. As the Soviet Union's permanent representative on the Security Council, he was doing his job with maddening competence.
Gromyko (rhymes with Topeka) was the man who, even more than Harry Truman, had made Americans veto-conscious. There had been ten Russian vetoes in 14 months; no other power had ever vetoed the will of the Council majority. Two weeks ago came veto No. 11. The majority of U.N.'s Balkan Commission had reported that Greece's Communist neighbors were supporting Greece's Communist guerrillas. The U.S. proposed a border watch. Gromyko promptly vetoed it. Last week Gromyko got around to explaining his veto. His remarks were intended for gulliberals of the Henry Wallace school rather than for his Security Council' colleagues.
Around the horseshoe table, behind their national name plates, sat the guardians of peace. Their assistants clustered about them, attentively bent forward, ready to leap into any possible breaches with a saving statistic. Under the bluish-white fluorescent glow, Andrei Gromyko sat erect, somberly garbed as any banker, reading in that flat, husky voice which has been described by several American women as replete with sex appeal.
Andrei & the Wolf. Said Gromyko, in effect: the Greek Government is to blame for all the border troubles. Foreign military missions (meaning the U.S. and British) must be withdrawn. Foreign economic aid (meaning U.S.) must be subject to a commission that included Russia. Otherwise the situation would end in the servitude of Greece. (Later, Gromyko—who has conscientiously learned to speak excellent English even though he persists in speaking Russian most of the time—poked a pencil at the translator and said that he had meant "enslavement" and not "servitude.") Intervention by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania was a "myth. Intervention cannot be concealed in bushes." As usual, Gromyko dragged his listeners around the same point through interminable repetitions. His reasoning was pervaded by the sublimely simple conviction that the Communist dogma was The Truth and would prevail. He was surrounded by an intangible body of strangeness, as though he had come from another planet and carried a piece of its peculiar atmosphere with him.