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Cried the U.S.'s Herschel Johnson: "So . . . the innocent little Slavic-Albanian brothers . . . are menaced by this wicked fascist Greek wolf. It is curious and almost like a fairy tale come to life." The councilors went through their paces like actors in a tediously familiar tragedy of manners. They voted down Gromyko, paragraph by paragraph, with only the pale hand of Poland's Oscar Lange raised with Gromyko's. Later Colombia suggested a compromise which called for the creation of a new, slightly modified Balkan Commission. Gromyko said the Colombia proposal was simply the old U.S. resolution with a "wash, a haircut, powder and lipstick."
Gromyko was among the first to leave, walking with his heavy, stiff shoulders carried high, head prodding forward, his face a stolid mask. Soviet car No. 1 drove up. The chauffeur smiled with a flash of stainless steel teeth, and Gromyko disappeared in a faint cloud of gasoline and mystery.
The Man Without a Face. To many a U.S. citizen, Andrei Gromyko had become almost a U.S. household nuisance. He was the closest visible embodiment of Russia's apocalyptic orneriness. He took walks on Fifth Avenue. He sat in the last row of the Trans-Lux theater, on Madison and 60th, taking in a newsreel. Fred Allen cracked jokes about him. And yet he was like a man without a face.
Little was known about his personal past. Russia's Cerberean censors withheld the barest biographical data. Recently, when a newsman who wanted to write a Gromyko profile asked his help, Gromyko snapped: "My personality does not interest me." One somewhat challenging fact is known: there are actually many Gromykos in the world.
Andrei was born in 1909 near Gomel in the small town of Gromyki, 90% of whose inhabitants are called Gromyko. He studied economics, got a master's degree in 1936, and lectured at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. In 1939, he was abruptly appointed head of the American section of the Russian Foreign Office, thence was sent into the thick of high & low diplomacy, as counselor at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. These were dangerous times, and Molotov. decided finally to keep the old-line, ex-Menshevik diplomats (Maisky, Troyanovsky Sr., Surits et al.) from further advancement, push a younger and more reliable set to the fore. Thus, in 1943, succeeding Western-minded Maxim Litvinoff, Gromyko walked into the Oval Room of the White House and presented his ambassadorial credentials to Franklin Roosevelt. Gromyko was then 34, and looked as though he could not tell a demarche from a dinner party. He was definitely something new in the world of diplomacy.