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The Man Without Memories. Until Gromyko's entrance, a successful diplomat was a subtle, imaginative artist, who could improvise a stiff note to a fractious government as quickly as a compliment for a fat lady. But Gromyko behaves in chancelleries and council chambers with all the charm of a misanthropic robot. He is blunt, aloof, without imagination, without the right (or apparently the will) to independent thought. He refers every decision to Moscow. His diplomacy consists in executing Moscow's will to the letter, to the accompaniment of paraphrased Pravda editorials. He is assisted by Physics Professor Dmitri Vladimirovich Skobeltsin (Atomic Energy), Economist Alexander P. Morozov (ECOSOC) and Lieut. General Alexander P. Vasiliev (Military Staff Committee). Gromyko works as hard as any man on his team. "Oh," says Mme. Gromyko with a nice sense for the hierarchy of toil, "Andrei does work hard, yet not as hard as Mr. Vishinsky, and even that is not so hard as Mr. Molotov works."
Many U.N. diplomats understand that to classify Gromyko it is necessary to realize that he is not only a new statesman, but a prototype of a new race of men. In Darkness at Noon, writing of those bullheaded, bull-minded men who grew up under the Revolution's rod, Novelist Arthur Koestler described that new race:
". . . The generation which had started to think after the flood. It had no traditions, and no memories to bind it to the old. vanished world. It was a generation born without an umbilical cord . . . colorless, barren voice . . . never smiled . . . absolute humorlessness . . . without frivolity, without melancholy . . . generation of modern Neanderthalers. . . ."
The Yogi & the Commissar. Andrei Gromyko is an almost perfect neo-paleolithic specimen. When the Communist Party hacked its bloody way to power in 1917, Gromyko was eight years old. He, like millions with him and after him, never had a toy, a dream, a book or an ideal that was not somehow tinged by the penetrating hue of Communist dogma. That such men exist, that they occupy positions of power is one of the most important facts in today's world. Gromyko does not belong in the category of the commissars of the 1920s, who were far more imaginative and volatile. He is closer to the yogi type—a yogi in disciplined contemplation of a narrow cult.
Beneath such stark dedication, not much of common humanity is visible. Gromyko reads mostly books on economics, though he once admitted that he likes Lord Byron (because he had a "social consciousness"). Gromyko drinks little, eats moderately. He plays some chess, some volleyball. Muffled reports say that he collects stamps. His buxom wife, Lidiya. has borne him a son, Anatoli, 15, and a daughter, Emiliya, 9. Whatever time he can spare (which is not much), he spends with his family. The story goes that when a newsman once called his home, Gromyko's daughter answered the telephone. The newsman asked to speak to her father. Emiliya: "He is not here." Newsman: "Do you know where he is?" Emiliya: "No—I never know where he is; he never tells me anything."
Gromyko lives in the 40-room mansion built by the late Ogden L. Mills at Woodbury, L.I. It is hidden behind high walls and 182 landscaped acres (including a superb 17th Century-style formal garden).