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Andrei Gromyko looked up with a rare, quizzical grin at the burly, bulgy-eyed visitor. "Ah, Mr. Gunther!" he exclaimed. "You must be Inside something!" Foreign Minister Gromyko was right. This week—17 months, 23,000 miles and 550 pages later—the presses are rolling out John Gunther's latest massive contribution to the school of reporting that bears his trademark. Its title: Inside Russia Today (Harper; $5-95).
Reporter Gunther, 56, tucks the world's biggest country under his belt with his sixth Inside job in 22 years of chewing up the globe in continent-sized chunks. Few others would dare even to attempt a comprehensive survey of Russia in 24 chapters (including one called "A History of Russia in Half an Hour"). But no other reporter has ever plowed or plucked on Gunther's gargantuan scale. A hulking (6 ft. 1 in., 238 Ibs.) legman in seven-league boots, he has at once traveled more miles, crossed more frontiers, interviewed more statesmen, earned more "money (more than $1,000,000), written more books and sold more copies (more than 2,000,000) than any single other newsman. Gunther's bestselling Insides, crisscrossing every continent but Australia, have traveled even farther than Gunther. In all. 13 of his books have been translated into 87 languages, massively pirated in Asia, published behind the Iron Curtain.
Gunther's reporting has made him more famous than most of the people he reports on. Yet he still basks in the celebrity of newsmaking titans, drops their names like trophies into his own entry in Who's Who in America:
Has interviewed Lloyd George, President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, King Carol of Rumania, Gandhi, Trotsky, De Valera, Dollfuss, Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kaishek, President Quezon of Philippines, Presidents Cardenas and Avila Camacho of Mexico; Vargas of Brazil; Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Pope Pius XII, Premier de Gasperi of Italy, Nehru, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, General MacArthur, and many other contemporary statesmen.
Asked by a minor Russian official how his first day in Moscow had gone, Gunther shrugged: "Moderately well." Pausing for effect, he added: "I met, shook hands with, and had brief interchanges of conversation with Khrushchev, Bulganin, Zhukov, Molotov, Gromyko and Shepilov. That's all." Many of the world's grandest panjandrums go out of their way to butter up Insider Gunther, and some are his good friends. To introduce him on an India-wide radio hookup, Nehru in 1938 went on the air for the first time in his career. When Gunther began working on 1947's Inside U.S.A., governors and senators across the land heaped him with invitations to interviews and conferences.