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To the Western world, the only interesting possibility in the congress is the chance of getting a slightly better look at the man who seems likely, some day, to hold the issue of war & peace in his pudgy fingers. There is no reason to expect that that chancy glance will be in any sense reassuring.-For no one in the Western world can honestly envision a dinner table at which it would be a pleasure to sit down with Georgy Malenkov. Even the nursery-rhyme liberals have given up hope in such fairy tales. If that metaphorical meeting ever does take place, Malenkov's fellow diners will have to come equipped with very long spoons.
†Gossip is tireless about Stalin's health and the fantastic precautions he takes to preserve it. The latest, from the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, describes a clinic in the Caucasus, where a group of 40 carefully selected Georgians of Stalin's age and general physical make-up are forced to lead a life precisely patterned on his, eating the same meals, keeping the same hours, while a corps of doctors observe and test them with life-prolonging serums. Weltwoche does not explain how the worries of ttie most feared and powerful man on earth are simulated, or whether Stalin gets the serum too. Stalin, according to French Ambassador Louis Joxe, who saw him last August, looks like a robust, healthy man.
*There has been no .serious suggestion that Zhdanov was murdered. Natural deaths do occur in the Soviet Union. - Last spring, when he left for Moscow as the new U.S. Ambassador, the State Department's top Russian Expert George F. Kennan expressed the cautious hope that Russian-U.S. relations might possibly be taking a turn for the better. Last fortnight Kennan told reporters in Berlin that his stay in Moscow has been one of "icy cold" isolation, little different from the treatment he got in Nazi Germany back in 1941 when he was interned as an enemy diplomat. The U.S. Ambassador, snarled Pravda in reply last week, was an "ecstatic liar ... an enemy of the peace and [hence] of the Soviet Union."