On a summer afternoon in 1945, an American newsman asked a visitor to Moscow, "What do you think of Zhukov?" Answered Five-Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower: "Georgy is a very decent fellow. [If he were] left on his own, I believe I could do business with him." Last week, when Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov was named Defense Minister of the Soviet Union, the question whether the old friendship would affect U.S.-Soviet relations became the subject of international speculation.
An Enormous Bear Rug. Dwight Eisenhower and Georgy Zhukov became friends in the early days of Allied control in Berlin. Their friendship did not indicate sympathy on the part of either man for the political system represented by the other: it was, in President Eisenhower's words, "personal and individual."
Speculating about "Ike and Zuke," Washington correspondents last week were quick to bring up the subject at the President's press conference. What did Zhukov's appointment mean in terms of Soviet-U.S. relations? Answered Ike: "Now, when I knew Marshal Zhukov, I will say this: he was a competent soldier. A man could not have conducted the campaigns he did, could not have explained them so lucidly and in terms of his own strength and his own weaknesses and so on, except that he was a well-trained, splendid military leader.
"He and I developed personally a practice of getting along and seeing eye to eye on a number of our local problems in Berlin. And so far as I was concerned—and I believe he was honest about it—we were trying to set up a pattern, if we could, in Berlin, in our little local place there, to show that even two nations could get along if they would both recognize the folly of not getting along. Now, what this means today, I don't know. The last time I had a direct letter from him was April 1946, and that was a long time ago."
What was that 1946 communication? "Well it was—I think I can recall it—it was a letter. You see, I left Berlin in November '45, and he corresponded and he sent me a present. I think it was an enormous bear rug, and I still have it, and something else of that kind. That was all."
A Mutual Assurance. A reporter pointed out that Zhukov had said in an interview last week, that he and Ike once assured each other that neither of their countries would attack the other. Said the President: "Now, I explained to him how absolutely impossible it was for a democracy to organize a surprise aggression against anybody. Our processes are open. Every time you get money or you change anything in your military affairs, you go to Congress. It is debated. There is no possibility of a country such as ours producing a completely surprise attack on' the other. And that is what I was emphasizing to him. He repeated ... he felt that Russia was a very peace-loving nation."