Every time a new world leader rises from the smoke, the press and the public try to piece him together from known fragments, however tiny. This works the way police composite pictures are assembled: witnesses contribute nostrils, ear lobes, chins, until a fully shaded face emerges, looking more like a Can-you-draw-this? ad for a crooked art school than a bleeding, breathing person, but nonetheless the best one can do by so splintered a method. So it goes for Yuri Andropov, the Soviet Union's new leader. In past weeks, Western observers have labored mightily to produce a portrait of the man, not by leaning on the ice-block facts of his biography but by poking about for the warm little things: Andropov's tastes, his hobbies, his manner. By such humanizing items, it is assumed we shall know him. And it is also assumed we shall like him better for being one of us.
Mr. Andropov offers impediments to this effort because the little humanizing aspects of his life do not form an immediately recognizable or coordinated whole. There is, for example, his alleged preference for gypsy music, Chubby Checker and Glenn Miller. While these things are not antipodal, it is hard to envisage Mr. Andropov among friends singing gypsy tunes, as he is said to do, in a "pleasant light tenor," then switching abruptly to The Twist or Pennsylvania 6-5000. Still, the image is peppy. The question of interior decoration has come up as well. In one account Mr. Andropov's home is graced with "European furniture," and in another with "modern Hungarian furniture." Unless one has an unusually precise idea of the modern Hungarian style, one strains to characterize Mr. Andropov by his possessions.
Among which, according to all sources, are the novels of Jacqueline Susann and/or Harold Robbins, bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch and/or cognac, tennis racquets (he is called a tennis "fiend") and perhaps a book or two on China, in which he is thought to hold an "amateur interest." That is about as far as the pieces take us. We have the fact of his terrible eyesight, which might explain his fiendishness on the tennis court, and we have one instance of his sense of humor, when he urged a cognac on a reluctant dinner companion, telling him, "You'd better accept. The KGB has a very long arm." Oh, yes, he is said to speak fluent English, although this was called into question by his use of an interpreter when he conferred with Vice President Bush. Either Mr. Andropov's fluency is exaggerated, or after reading Susann and Robbins, he is unaware that Americans speak English too.
Our purpose in culling such items is optimistic; we would like to see through to the real Mr. Andropov, clasp him to our bosom and cast aside the husk. In Andropov's case, the husk is considerable: a 15-year hitch as head of the most powerful secret police in the world, a three-year term as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, where he may or may not have acquired his penchant for furniture, but did help crush a revolution; membership in the inner circle that decided Czechoslovakia deserved an invasion in 1968. He has also been a longtime quasher of dissidents, and was eager to remove civil liberties from Poland. Noteworthy as such information is, none of it has the exhilarating effect of making one suspect Mr. Andropov has the gypsy in his soul.