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Wherever Nikita Khrushchev went last week, he had a shadow. Whether it was Paris, Berlin or Moscow, there at Nikita's elbow was the hulking, impassive Ukrainian, whose short-cropped grey hair and bulldog face were in dour contrast to his gleaming epaulets and the nine rows of gaily colored medal ribbons that adorned his chest. By no accident, the wrecking of the Paris summit coincided with the West's first close-up look at Rodion Malinovsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union and Russia's Minister of Defense.
In time past, Nikita had kept his soldiers out of the diplomatic limelight, had even been prone to twit them in public. Only a fortnight ago, while boasting of the Soviet army's current troop cuts at a diplomatic reception, Nikita gibed: "One of our generals over there just scratched his head. Another reduction!" But last week, as he ranted through the most clamorous diplomatic debacle of modern times, Nikita thrust Russia's top soldier into the public eye at every opportunity.
Even in his summit-eve private calls on Charles de Gaulle and Harold Macmillan (TIME, May 23), Nikita brought Malinovsky along to buttress the boast that Russia is militarily stronger than the U.S. When Khrushchev impulsively cantered out of Paris to Pleurs, 84 miles southeast, he was visiting the village where Malinovsky had been billeted with Russian troops serving on the western front during World War I. When Malinovsky pointed out the hayloft in which he had slept, Khrushchev swiftly moved in to extract every possible kernel of corn. "Cows below and a future marshal above," he said. "Well, cows make excellent heating appliances."
At his final wild-eyed Paris press conference, Nikita took time out to launch into unsolicited discourse on his Defense Minister. Malinovsky, Khrushchev declared, was "a hero of World War I and II ... a person who has often been decorated for his outstanding services ... a true son of a socialist motherland."
Hints & a Symbol. Astonished by this unprecedented buildup for a Soviet military man, some Westerners inevitably began to see signs that Khrushchev was on a leash. After all, the Red army is known to have little enthusiasm for Khrushchev's policy of peaceful coexistence. Four days before his departure for Paris, Communist Party workers assigned to the Red army had assembled in Moscow for a conference at which one of the chief speakers was tousled-haired Marxist Theoretician Mikhail Suslov, who is always billed by Kremlinologists as the leader of the hard line in Russia's ruling Presidium. Marshal Malinovsky had been added to Khrushchev's list of traveling companions only three days before the Paris confrontation. Was he sent along to make sure that Nikita stuck rigidly to the position papers drawn up for him? Suspicions were reinforced by the curious tone of some of Nikita's pronouncements in Paris. During his half-hour diatribe against the U.S. at the summit's one, abortive session, Khrushchev had dropped the unprecedented hint that he was forced to act as he did because of "internal politics." The experts could only speculate, mindful that Khrushchev has been capable before of implying that he had no choice in doing what he decided to do.