Gromyko Takes a Ride

Andrei Gromyko said yes, he would attend the Security Council session that afternoon. Instead, he rode in a black Cadillac through three miles of New York streets. His change of venue might have been a wise one, for the great question before Gromyko and his Russian colleagues did not lie in the Council room, or in the phrases of the UNO Charter, or in Iran. The streets and fields of the U.S. held the answer they sought. From where the Russians sat, the riddle was: would the U.S., over the next few decades, be able to make its policy felt in the world? Or would its power decline, frustrated by internal division, softness and doubt?

That was what Gromyko needed to know, but how much could a man learn in half an hour?

Street of Dignity. To reach his automobile, Gromyko passed through a queue of nylon seekers in front of the grey Soviet Consulate on East 61st Street. (Gromyko knows that Americans talk about nylons much more than about the atomic bomb.) The Cadillac turned into the dignified but flabby reaches of Fifth Avenue as matrons, becalmed by $3 luncheons, heaved out into the 4 o'clock sunshine. At Tiffany's or Cartier's, where a brooch might cost almost as much as a light tank, men & women paused to glance at displays with a diluted, good-natured envy.

At sist Street, where a new department store was going up, the owners, thoughtful of New Yorkers' idle curiosity, had put windows in the plank boardings, so the public could watch the construction job (not as commonplace a sight in the U.S. as it was a generation ago). Next door other workmen were putting a new face on St. Patrick's. Down the street, the sign on the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas said that Dr. Joseph Sizoo would preach the next Sunday on "When Dawn Comes."

Gromyko passed the New York Public Library, where any man may freely become confused, inspired, corrupted, entertained, informed or ennobled by any of its 4^ million books; no censor of political ideas watched over them.

At 37th Street Gromyko turned west through a block of millinery establishments, part of the great U.S. garment industry created largely by men & women who sprang from Gromyko's part of the world, and from a lowlier station in life than his had been.

Street of Failure. If the garment district was a reminder of U.S. opportunity, this part of Sixth Avenue (which no self-respecting New Yorker could bring himself to call the Avenue of the Americas) was a monument to American failure. No hour of the day or night found bar-lined Sixth Avenue without a few drunken men & women; no upper Sixth Avenue crowd ever looked happy or even gay. At the Miami Theater coming attractions were Primitive Love and Guilty Parents. Even

Sixth Avenue's fuddled prostitutes, marginally employable, are looked down upon by their brisk Eighth Avenue sisters.

Gromyko turned east on 48th Street along the edge of Rockefeller Center, where men had tried to deny their insignificance by raising structures that dwarfed them even further. (In the projected 1,350-ft.-high Palace of the Soviets, Gromyko's people were prepared to thrust up a similar gesture.) The Rockefeller Center buildings were largely given over to the communications industry, billions of dollars worth of facilities of information in the hands of competing, conflicting private individuals. (The participants call this freedom; in Gromyko's country they think of it as chaos.)

He went up Fifth Avenue again and turned right on 54th Street to Madison Avenue. From the corner of 54th and Madison, Gromyko might have seen the old-coin shop of Wittlin Inc. in whose window a philosopher had placed a map of the eastern Mediterranean with a sign that Americans find as startling as Gromyko might: "This map shows the region where about 2,000 years ago ideas were born and events occurred which formed our civilization; since then mechanical devices have improved and taste deteriorated--but otherwise little has changed."

When Gromyko returned to the consulate--after twice passing the building where the Council was meeting--it was impossible to tell whether he had learned anything on his three-mile ride. Much that he saw might have misled him, for Fifth and Sixth and Madison Avenues are not the U.S. But they are a caricature of the U.S., distorting much of the worst and the best of the enigmatic land that lies for 3,000 miles behind New York. Would that land keep its cohesion and its kinetic spirit? Were the contrasts too great; was the freedom too diffuse?

How much could a man learn in half an hour?

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