Andrei & the Bird

Lissome Anny Gould, a Parisian nightclub singer, thought some U.N. publicity might be exciting. While press photographers stood by, she waited last Friday on the steps of the Palais de Chaillot, ready to present her pet dove to the first U.N. delegate to appear. Johnny on the spot was Andrei Vishinsky. As shutters snapped, Anny stage-smiled and offered the dove to Vishinsky. "A symbol," said she, "of the peace we all want."

Vishinsky thanked her, handed the bird to an aide, and marched inside the building. "Are you going to keep my bird?" Anny asked. "Of course I'm keeping it," replied Vishinsky. Anny was taken aback. She was even more chagrined to find herself erroneously identified in Parisian papers next day as a representative of a Communist women's organization. Terribly upset, Anny bought 59 more doves, sent one to each U.N. delegation (except, of course, the Russians). It wasn't the first time a Russian had grabbed a peace dove from the unsuspecting West.

Silent Laughter. Inside the meeting place of the General Assembly, after fondling the ruffled dove for photographers, Andrei Vishinsky gave the bird back to an aide, strode up to the speaker's podium to eat some crow. No one, including his bosses in Moscow, had been much amused by his laughing dismissal of the West's disarmament proposals the week before. In Pravda's account of the speech, the laughed-all-night passage was cut out. Vishinsky prefaced his second try by trying to minimize his first: "I merely made some cursory remarks at the time."

His new peace proposal was a quickly juggled anagram of all the old ones. The Russians continue to insist on a toothless international inspection program--i.e., Russia wants to do its own inspection of its armament--and on the abolition of atomic weapons before a large-scale reduction of conventional armaments. (The Russians, who control the world's biggest armies, want to impose an arbitrary one-third reduction on the troops of all the Big Five powers.) Sniffed Dean Acheson: "This takes us back to 1946."

Following Vishinsky was French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman. Like Anthony Eden's rejoinder earlier in the week, his speech was as firm in substance as Acheson's, but more moderate in tone. Said Schuman to Vishinsky: "I am quite prepared to believe that you do not want war. I am trying to be fairer to you than you are to us. War is prepared secretly, like evil deeds. Let us do away with this secrecy. I know full well that our regimes are in opposition and cannot be reconciled, but they can exist alongside each other without resorting to war . . ."

Counterproposal. When the Assembly formally adopted its agenda, Vishinsky's peace proposal was far down on the list.

To be considered before it: the U.S. disarmament plan, the proposed security machinery for dealing with future aggressions, and the Korean question. This week the West spelled out its own plan in greater detail. It made several gestures to the Russians. It proposed a twelve-nation U.N. disarmament commission (the eleven Security Council members and Canada) under the control of the Security Council. Theory: the West need not fear a veto, since if the Russians won't play, disarmament won't get anywhere, anyhow. And, in a gingerly worded passage, it provided that the Chinese Reds might attend a worldwide disarmament conference, if & when the commission calls one. The next move was Russia's.

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