The Unhappy Shakespearean

Over the years, Americans have learned to distinguish some of the names of the men who come to the U.N. to denounce the U.S. One of the more prominent among these was Juliusz Katz-Suchy, in 1951 the churlish chief of Poland's U.N. delegation. In anti-American invective, Katz-Suchy seemed to be the match of any of his Russian or other Iron Curtain colleagues; occasionally he even spiced his Marxist denunciations of the U.S. as warmonger, slavemaster and cannibal with quotations from Shakespeare. But U.N. colleagues who knew him insisted that there were symptoms of Western infection noticeable in Katz-Suchy.

He looked, in the words of one acquaintance, "like an N.Y.U. philosophy professor who was on the football eleven not so long ago." Son of a Polish merchant, he became a Communist in his teens, held various party positions, then worked in a textile plant while a refugee in Britain during World War II. He often expressed his admiration for the British character. He was described as disillusioned because the U.S. and Russia failed to cooperate in U.N. (although he seemed to do his best to thwart any cooperation). Once, according to one story, he was making an anti-American speech when a U.S. delegate walked out in a huff. "Why does he get so worked up now?" Katz-Suchy remarked. "I have been making the same speech for years." He also seemed to be guilty occasionally of bourgeois sentimentality. In his office, on top of the safe which held his secret files, he used to keep a small Christmas tree hung with silver snow and tiny colored balls.

Last year the whispers about his "unreliability" seemed confirmed when he was abruptly recalled to Poland and shunted to several minor jobs. This year he came back to the U.N.'s General Assembly, no longer as head of the delegation, but as an alternate.

One night last week, a Cadillac crashed into a pillar at the Manhattan end of New York's Triborough Bridge. From the wreckage police lifted Katz-Suchy, with head and tongue injuries, and a Polish woman journalist, who was also hurt. Reporters learned that Katz-Suchy had plane reservations for Europe and was scheduled to leave the night after the accident. U.N. corridor gossip had insistently compared him to Czechoslovakia's recently executed Vladimir dementis (TIME, Dec. 15), who was also recalled from an Assembly session. Katz-Suchy may well have been in a state of mind calculated to make him accident-prone.

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