Writhing Words

As V. K. Krishna Menon, India's Communist-cuddling roving ambassador, sat at the head table of the National Press Club in Washington one noon last week, his lean fingers coiled and writhed, flitted across his face, danced in the air, groomed his nose. Sometimes he cracked his knuckles with an audible snap. When at last he rose to face the newsmen, his words also coiled and writhed and flitted.

Dressed in a dark-blue double-breasted suit, a dark-blue tie, and a shirt with a blue pinstripe, Krishna Menon looked more than ever like a snake charmer, but he denied that he had developed a personal aura of mystery: "The only mystery I know of about myself is that I have nothing to be mysterious about. It is so simple that it appears complex. And this world loves complexity because it flatters itself -- how complex we have made things -- and it is complexity that baffles us. That is how it is."

But Krishna Menon's words did not offer many clear clues to just how it is: "I think everybody can aid world peace by living and letting live . . . You know the last word has not been spoken on anything ... A principle is not like a geometrical point, without magnitude. A principle has sufficient magnitude for different points of view to be reconciled . . . We have differences in the valuation of purposes, if you like ... The main thing to consider is to discover, isn't it? The course of discovery is very important, and what is more, we have found that it is better to accept people for what they say ... The impression that has been generally gained ... is that the general changes or improvements, or whatever you like to call them, in Soviet Russia have more than a temporary character."

Later, Krishna Menon danced around a question about whether he is a Marxist, and slipped into a revealing statement of India-style policymaking: "Well, I haven't heard myself called [Marxist]," he said. "That is a new one on me, but if it is so, there is no objection . . . So far as the policy of our country is concerned . . . if any particular outlook becomes advantageous ... we use it."

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