Word: gibney
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...Headed City. No newsman has described the delicate and complex situation with more insight than Reporter Gibney, a LIFE staff writer. With authority, humor, and political sophistication, Gibney describes how paradox has become a law of life in a country where a dedicated Communist (Premier Gomulka) collaborates with a dedicated Catholic (Cardinal Wyszynski) to check both hothead Marxists and anti-Marxists. The result, reports Gibney, can sometimes be as bewildering as that wondrous two-headed animal of Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle stories, the "Push-me Pull...
...headed Warsaw, says Gibney, is full of "tattered signboards with their promise of a bargain-basement brotherhood of man," and at the same time it is more Catholic than any European capital except Rome ("and more sincerely so than Rome, one suspects"). Old World charm still contends with the Reds' brave new world: "Nowhere else do so many Communists kiss so many ladies' hands." Poland today "is a place where Marxist theoreticians argue with Americans in night clubs, [where] TV commercials can be permitted on the same channels that pledge the 'workers' society...
Humane Socialism. Gibney believes that Gomulka, as the country's boss, has a fair chance to keep up his hair-raising tightrope act under the international big top. But he has no illusions about him. In the past, Gomulka "connived, cheated, threatened and bludgeoned" as much as any other Communist leader. When he returned to power in 1956, after years of imprisonment at the hands of the Stalinists, a more humane side emerged. He undertook to introduce democracy in the Communist Party and to build "humane socialism" (which Gibney describes as a "wedding of modern Communist practice with...
Therein, feels Gibney, lies Poland's immense value to the West; the country is "a pilot-study in Communist decay." As the stone of Red repression was temporarily rolled away and the life underneath suddenly laid bare, it became clearer than ever that the Communist state, even when men try to liberalize it, cannot do without coercion and police power. Author Gibney finds another way of saying this, in the words of a witty Polish intellectual. In a small Jewish congregation, so goes the story, a young Communist was puzzling about one of Stalin's famous slogans...
DOROTHY T. GIBNEY Hempstead...