Word: harrimans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Worse Than Stalin." Just what the U.S. can expect when the Geneva conference resumes next week-and how little the public Kozlov grin showed the true face of Soviet policy-was plain this week when New York's ex-Governor Averell Harriman, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1943-46, reported, in LIFE and in memos to top Administration policymakers, on his talks with Premier Nikita Khrushchev (see FOREIGN NEWS). To Harriman, Khrushchev seemed to be dangerously cocky, dangerously ignorant of the West. Even after discounting Khrushchev's performance as tactical bluffing in part, Harriman found him "shocking, worse...
...midst of all the glad-handing in the supermarkets, the other face of Russia came through clear and cold last week from Moscow. It was the face of Nikita Khrushchev, confident, truculent, uncompromising, as he told W. Averell Harriman, U.S. wartime Ambassador to Russia, what he thought of things in a tone that Harriman-were he still ambassador-would have had to protest...
This involved yeoman duty for both correspondent and aide. Missing not a chance to make propaganda hay, the Soviets turned out big crowds to cheer at every stop. Harriman addressed an open-air rally at the new Siberian iron-mining town of Rudny, several times spoke over local radio stations, was everywhere interviewed by Russian newsmen. Jotting it all down in separate notebooks, Harriman and Thayer spent long hours each evening disputing their impressions. When at last an article was ripe, Thayer would retire to hammer out a first draft behind a locked door, later return to defend...
Warmly Welcomed. In six weeks the process produced seven articles under the Harriman byline; e.g., on Yalta ("Seldom, I am told, has an American been more warmly welcomed"), on peace ("I have been received everywhere as an American who symbolizes our wartime alliance"), and Soviet penal reform (his hosts showed him only their showpiece prison outside Moscow...
...windup press conference last week in Moscow, Harriman gave out next to nothing of his visit with Khrushchev. Instead, he defended, with practiced diplomatic finesses, the integrity of the U.S. exhibit in Moscow's Sokolniki Park. "We would be stupid to present anything except for what it is represented to be." Then, only slightly chastened by Communist China's polite refusal to grant him a visa, Reporter Harriman headed for Paris -where all good foreign correspondents go for rest and rehabilitation-before undertaking his next journalistic assignment : a textpiece for LIFE Magazine...