BATTLE OF LAKE SUCCESS: Junior S.O.B.

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Even India and Egypt, who wavered at first, now vote more & more often with the U.S. The point was underlined last week when the Council majority prepared to hold an informal meeting. U.S. delegates were uneasy about conferring in a U.S. office. But their colleagues of the majority agreed with the comment of one delegate: "Malik will call us satellites and puppets no matter where we meet. My country is a free country. We are quite willing to meet anywhere at all—including a U.S. office." Ecuador's Dr. Antonio Quevedo last week indignantly denounced Malik for speaking to the Council "whip in hand, as if he were conducting a gang of forced laborers in the Arctic."

Without Umbilical Cord. Jacob Malik grew up in the shadow of the whip. He was eleven when the Red revolution engulfed his native Kharkov. He belonged to that Russian generation "without umbilical cord," which, in Arthur Koestler's words, "had no traditions and no memories to bind it to the old, vanished world ... to the vain conceptions of honor and . . . decency . . . Honor was to serve without vanity, without sparing oneself, and until the last consequence . . ."

The new Soviet state put Malik through Kharkov University, then sent him on to the Institute for Foreign Affairs at Moscow State University. For two years he served as deputy chief of the Foreign Press Service in Moscow. Then he went on to Tokyo (1939-45), rising from counselor to ambassador.

Before the Nazi invasion of Russia, Malik expedited shipments of raw rubber from Southeast Asia and lubricants from Japan via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Germany. Later, he had a hand in keeping Japanese jingoists from getting Japan into war against the U.S.S.R. On Aug. 9, 1945, he presented Russia's declaration of war to the Tokyo government. U.S. power had already beaten Japan; next day Malik received Tokyo's offer of surrender. By the winter of 1946, Malik was Deputy Foreign Minister in Moscow. In 1948 he took over from Gromyko as chief delegate to the Security Council. His informal talks with the U.S.'s Dr. Philip Jessup at Lake Success were the prelude to Russia's lifting of the Berlin blockade (TIME, May 2).

Malik has two sons, Yuzi (18) and Eugene (11), who are now in a Moscow school. His chubby wife and daughter Svetlana (5) are with him in New York (their summer retreat is the Glen Cove, L.I. estate rented by the Soviet Union).

From Bourbon to Soda. In Tokyo and later at Lake Success, Malik was regarded as amiable and even witty—for a Soviet diplomat. Once he cracked that a severe U.S. winter was "undoubtedly due to the cold war." When Vyacheslav Molotov was shifted from the post of Foreign Minister, Malik was asked what it meant. "I don't know," he quipped. "I can't get one of your radio sets to pick up Radio Moscow."

Unlike the bleak-miened Gromyko, Malik could say "No comment" smilingly to the press (he once said it 30 times, each time with a smile, in one brief interview). A more loquacious exchange, with a New York Herald Tribune reporter, ran thus:

Malik: You really should learn Russian.

Reporter: I know two words—da [yes] and nyet [no].

Malik: ... All the newspapers here say we only say nyet.