FOREIGN RELATIONS: Smiling Mike (Contd.)

"Can it ever be forgotten what a racket was made with the Citizen Genêt?" wrote a Pennsylvanian about the tour of the U.S. put on by the French revolutionary republic's new ambassador in 1793. "What hugging and tugging! What addressing and caressing! With liberty caps and the other wretched trumpery of sans culotte foolery!" But President George Washington soon had his fill of Citizen Genêt's pleading with the American people for U.S. help to France over the heads of the U.S. Government, and the nuisance he was making of himself trying to kick up an expedition of American adventurers against the U.S.'s Spanish neighbors in Florida. Thundered the President: "What must the world think of such conduct and the government of the United States in submitting to it?" He called in his Cabinet and decided to demand Genêt's recall as persona non grata.

Last week the U.S. Government's patience was running out on another hugand-tug type of foreign diplomat in Washington. Name: Mikhail Alekseevich Menshikov, ambassador of the U.S.S.R., who has carried Dictator Khrushchev's stop-nuclear tests and let's-have-a-parley-at-the-summit propaganda to the U.S. public via TV press conferences, businessmen's dinners and cultural wingdings with such sincere style that he got the nickname of "Smiling Mike" (TIME, March 17 et seq.). Sample exchange: Q. How can we trust you on stopping nuclear tests when you violated the armistice in Korea? A. I think we should believe each other—that is the only way.

Last month Menshikov was warned in a nice way by Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy, now busy with Middle East matters, that he was specifically violating diplomatic procedure by sending Soviet propaganda to members of Congress and key Government agencies, e.g., Vice President Nixon, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, California Democratic Representative Jimmy Roosevelt, without channeling it through the State Department as required. Menshikov smilingly promised to look into the matter, did nothing. Last week the State Department let it be known that the U.S.'s final recourse in such a matter might be to declare such a diplomat persona non grata—almost like Citizen Genêt.

As it happened, Ambassador Geneê's fate was far from cruel. Things were so rough and unpredictable back in revolutionary France in 1793 that Citizen Genêt, fearing death by guillotine, asked Washington if he could stay on in the U.S. as Private Citizen Genêt. Washington's response: O.K. So Genet retired quietly to New York State, there wed the daughter of Governor De Witt Clinton, let the Revolution go by as he lived out his life with a big smile.