FRANCE: Hurrah for Whose Bomb?

Early one morning last week, the phone rang for Nikita Khrushchev at the elegant Chateau Rambouillet, country residence of France's Presidents. On the other end of the line was Soviet Ambassador to France Sergei Vinogradov with the news that France had just exploded in the Sahara its second atomic bomb—a small one, roughly the size of the U.S.'s Hiroshima bomb (20 kilotons), but far closer to being a portable, functional weapon than the first 60-to 70-kiloton French bomb.

As the world's most belligerent peace lover, and loud public opponent of all nuclear testing, could Nikita avoid denouncing France in strong terms? The answer came clear when, after a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, Khrushchev encountered De Gaulle in Rambouillet's 16th century Hall of Marble. "Hurrah for France!" cried Nikita.

The Man from Agitprop. This was the keynote of the second half of Khrushchev's tour de France. At times, Nikita seemed intent on establishing himself as a kind of honorary Frenchman. His family helped. Motherly Nina Khrushchev admired acres of stained-glass windows, trudged through an open-air market where she expertly sniffed at a proffered melon.

Daughters Rada, Elena and Julia ogled the spring fashions at Dior's. Nikita himself genially traded stag jokes with French influentials, beamingly invited a handsome girl folk dancer to visit him in Moscow, and clutched to his bosom everything from lambs to schoolchildren. And during a flight in one of France's handsome jet Caravelles, which he vocally admired, he set the hearts of French industrialists aflutter with the offhand statement: "I'll take a dozen to start with."

Despite his best efforts, Nikita's essential boorishness occasionally broke through: to the proud director of a vast irrigation project in the Camargue, he remarked that Russia had a far vaster project in Tadzhikistan. And the apparent popular enthusiasm that greeted him wherever he turned was largely synthetic.

As he progressed through France's heavily leftist south, local Communists, augmented by busloads of comrades from afar, took over key positions along his route and at prearranged signals waved red flags and chanted admiring slogans. In Marseille, where the shouts were loudest, Khrushchev Son-in-Law (and Izvestia Editor) Alexei Adzhubei admiringly remarked to Soviet Propaganda Boss Leonid Ilyichev: "Comrade, you always handle the Agitprop well!" Spiking the Canon. Clicking away insatiably, Soviet cameramen captured scenes of enthusiasm designed to convince movie audiences behind the Iron Curtain that all France had embraced Nikita.

Truth was that, apart from the organized knots of Reds, the crowds that turned out to see Khrushchev were mostly just curious—ancl often silent. And throughout the tour, Nikita was confronted by the weighty displeasure of France's Catholic hierarchy. Priests were forbidden to receive him in their churches. In Reims the Host was removed from the altar of the cathedral before Khrushchev was shown through—and a purification service was held after he had left. The church even succeeded in spiking one of the anticipated triumphs of the Agitprop men—Nikita's scheduled meeting with Canon Félix Kir, the 84-year-old priest who doubles as mayor of Dijon and is an Independent Deputy in France's National Assembly.