National Affairs: The Muzhik Man

His smile stretching his brush mustache, his arm half-raised in greeting with fingers waggling briskly, Anastas Mikoyan, the Kremlin's No. 2 man, was busier than a checker in a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. In the space of a week, he whirled through official and unofficial Washington, raced on to luncheons, dinners and informal question games in Cleveland. Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles. In between appointments, he inspected stores, gave candy to a baby, shook hands along auto assembly lines, peered at new gadgets and chomped on an airline's free Chiclets.

For all that, Amiable Anastas clearly had a bill of goods to sell the U.S. Unmistakably, his was the pitch of an ever-reasonable, just-plain-folks Russian competitor bent on straightening out a few minor differences. Unquestionably, his method was part of Russia's newest device —the soft sell that began last year with the assignment of Ambassador Mikhail ("Smiling Mike") Menshikov to Washington, polished thereafter with headline-catching informal talks between newly ingratiating Nikita Khrushchev and such prominent U.S. callers as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey.

"Older on the Inside." With imperturbable informality, Mikoyan tried out his pitch first on Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in a go-minute, off-cuff State Department session, during which he once again, in reasonable tones, laid out Russia's unreasonable stand on a "free" Berlin, left behind a fresh memorandum carrying a near imperceptible sign of a willingness to negotiate.

Two hours with Vice President Nixon gave him the chance to invite Nixon to visit Russia (no committal) and to remark on Nixon's youthful appearance (Replied the Vice President, just turned 46: "I feel older inside"). He pitched again at a dinner given by Motion Picture Association President Eric Johnston (who wants bigger sales of U.S. films to the Soviets), which was attended by such big opinion makers as New York Times Pundit Arthur Krock, Missouri's Democratic Senator Stu Symington and Texas' Lyndon Johnson. He had former Disarmament Aide Harold Stassen over for a private lunch at the Russian embassy. Mikoyan even ran the spiel again for the benefit of top labor union bosses James Carey and Walter Reuther (absent: A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s hornyhanded President George Meany, who said he would "not meet Mikoyan any time or place").

Mikoyan's road-show sell got a good house in Cleveland. There, he presented a gift of a Russian troika (three splendid, high-stepping white horses and carriage) to his host, aging (75) Industrialist Cyrus Eaton, was invited for a ride, no sooner got one foot on the little carriage step than the whole shebang lit off around a snowy track at full speed. Jaunty and chipper, he hung on, alighted at last with a gallant swoop of his hat, as Mrs. Eaton cooed: "You're the bravest man I've ever heard of." Eaton, who regards himself as a kind of missionary for Russian-U.S. coexistence (see BUSINESS), received the gift—a memento from Khrushchev of his visit to Russia last September—with the sentimental hope that "between these three fine stallions and our own mares, there can be not only peaceful coexistence but happy relationships."