Foreign News: HOST WITH THE MOST

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Morning after the elections in which the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat ratified its contempt for the democratic process of free popular choice, the three Americans appointed by the State Department to observe the show went off to an interview with Nikita Khrushchev at the Communist Party's stucco-front headquarters near the Kremlin. The Americans-Cyril E. Black, professor of modern European history at Princeton University; Richard Scammon, director of elections research for Washington's Governmental Affairs Institute; and Hedley Donovan, managing editor of FORTUNE-were official guests of the Soviet government, repaying a visit that three Soviet observers had made to the U.S. during the 1956 campaign. Afterward, Newsman Donovan cabled from Warsaw his impressions of the host with the most votes of all:

KHRUCHCHEV looked tired; he was also older-looking than I had expected, and softer and shorter-looking. Perhaps this was only because for weeks his picture had been gazing out over me from hundreds of Soviet walls, and in these tinted official photographs, two or three times lifesize, his features are planed off and hardened. He was wearing a well-cut suit, dark blue verging on black, a soft white shirt with French cuffs, and a light grey tie. He placed the young interpreter from the Foreign Ministry at the head of the long, green baize conference table, and himself took a seat at the side, his back to the windows that look out across an interior courtyard to an expanse of zinc roofs.

"You are quite right," he conceded at the outset, "in noting that the party organization plays an active role in the selection of candidates."

Communism has never had a spokesman who could state a bad case more ingratiatingly. As official observers, we felt that courtesy demanded a minimum of argument, and this suited Khrushchev. He put on quite a show. When I said we had been much impressed by the earnestness with which people talked of "overtaking and surpassing" U.S. production in 10 or 15 years, Khrushchev answered with a trace of irritation: "I don't know why some people in your country don't take this slogan seriously. Our rates and tempos of growth are three and four times those of your country. I don't know about the time, but the lines are bound to cross. We are all convinced that we will overtake you, and this is not a matter of theory but of facts."

I said it would be a good thing for the U.S. to understand the U.S.S.R.'s determination, and that Americans would welcome the competition. "We are not threatening the U.S. with just competition," he said. "We consider that the task should be for all the people of the earth to achieve the American level of living and go even beyond that, and we are sure the whole earth has enough resources for this to take place."