Review

Nikita Khrushchev moved out of his wood-paneled office in the Kremlin one day last week so a CBS crew could strew it with cameras, lights and sound equipment. Next afternoon Russia's most powerful Communist stepped into the glare wearing the light grey suit the TV men had suggested, and two Hero of Socialist Labor medals on his chest. He firmly rejected any makeup, declined earphones for the simultaneous translation system, corrected an introduction describing the office as the room where Russia's major decisions are made: "We don't have a cult of personality any more." Then Khrushchev faced an hour of questions by U.S. newsmen for Face the Nation. This week over CBS TV and radio, Americans got the result: the season's most extraordinary hour of broadcasting.

It was a striking broadcast, not so much for the words that made headlines, but because it gave the U.S. its only firsthand, sustained view of what manner of man runs the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. The view bore little resemblance to the popular image of the off-duty, semicomic, garrulous Khrushchev tippling his way through diplomatic receptions. This was Khrushchev during office hours, not only sober but sobering: a tough, shrewd, vigorous man with the air of confident command. In sharp contrast to China's Chou Enlai, who cautiously read his answers to selected written questions on See It Now (TIME, Jan. 7), Khrushchev played by U.S. ground rules, asked in advance only for what fields the questions would cover. Producer Ted Ayers replied so broadly that he left a free hand to his panel, Moderator Stuart Novins and Moscow Correspondents Daniel Schorr of CBS and B. J. Cutler of the New York Herald Tribune.

"Your Iron Curtain." They warmed him up with questions on Soviet agriculture. A Foreign Ministry interpreter at his side whispered the questions in Russian, and another off-screen kept a sentence behind him in English over his electronically muted replies. Khrushchev, who has never appeared on Russian TV, sat calmly at his desk with his hands folded, grew more animated when the talk shifted to the U.S.-Russian tension. He jabbed his finger didactically as he prophesied that "your grandchildren in America will live under Socialism." A metal tooth often glinted at the corner of a cunning smile, and his quick but heavy wit, like a fat lady with a flair for dancing, lunged repeatedly in scorn; e.g., "You must do away with your Iron Curtain and not be afraid of Soviet cooks arriving in the U.S. --I don't think they will make any revolution in your country."

He pitched his current line hard: the U.S. is planning war while the Soviet Union wants only peaceful competition, serene that capitalism will crumble of itself. Will Russia, which has been urging a whole-hog ban on atomic arms, agree to the idea of a "first small step," as the U.S. proposes? Sure, said Khrushchev. He took refuge in evasion only once. When he said that Russia had cut its armed forces by 1,800,000 men, Cutler asked: "How many remained?" Khrushchev pleaded that he lacked accurate figures. Otherwise, when he did not joust with wily polemical craft, he swung the big lie like a club. When the newsmen flung the example of Hungary into his teeth and challenged his claim that all Communist regimes rest on "the will of the people," Khrushchev looked the picture of stubborn conviction as he launched a fist-clenching, arm-waving speech with the cry: "Absolutely! Absolutely! How can it be otherwise?"

Disneyland's weekly claim on being a "timeless land" could hardly have been more justified. For this week's venture, Walt Disney's ubiquitous cameras probed the most isolated and timeless community on earth: Antarctica. The second in a series of three shows about the U.S. Government's Antarctic Operation Deep Freeze opened with the arrival in McMurdo Sound and Little America V of Navy Task Force 43, whose job it was to set up bases to serve the scientists participating in the International Geophysical Year program of exploration. Americans had read much about dangers of the 200-m.p.h. winds, the merciless cold, the uncertain light; the film of two Disney cameramen brought them starkly to life on the TV screen.

A Seabee fell to his death in the enclosed cab of a D-8 tractor when the shallow snow roof masking a vast crevasse collapsed under him, and the camera poked 80" ft. down where the machine had come to rest. There were stunning shots of a mountainous snow mirage, of the frozen innards of crevasses "large enough to engulf the Empire State Building." Task Force Boss Rear Admiral George J. Dufek worried in the grim, featureless glare of a snow blizzard as radiomen tried to talk a plane down. With chilling thunder it crashed on the edge of the strip, killing four men. Also dramatized by sight and sound was the other hazard, the monotony of the explorers' long winter confinement. A lonely husband talked by radiophone to his wife and children back in Massachusetts. "Daddy, bring me a penguin," said his boy. Onscreen popped penguins, to steal the show from the Navy, as they stood, a splendidly cut-awayed audience, to watch a Seabee ball game, waddled aboard ice floes, and carried on comic, nearsighted courtships.

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