Father & Son

In their tireless effort to determine how Soviet policy is made, Western diplomats are often in the position of anthropologists trying to reconstruct a dinosaur from the evidence of one jawbone. But when Nikita Khrushchev performed his clumsy about-face on the summit meeting last week, the reason was plain to see. He had been driven to it by Red China's Mao Tse-tung.

As has happened before, Khrushchev's cocky impetuosity had got him into trouble. In the days after the Iraqi coup, Nikita conducted his Mideast summit negotiations with the offhand decisiveness of a man who feels no need to consult anyone before he answers his mail. When Eisenhower's note proposing a U.N. summit conference arrived in Moscow, Khrushchev and some of his top aides were in conference with a group of visiting Austrians. "Will you excuse us?" said Nikita. "We have to draft a reply to Eisenhower's letter." In just 20 minutes, his acceptance note outlined, Khrushchev reappeared.

In his self-confidence, Khrushchev ignored the deep-seated hostility inside the Kremlin bureaucracy toward a summit meeting inside U.N.--a hostility clearly indicated by the fact that the first reactions of the kept Soviet press to the proposal were uniformly unfavorable. Worse yet, he obviously failed to keep in touch with Mao, whose journalistic mouthpieces, right up to the moment that Khrushchev accepted the proposal, were denouncing it as "deceptive," "ridiculous," "full of pitfalls."

Then came the flight to Peking--a journey that to gleeful Asians seemed to be Khrushchev's dutiful response to a hurry-up call from Mao. For four days, behind the ancient red walls of Peking's Imperial City, the two arbiters of the Communist world negotiated. When they emerged to shake hands for the photographers, the Peking line had become the Moscow line as well.

The Crackdown. This was not the first time Mao Tse-tung had made himself felt in Moscow. For two years Communist specialists in the West have been speculating that Mao had something close to a veto over some aspects of Soviet policy. Such speculation began when the Poles and Yugoslavs--soon after the October revolt that brought Wladyslaw Gomulka to power in Warsaw--reported that Mao was pressuring the Soviets to follow a more liberal policy toward the satellites. Warsaw and Belgrade saw Mao as their best champion in the Kremlin.

At that point, Mao was talking big about "letting one hundred flowers bloom" --until the blooming flowers of self-criticism set off such disorder in his own garden that he had to call the whole thing off. From then on, Peking worked against Gomulka and Tito by attacking Yugoslav "revisionism" even more savagely than did the Russians themselves. But the Mao-is-tops theorists stuck to their theory, while reversing their field: now it was not Mao the liberal they cheered, but Mao the hard they feared.

The available pieces of jawbone are not enough to flesh out the skeleton on which that theory hangs. But there could be little doubt that Mao had vetoed the summit. Nor is there much question of a sharpening distinction between current Russian and Chinese approaches. Khrushchev's claim to "liberalism" is belied by Hungary and his earlier days in the Ukraine; but he has pragmatically responded to some of the pressures to "liberalize" Russian life.

Mao is cracking down ever harder, and systematically sealing up every tiny gap in the Bamboo Curtain. The foreign press colony is now almost nonexistent in Peking. In the past six months, nearly two score Chinese servants employed in foreign embassies in Peking (including even that of "comradely" Czechoslovakia) have been whisked off to jail. Last week Mao's government ruled that the embassies and foreign business concerns could no longer hire their own employees, must accept people sent to them by the State Labor Bureau.

Saber & Specter. Obviously, any breath of outside air is, in China's present stage, like too much oxygen. Adult Russians have known nothing but a Communist society for the past 40 years; among educated Chinese, the memory of the atmosphere and another kind of thought is only nine years old. On such people, Mao has to cinch the Marxist straitjacket tighter. He is less free to adopt the Russians' confident approach that "peaceful competition" will lead to ultimate Communist triumph. In the classic fashion of young dictatorships, Red China must rely on "the threat from abroad" as a prop to internal discipline.

All of this was no sign that Mao was now calling the tune in the Communist world, or, as London's pinko New Statesman put it, that "Communism has two capitals, two spokesmen of equal weight." It suggests that Mao is a drag who on occasion has to be heeded. A nation of 600 million cannot be treated like Bulgaria.

The Communist Chinese obviously do not like a U.N. where Nationalist China has a seat and they are excluded; and they would hardly welcome Khrushchev's designation of Nehru as the appropriate man to represent Asia. Not only did the Mao-Khrushchev talks kill the U.N. summit conference; they also involved Khrushchev in a display of belligerence that went far beyond his usual pro forma reminders of Russian military power. The communique itself was disfigured by a gratuitous threat "to wipe out clean the imperial aggressors and so establish everlasting peace." And on the heels of this saber-rattling, Peking calculatedly added to the rustle of tensions by moving MIG-17 jet fighters into several previously unused airfields along the South China coast, one of them only 22 minutes' flying time from Taipei.

Nationalist Chinese forces, fearful of an impending attack on the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, promptly went onto the alert; in Washington the Department of State protested that Peking was "raising the specter of war." And in the process, Khrushchev's longstanding campaign to persuade the world that the Communist nations are just one big nest of peace lovers suffered a sharp setback.

As always, there were some who thought that Khrushchev had planned it all that way: that having lost the advantage of a summit on his terms, he wanted out. But he hardly had to back out in a way that so reflected on his own authority.

With Due Deference. The Peking meeting was an undisguised personal reverse that could only strengthen the position of the men in Moscow who had regarded his Mideast summit policy as rash and unsound. The Russian censors even let pass an A.P. dispatch suggesting that Khrushchev's stature had been diminished in Moscow.

Not long ago, chatting with a group of distinguished foreigners, Khrushchev confided that in the long run "we expect our relations with the Chinese will be rather like England's with the U.S." What Nikita apparently had in mind was his own peculiar interpretation of Anglo-U.S. relations--a kind of father-son tie in which the elder power is accorded the deference due to a parent. Last week, thanks to Khrushchev's miscalculations, the whole world could see that father's authority was already a little challenged.

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