The Businessman-Diplomat

NORMAN K. WINSTON

AMERICAN businessmen must now take the role of the businessmen-diplomats of 50 years ago." Few men practice their preachments with more determined zeal than the author of those words, Norman Kenneth Winston, 59, an impish-faced, meticulously dressed man who ranks among the world's biggest builders (more than 20,000 houses and apartments worth $300 million), runs so many construction and real estate companies (more than 100) that he has lost count, manages a huge personal fortune ($40 million)--and still finds time to hustle continuously from continent to continent as envoy extraordinaire of U.S. capitalism. This week Norman Winston hopped off to Moscow to help open the first American National Exhibition in the Soviet Union as a special adviser to Fair Coordinator George V. Allen.

Well acquainted with Soviet brass, including Deputy Premiers Anastas Mikoyan and Frol Kozlov (whom he hosted in Manhattan), Winston smoothed the way for getting the U.S. show into the U.S.S.R. during seven self-paid trips to Moscow. Acting in an advisory capacity, he backed up the hard work of Exhibition General Manager Harold C. Mc-Clellan and his fulltime staff. The Soviet government respects Winston's business know-how, has invited him to Moscow three times for counsel on home building. Unlike Fellow Capitalist Cyrus Eaton (TIME, Jan. 19), Winston caustically criticizes Communism and all its works. Says he: "I tell the Russians that I'm a capitalist and that it's wonderful."

AS part of his unofficial diplomatic career, Capitalist Winston has been tapped by Mayor Robert Wagner to act as New York City's High Commissioner at trade fairs in Poznan, Zagreb, Vienna, Paris. The U.S. Department of Commerce took Winston on as special adviser for trade fairs, and last year Winston was U.S. Special Delegate to the UNESCO General Conference in Paris.

Winston is a builder at heart, and wherever he goes--in more than 200,000 miles of travel a year--he preaches the need of more home building. He is convinced that good housing is the best insurance against Communism ("People want to divide what you've got, not what they've got"), even believes that it is the cure for such social ills as alcoholism. ("Mendes-France would have cut out a lot more drinking had he built homes instead of trying to persuade Frenchmen to drink milk.") Winston has plenty of housetops to preach from. Outside Paris he put up 250 U.S.-style, moderately-priced houses and apartments to show off American mass-production building methods, sold them so fast that he plans hundreds more. In Spain's new steelmaking town of Aviles, he is building a $45 million city of 3,500 two-bedroom houses (price: $2,000).

Across the U.S., Winston has built housing valued at more than $250 million. He has $112 million worth abuilding, including groups of 3,500 apartments in Bayside. L.I., 1,500 apartments in Palatine, Ill. His formula for success is to build houses fast and in quantity, offer people something they could not duplicate for the price ($8,490 to $29.000), and, most of all. "build up to their dreams" by offering luxuries and interiors usually found in costlier houses.

WINSTON'S formula is so successful that his own dreams have literally come true. He moves among jewel-like homes on Manhattan's Sutton Square, in Paris' Faubourg St.-Germain and the Riviera's St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. On both sides of the Atlantic he is a lavish and witty host to society and royalty. Socialites, politicians, ambassadors and industrialists come to admire his golden-eyed. part-Cherokee wife Rosita (the eighth best-dressed woman in the U.S.), his superb table and cellars, and his tastefully decorated walls (three dozen major works by Renoir, Matisse, Degas, Modigliani, Picasso, Goya).

Such heights are far removed from Manhattan's Lower East Side, where Winston was born and reared, the son of an immigrant from Odessa. Young Winston went to the College of the City of New York ('20) and Fordham Law School, raised a $50,000 stake in the export-import business, shrewdly started horse trading in real estate. In the Depression Winston confidently bought large blocks of land on city fringes, watched his wallet grow fat as the population shifted to the suburbs.

Like Fellow Builders William (Levittown) Levitt and William (Hotel Zeckendorf) Zeckendorf, Norman Winston preserves his name in brick and mortar. Four U.S. communities are named Winston Park and four Winston schools have risen on land donated by Winston. These, and a philanthropic foundation, are his monuments; he has no children. Why does he not retire? Says Winston: "It's too late to retire."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.