Kudirka Lands in America

I arrived by taxi, rumpled and tieless, at the Waldorf Astoria, where I was sent on an editorial spur of the moment to cover the press conference of Simas Kudirka, the Lithuanian sailor, the only Lithuanian many Americans have ever heard of. We don’t have much contact with Eastern Europe, we Americans. Their languages are no kin to. ours, and an Iron Curtain has come to seem an almost natural kind of boundary between them and us. I found the Louis XVI room, plush and high-ceilinged, where the conference was to be held. I was early. A few distinguished-looking but unrecognizable men were conversing, quietly in Lithuanian while TV crews arranged their lights and cameras.

After wandering around the room bashfully for a while, I spoke with a man who turned out to be vice president of a Lithuanian-American organization whose members took a great interest and pride in Kudirka. He asked me, warily it seemed to me, whether I knew about the case: Kudirka’s attempted defection, his being beaten and seized by Soviet seamen aboard a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, his imprisonment in Russia, and at length his release. I said I knew, and told him I was from national review, which instantly made his manner freer, as if I had given him reason to trust me. We chatted for a few minutes, and it transpired we were both from Michigan —he from Grand Rapids, where Congressman Gerald Ford had shown concern about the Kudirka case from the moment it disgraced the U.S.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

James L. Buckley

Gerald R. Ford

I arrived by taxi, rumpled and tieless, at the Waldorf Astoria, where I was sent on an editorial spur of the moment to cover the press conference of Simas Kudirka, the Lithuanian sailor, the only Lithuanian many Americans have ever heard of. We don’t have much contact with Eastern Europe, we Americans. Their languages are no kin to. ours, and an Iron Curtain has come to seem an almost natural kind of boundary between them and us. I found the Louis XVI room, plush and high-ceilinged, where the conference was to be held. I was early. A few distinguished-looking but unrecognizable men were conversing, quietly in Lithuanian while TV crews arranged their lights and cameras.

After wandering around the room bashfully for a while, I spoke with a man who turned out to be vice president of a Lithuanian-American organization whose members took a great interest and pride in Kudirka. He asked me, warily it seemed to me, whether I knew about the case: Kudirka’s attempted defection, his being beaten and seized by Soviet seamen aboard a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, his imprisonment in Russia, and at length his release. I said I knew, and told him I was from national review, which instantly made his manner freer, as if I had given him reason to trust me. We chatted for a few minutes, and it transpired we were both from Michigan —he from Grand Rapids, where Congressman Gerald Ford had shown concern about the Kudirka case from the moment it disgraced the U.S.