Pacific Rim Shot : U.S. Official’s Joke Riles Trade Summit Delegates

A senior U.S. official embarrassed those attending a Pacific Rim trade summit and offended Soviet and Chinese delegates by attacking Marxism and using a mocking Chinese accent to tell a joke about Soviet women.

Fred M. Zeder II, head of the government’s Overseas Private Investment Corp., made the comments Tuesday in a speech that left organizers red-faced and many foreign delegates shaking their heads in embarrassment.

Zeder, 68, was the first speaker on the second and last day of the $1-million Pacific Summit, the centerpiece of Washington state’s centennial celebration. He was appointed to head OPIC by President Bush earlier this year.

Began With Joke

Zeder began his address with a joke in which China’s late Chairman Mao Zedong is asked by a foreign journalist what “might have happened if Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated Khrushchev rather than President Kennedy.”

Mimicking a Chinese accent, Zeder said Mao replied: “Only one thing certain. Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”

Few listeners were amused, delegates said.

“It was only a joke, but I don’t like the joke,” said Lu Zu-wen, commercial consul for the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. “He’s a joker. I don’t know what his purpose was.”

Zeder accused the Soviets of “marching into Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia,” of “bringing Castro’s Cuban mercenaries into Nicaragua, Angola and Ethiopia” and of spreading Marxism “every place in the world.”

‘A Dismal Failure’

“Everyone who has tried that Marxist-Leninist form of economy and ideology are now openly admitting that their system was a dismal failure,” Zeder said.

Zeder described how shortly after World War II a German businessman introduced himself and then said, “I never was a Nazi” while giving a Nazi-style salute.

“Now every place I go in the world, people say, ‘I never was a socialist.’ You know, they all want to get on the privatization bandwagon.”

Soviet delegate Vyacheslav Zilanov drew applause from other participants at a later forum when he criticized Zeder’s remarks, particularly his harsh attack on Marxism.

“I don’t agree with some of the opinions put forward by Zeder in his morning speech,” Zilanov said. “I don’t feel this Pacific Summit is the right place to discuss Marxist-Leninist theory and its position right now.”