Epochal Journey

They began arriving at 10 a.m. by the dozens, then by the hundreds. By noon there were nearly 15,000 -ordinary citizens, students with placards of welcome, brass bands, civil servants, diplomats, Congressmen, Cabinet members and the President of the U.S. -crushing around the DC-6B just landed at Washington's National Airport. In the plane's doorway appeared Vice President and Mrs. Richard Nixon, back from their tumultuous 18-day tour of Latin America. This was their homecoming, rare in its deep-felt warmth.

The receiving line broke up, swirled around the Nixons. "You did a great job, damn your soul," beamed South Caro lina's Democratic Representative Mendel Rivers to Republican Nixon. And then, to President Eisenhower: "Didn't he do a wonderful job?" Pennsylvania's Republican Representative James Fulton shouted to Mrs. Nixon: "How about a kiss for the President, Pat?" The President ducked away, grinning, lifting a shielding arm: "Dick is here, and Dick still carries a wallop." On a temporary speaker's stand, President Eisenhower nudged Pat Nixon, pointed to one of the dozens of placards bobbing above the crowd. Its legend: "Viva la Blond!"

Finally, the President waved for quiet, spoke into a battery of microphones. "All America welcomes them home," said Dwight Eisenhower. "We stand together in condemning any kind of Communist leadership of any such incidents as endangered our beloved Vice President and his wife." Replied Nixon: "I don't think that either of us has ever been so moved . . . returning as we do." Minutes later the homecoming caravan rolled away from the airport, along streets lined with 100,000 people, under a triumphant arch of fire-engine ladders, to the White House, where Nixon spent the next hour and a half reporting on his trip to the President and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Nip & Tuck. Both the President and Dulles had been living anxiously on the edge of Nixon's trip since Tuesday, when Ike got first word at a White House luncheon of the Venezuelan mob attack on the Nixons (see HEMISPHERE). The President's first move was to order Dulles to find out from the Venezuelan embassy if its government was able to protect the Nixons. He added: "We had better find out what we have militarily in the area." The President called Defense Secretary Neil McElroy and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Nathan Twining. Under Secretary of State Christian Herter, who had, through aides, been in touch with the Nixon party in Venezuela, called McElroy, reported the situation as "nip and tuck."

When Herter's report came, McElroy was in conference with the Joint Chiefs. The Army's Maxwell Taylor arose, asked McElroy crisply: "May I use your phone?" Permission granted, Taylor snapped out orders for the joist Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. to alert two companies. Equipment: "Packet A" -i.e., antiriot weapons, such as billy clubs and tear gas.

That afternoon President Eisenhower made his decision: he ordered Army para-Associated Press troopers and Marines* flown to U.S. bases in Cuba and Puerto Rico, there to stand ready to protect the Vice President. A fundamental condition: the troops would be sent into Venezuela only at the request of the Venezuelan government. The Joint Chiefs drew up a provisional plan: if Nixon should be actually besieged, two companies of the 101st Airborne would parachute into Caracas to secure the airfield, followed by two Marine companies, about 500 men, making a sea landing from the missile cruiser Boston. The carrier Tarawa would be steaming toward Caracas with another 250 Marines. Helicopters would be sent from the airport to the embassy for the Nixons, then the troops would pull out fast.

But such action did not prove necessary; next morning President Eisenhower talked to Nixon by telephone, learned that Caracas was calmer. That day, needled by questions about Yanqui diplomacy at his press conference, the President replied calmly: "Well, it is the most, the simplest precautionary type of measure in the world."

Cheers & Jeers. The press conference questions signaled the U.S. uproar to come. The last welcoming cheer for Richard Nixon's homecoming had barely died away when the political outcry began. Oregon's Nixon-hating Democrat Wayne Morse announced that his Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Latin America would investigate the whole Nixon tour, calling in State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and other witnesses "to learn what they knew of the potential for the outbreaks of violence and anti-Americanism before the Vice President scheduled his trip." The full Senate Foreign Relations Committee promptly took over the investigation, scheduled its own hearings and widened the scope. Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler got into the act, declared Nixon's good-will trips abroad were mere propaganda designed to get him on Page One. Replied White House Press Secretary James Hagerty: "How silly can you get?"

The nation's press leaped freely into the growing national fray. New York Times Pundit Arthur Krock found one Democratic leader who blamed Nixon for "trying to argue U.S. democracy through an interpreter at a loss to this country's dignity and his own." The Washington Post & Times Herald's Robert C. Albright quoted "several Democrats" who wondered "how much of the hostility exhibited at Lima and Caracas was directed against Nixon himself as a controversial individual." One or two even wondered whether Adlai Stevenson or some other prominent Democrat might not have had better treatment on a similar South American tour.

For the Republicans, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker added heat, but no light, to the debate by saying that Nixon's "sole offense as a cause of the rioting is that he is anti-Communist and anti-Alger Hiss." Connecticut's G.O.P. Representative Albert Morano and Pennsylvania's Republican James Fulton invited all their colleagues to sign up for "Nixon In '60." Six did.

"We Should Be Proud." Beyond the simple political name-calling were two substantive questions: Had the U.S. received adequate advance warning of the riots that might greet Nixon in South America? If so, should Nixon have gone? In fact, U.S. intelligence had considered it probable that there would be Communist-led demonstrations, even while underestimating their intensity and overestimating the ability of the Latin American governments to handle them. As to whether Nixon should have gone under such circumstances, the best-informed answer lay in the fact that his having gone brought important long-range benefits far outweighing temporary embarrassments.

Richard Nixon returned from South America convinced that it has undergone considerable social and economic revolution in the last decade -and that U.S. diplomacy has not caught up with the change. As he had on his trip to Africa, he found some U.S. diplomats mingling only with the thin upper-crust of society, totally unaware of the aspirations of the restless students and intellectuals. He arrived in Washington determined to throw all his influence into revamping U.S. policy toward Latin America.

"The people there," said he, "are concerned, as they should be, about poverty, misery and disease. They are determined to do something about it. And the U.S. is, and should be, proud to work with them as partners in moving toward democracy, toward freedom, toward economic progress." If achievement of that partnership is the outcome, then Nixon's troubled trip to Latin America may at the final summing have been a historic success.

* But the red-faced Marines were delayed because clerks had to type out the manifests of each hurry-up planeload. Henceforth the Marines will hand-scribble their manifests, save valuable time.

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