The Long March

The U.S. saw Nikita Khrushchev and Nikita Khrushchev saw the U.S. All hopeful predictions about relaxing tensions to the contrary, the meeting turned out to be one of the grand confrontations of the cold war and of all time.

Khrushchev was tough, petulant, vital, bantering, implacable. The U.S. was calm, curious, confident, challenging. Khrushchev staked claim to rocket power and the inevitable acclaim of history. Millions of Americans, lining his route, countered with a crash of unapplauding silence more eloquent of unshaken resolution than batteries of rockets on the moon.

What Nikita Khrushchev really saw of the U.S. was next to nothing. By his own order, he bypassed such monuments to U.S. achievement as the Tennessee Valley Authority, and by his own disinterest, he did not look upon the unparalleled industrial complex between Washington and New York City. Instead, he set his own course through the serried ranks of U.S. diplomats, businessmen, civic brasshats and movie actresses, as if in search of more Marxist cliches to take home. Even when his hosts drove him through towns with tall white steeples, through prosperous farms, friendly campuses and towering skyscrapers, he barely bothered to look out the window. At week's end in San Luis Obispo, Calif., he turned the Marxist cliche around by complaining that the American "authorities" had not let him meet the real people, had kept him under virtual "house arrest."

What the U.S. saw of Nikita Khrushchev was much more valuable. The U.S., long since disabused of the image of Nikita the Vodka-Slopping Peasant, already knew Khrushchev to be the skillful and dynamic leader of 200 million people. The U.S. found out, as Khrushchev boiled into successive rages in Washington, New York and Los Angeles (twice) before TV crowds of millions, that Khrushchev could also lay out a combination of uncontrolled willfulness, ignorance and ill temper. Above all, the U.S. found out last week that Khrushchev's New Course of Communism was the same Old Course; that his protestations of peace and friendship cloaked a naked drive for world power no less sustained than that of the late Joseph Stalin.

President Eisenhower, preparing to confer with Chairman Khrushchev this week at Camp David, Md., described to his press Conference in Washington the full measure of what was involved in the confrontation. Dedicated Communists, said Ike, believe that their system is a "progressive step in the long march of civilization. We do not. We do not have a real system; we have a way of life. We are concerned in giving every individual the maximum freedom to develop himself, and the

Government is really a help, not the complete director of the individual.

"So, since we believe that the feeling for freedom, that respect for freedom, love of freedom, is instinctive in men, we do think that the systematized order that is observed in Russia is a step backward, not forward. Now, Mr. Khrushchev . . . is always saying that history is going to decide between us. I believe history, in the long run, is going to decide in favor of the free system."

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