The Elemental Force

DIPLOMACY (See Cover)

"Nikita Sergeevich, I salute you on American soil," said the U.S.S.R.'s Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. last week--and there he was. There on American soil was Nikita Khrushchev, short, bald and portly, wearing a black suit, Homburg and three small medals, bowing down the receiving line, accepting a 21-gun salute, parading past a guard of honor. There on his one hand stood his pleasant, shy wife Nina Petrovna, his daughters Julia, 38, and Rada, 29, his studious-looking son Sergei, 24, and a retinue of 63 officials and bureaucrats. There on his other hand stood President Eisenhower. "Permit me at this moment to thank Mr. Eisenhower for the invitation," Khrushchev said graciously, responding to the President's coolly proper speech of greeting. "The Soviet people want to live in friendship with the American people." But Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev was not five minutes into his speech or 15 minutes into the U.S. before he sounded a prideful note of power that was to echo, sometimes blaring, sometimes muted, as the dominant theme of his trip. "Shortly before this meeting with you, Mr. President," he said, "the Soviet scientists, technicians, engineers and workers filled our hearts with joy by launching a rocket to the moon. We have no doubt that the excellent scientists, engineers and workers of the U.S.A. will also carry the pennant to the moon. The Soviet pennant, as an old resident, will then welcome your pennant." Khrushchev's tone at this point was so pleasantly conversational that Ambassador Menshikov flashed a warm beam, but Khrushchev's pleasantness stopped at his ice-cold bullet eyes. The Facts of Life. Thus began what was, from Washington to Manhattan to Los Angeles to San Francisco, not so much a move to reduce world tension as a historic and tireless one-man campaign to cajole, flatter, wheedle, shame, threaten and defy the U.S. into changing its way of looking at the world.

Khrushchev defined it most bluntly in Washington: "There are only two nations which are powerful--the Soviet Union and the U.S. You people must accept the facts of life. You must recognize that we are here to stay." Khrushchev's argument: the U.S. must accept that fact and concede a "status quo" or "thaw" or "peace." It must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm. It should reap the golden harvest of trade with Communist nations. It should leave to a furious peacetime competition the settlement of the classic feud between Communism and capitalism. Ultimately, he declared cockily, Communism would win anyway.

Nikita Khrushchev, sleeping as little as three hours a night, scarcely bothering to look out the windows of cars, trains, planes, pressed his message in brief private talks with the President, with U.S. diplomats and business executives, and in public question-and-answer debates with U.S. businessmen and newsmen before TV crowds of millions. And as the trip piled climax upon climax, it was Khrushchev himself--with his peasant's roughhewn politeness and witty proverbs and knack of making others laugh; with his politician's adeptness at choosing which questions to answer, dodge or bull through; with his dictator's unpredictable pace changes from toothy grins to sudden shouts; with his Marxist's igth century-model sureness that capitalism, like feudalism, was doomed by a simple process of history--it was Khrushchev who was at all times the embodiment of the elemental challenge. With an expansive smile he proclaimed to the U.S.: "You wanted to see what kind of man Khrushchev is! Well, here I am!"

Marx & Butter. The kind of man Khrushchev is had been case-hardened in the crucible of what Communism is--and both underlay every play of last week's drama. Khrushchev learned his Bolshevism out of his dismal early life--born and bred in a mud-and-reed hut, boy shepherd, child laborer in the coal mines, whipped unforgettably with a knotted nagaika while caught fishing on a princely estate. He was semiliterate until his mid-208, when he was sent, along with other Red army civil war veterans, to Lenin's Rabfak (workers' school). He learned his political skill in the apparatus--secretaryships in the Donets Basin, Moscow, the Ukraine; straw boss on digging the Moscow subways--and he translated it, in his first big assignment, into his ruthless purges of Ukrainian nationalists before and after World War II.

Khrushchev's rubber-stamp loyalty to superiors brought him the nomination of Stalin's heirs, after Stalin's death, for the party's first secretaryship. Khrushchev's mastery of the party regional machinery enabled him to build the personal power that ousted Stalin's heirs: Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, even the Red army's authentic hero Marshal Zhukov. But Khrushchev's elemental knowledge of the people told him that the Soviet's rising technology needed some freedom from terror, and he set a new course of demote, not destroy; prosper, not starve. "It is not wrong," said he, as he laid claim to be Communism's first popular leader, "to throw in a piece of bacon and a piece of butter in the course of improving the theory of Marx." And Khrushchev's cloistered view of capitalism persuaded him that he could change the ways of the outside world--a world of law and liberty and a heritage of Christian morality he never knew--if only he could convince the strong that he dealt from equal strength.

"Nearer My God." In this long perspective, the eyes of the world on them, Khrushchev, his wife and the President of the U.S. rode 13 miles in the President's open-top Lincoln from Andrews Air Force Base to Blair House, the President's guest house across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. As the motorcade swung behind blaring brass bands into downtown Washington, the crowds lining the streets stood silent and somber, did not respond to Khrushchev's doffs and waves of his Homburg. A skywriting plane traced a big cross in the sky, and the carillon of St. John's Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House, pealed Nearer My God to Thee. A Russian aide reported to Khrushchev that it was all a capitalist plot: a car, he said, had gone through the streets just before the arrival bearing a sign instructing the crowds not to applaud. The Moscow press and radio (see PRESS) reported a triumphal turnout.

In the afternoon Khrushchev headed into talks with Eisenhower in the White House--1 hour 45 minutes with Vice President Nixon, Secretary of State Herter, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, Ambassador Menshikov, and a few others; 13 minutes with Ike and interpreters alone. Eisenhower told Khrushchev: If you are sincere, you have an opportunity to make a great advancement in reducing tensions. We are willing, but you have got to be equally willing. Khrushchev replied: We hope to improve the international climate. We want to live in peace and to have peaceful competition.

They agreed to meet again this week at Camp David, the presidential retreat on Maryland's Catoctin Mountain. The President put Berlin, Laos and disarmament on the agenda. Said Khrushchev: "We will want to discuss the question of bases on foreign territory."

At talk's end, Eisenhower took Khrushchev on a 33-minute helicopter ride at 700-ft. to 1,000-ft. altitude above prosperous new housing developments and shopping centers, superhighways crowded with cars, and marinas filled with boats.

How-Secret Service? The White House glittered that night for the biggest white-tie dinner of the Eisenhower Administration. Khrushchev arrived in neat black suit, white shirt and pale grey four-in-hand tie; Mrs. Khrushchev in a dark blue-green dress, with a diamond brooch her only jewelry. The Khrushchev family made a brief visit to the Eisenhower family rooms upstairs, posed with the Eisenhowers for pictures, then went down to the huge E-shaped table jammed into the White House dining room.

Khrushchev, all smiles, got into a catlike exchange about the secret service business when he was introduced to Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The dialogue:

Dulles: You, Mr. Chairman, may have seen some of my intelligence reports from time to time.

Khrushchev: I believe we get the same reports--and probably from the same people.

Dulles: Maybe we should pool our efforts.

Khrushchev: Yes. We should buy our intelligence data together and save money. We'd have to pay the people only once.

And Khrushchev remembered his basic message. Said he in response to the President's toast to "fact and truth'': "When the weak quarrel, they are just scratching each other's faces, and it takes just a couple of days for a cosmetician, and everything comes out right again. But if we quarrel, the world will be involved in a world shambles."

"Agreement with the Strong." At 7:40 a.m. next day, Khrushchev walked out onto the porch of Blair House in shirt sleeves, keynoted his second day with a friendly wave to a knot of reporters and photographers (see color). Accompanied by Mrs. Khrushchev and daughters Julia and Rada, he sped out at 9 a.m. to the Agriculture Department's 12,000-acre Research Station, 22 miles north of Washington at Beltsville, Md. He managed to ignore a horde of noisy photographers and listen intently to the highly technical lectures, e.g., plant response to varying lights. Later he was escorted outside to inspect Beltsville's best cattle, sheep, pigs and turkeys. "If you didn't give a turkey a passport," he said with a grin, "you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey."

Back in town, in his first formal public speech at the National Press Club, Khrushchev extended the friendly impression. His voice was clear, his manner sincere. He defined some of the specifics of what the Soviets mean by coexistence, e.g., disarmament, neutral West Berlin, German peace treaty with Communist East Germany recognized, removal of U.S. restrictions on strategic trade with the U.S.S.R. Said he: "We want to reach agreement with the strong and thereby reach agreement with all countries on the abolition of the cold war."

On the Defensive. Then, for the first time, Nikita Khrushchev was suddenly and unexpectedly thrown onto the defensive. At the opening of the question session, New York Timesman William H. Lawrence, Press Club president, crisply recounted an anecdote ("perhaps apocryphal") and invited Khrushchev to comment. It added up to a delicate question: What was Khrushchev doing during Stalin's blood purges? Khrushchev's face muscles tightened and his eyes narrowed as he heard the translation. He replied: "Probably the authors of fables, including the author of this question, wanted to place me in difficulties. I shall not reply to this question, which I look upon as being provocative."

Moments later a second question struck. Did Khrushchev justify Russia's armed intervention in Hungary? "Well," Khrushchev snapped back, "you see, the question of Hungary has stuck in some people's throats as a dead rat. He feels that it is unpleasant, and yet he cannot spit it out . . . We, for our part, could think of quite a few dead cats we could throw at you." Translator Oleg Troyanovsky, apparently under instructions to blunt Khrushchev's sharpest bites, translated the "dead cats" as "questions of a similar character."

Sharp Answers. But Nikita Khrushchev was gaining understanding of a sort. He threw himself into his answers; he never faltered in setting down the Soviet line. He demonstrated clearly that he is no clown, although he knew how to draw a laugh when he wanted one. He stumbled--perhaps artfully--half a dozen times. Once he apologized for accidentally calling U.S. newsmen "comrades," once referred to the tenth anniversary of the revolution in "America" when he meant China. When he was asked about his celebrated "We will bury you" gibe at the U.S., Khrushchev explained calmly that capitalism was doomed to die not by his action but by the inexorable march of history: "We believe that Karl Marx, Engels and Lenin gave scientific proof of the fact."

Later in the afternoon, his unyielding line on Germany, on U.S. overseas bases and on U.S.S.R. censorship and radio jamming shook 26 members and guests of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called together for tea with the visitor by Chairman William Fulbright of Arkansas. Said Minnesota's Eugene McCarthy when the session was over: "He's a little like a candidate in the late stages of the campaign. He has heard all the questions many times, and his answers are sharp as hell."

Khrushchev went down from Capitol Hill to Blair House just in time to swap his tan suit for his dark suit and play host at a state reception of the Soviet embassy. The first U.S. President to cross the embassy threshold, Dwight Eisenhower led his lady and 31 other Americans in joining 23 Russians in caviar, borsch and shashlik beneath crystal chandeliers. Said Khrushchev of his trip to date: "I'm very pleased--despite the strong propaganda, a warm reception." "Had anything he had seen changed his prior conceptions about the U.S.?" "No."

Underground Welcome. Khrushchev was out at 7:47 a.m. to lead his party aboard the train to Manhattan. There, on a brisk, clear day among the skyscrapers, the tour began to lose its jovial bounciness. As a safety precaution, he got the official greeting in the dirty, cavenious incoming baggage room at Pennsylvania Station. For the next 45 hours, his hosts seemed to spend most of their energy trying to protect him from harm.

Time and again Khrushchev's motorcade of black, closed-top Cadillacs ran between silent crowds at a 35-m.p.h. clip. His route was patrolled--sidewalks, roofs, windows, gratings, manhole covers--by 3,300 blue-uniformed police and plainclothesmen. Here and there, Ukrainian and Hungarian pickets waved placards--WELCOME MURDERER, and GO TO THE MOON, LEAVE NEW YORK FOR--US but the police had even ordered the pickets not to carry placard poles.

On his arrival in Manhattan, Khrushchev greeted the American "toilers, who create the wealth of society." But he had pointedly accepted invitations to talk with business leaders. After a civic luncheon--where the audience surprised itself by joining the band in a roaring, spontaneous rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner--Khrushchev was whisked to the town house of Multimillionaire W. Averell Harriman. There Host Harriman, who had visited Khrushchev in Moscow, introduced him to 27 top U.S. industrialists, financiers and educators, told Khrushchev bluntly that here was his chance to sample the views of those held by Communists to be "the ruling circles." As Khrushchev sank back in a big chair, the U.S. businessmen--notably Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman John McCloy, General Dynamics Chairman Frank Pace and RCA Chairman David Sarnoff--assured him that they wanted nothing more than to give up profits from national defense contracts to concentrate on the growing civilian economy. They agreed afterward that they had not made a visible dent in Khrushchev's understanding of capitalism. To argue capitalism v. Communism ideology, said Khrushchev, was like "the deaf talking to the deaf."

"An Old Sparrow." U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge, serving as Khrushchev's escort, tried again that night at an Economic Club of New York dinner at the Waldorf. During Lodge's exposition of U.S. capitalism as "economic humanism" (see box), Khrushchev interrupted: "Only the grave can correct a hunchback!" And in his long, prepared speech, Khrushchev dangled the prospect of big profits before the businessmen if the U.S. would abandon its "obstinacy" and lift strategic trade restrictions. He got tangled up in language difficulties, lost his temper when he mistook grumbling over his long-windedness for derision of his own ideas. Khrushchev hurled back a proverb--"He who wants to have eggs must put up with the hens' cackle"--and then erupted during the question period with a line that discreet Translator Troyanovsky did not render into English: "You think you've got me lying on my back with my hands and feet in the air!" In the short-lived hubbub, Khrushchev fell back on his native Russian pride. "Gentlemen," he said, "I am an old sparrow. You cannot muddle me by your cries. If there is no desire to listen to what I have to say, I can go. I come here not to beg but as a representative of a great people." But at dinner's end he had his temper under control, exited smiling, singing out "Do svidaniya [Goodbye]."

"I Have No Power." Khrushchev got a late start next morning. As a result his party rolled away from the Waldorf for a 75-85-m.p.h., 100-mile motor run through the green hills and trim white farms of the Hudson River Valley country to lay a wreath on the Franklin D. Roosevelt grave at Hyde Park. There, Khrushchev said simply and routinely: "We came to pay homage to the memory of Roosevelt."

But the visit produced a strangely significant vignette. On hand to greet him and his smiling wife Nina was Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, longtime preacher of the proposition that tensions around the world can be relaxed. The day Khrushchev got to New York Mrs. F.D.R. had signed a friendly, full-page advertisement in the New York Times, with 56 others--WE SUPPORT PRESIDENT EISENHOWER'S INVITATION TO PREMIER KHRUSHCHEV. But as Eleanor Roosevelt guided Khrushchev through the framed portraits, ship models, bound volumes of past Roosevelt glories, she seemed to grow more and more perturbed; Khrushchev was paying little attention to her. seemed anxious to get away; he did not stop even to sip the coffee she had prepared. "One for the road," he grinned as he grabbed a seed roll from the table to munch on the way back to New York.

Said she sadly, "This gentleman is interested in power--and I have no power."

The K-Dud. Khrushchev had a couple other pro forma visits on the day's schedule. He chatted amiably for 22 minutes with New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who came to call at the Waldorf and delivered a little homily on the Bible and man's faith in God, then posed for one of the liveliest pictures of the week. Khrushchev dutifully went to the top of the Empire State Building and got into a bootless argument over whether the view was as handsome in Moscow. Said Khrushchev: "New York is a fine city, but I like Moscow best of all." He led his entourage on a 35-mile-an-hour sweep through Wall Street and up Broadway--distinguished by two tiny trails of ticker tape fluttering out of a lonely window.

The big item on Khrushchev's schedule --and obviously the big, open failure of his first week abroad--was his disarmament speech to the United Nations, which turned out to be a fabulous dud (see FOREIGN NEWS). That night, when he showed up in his dark suit for a United Nations dinner, Khrushchev seemed dispirited and worn out. He proposed his toast listlessly and headed home at 10:25 p.m. He had some of the bounce back next morning when he swept through Harlem on the way to Idlewild Airport for his flight west in an Air Force Boeing 707 jet. Said he: "It seems that some provocative elements have a negative attitude toward us." But after all, these people were but "a few drops in the sea." Getting back to mingling with the workers again, he said, would "make me feel like a fish in a mountain stream."

Unspoken Speech. Khrushchev's big jet swept into Los Angeles International Airport 5 hr. 27 min. later, sat down with a bounce. He padded down the bright aluminum ramp, his light-colored suit flapping, looked detached and almost dubious about leaving the plane. Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson stepped forward, handed out what was perhaps the briefest official greeting a U.S. city has ever given a visiting chief of state. Said Poulson: "We welcome you to Los Angeles, City of the Angels, the city where the impossible always happens." Khrushchev, who had the text of an arrival speech in his hand, gave it back to an aide, said little more than "Thank you." There were no crowds: the welcome was set in a remote corner of the airport in front of a yawning North American Aviation Co. hangar. Nor were there crowds along Khrushchev's route through the city: the route had not been published.

Just before 1 p.m. Khrushchev's motorcade rolled up to the 20th Century-Fox studio commissary ("Cafe de Paris") in Beverly Hills. Khrushchev was welcomed by President Eric Johnston of the Motion Pictures Association, who had visited Khrushchev in Russia, and by 20th Century-Fox President Spyros Skouras. The Premier sat down for lunch between them. Mrs. Khrushchev, carrying a bouquet of bird-of-paradise flowers, sat beside Frank Sinatra, opposite Bob Hope and David Niven. Before them stretched a glittering panorama of jewels, dyed hair and suntans of a Hollywood movie colony so complete that even Eddie. Liz and Debbie were in the same room. Greek-born Spyros Skouras and Khrushchev got into a bumbling, emotional, unscheduled debate about how each had risen from their poorboy origins under their respective capitalist and Communist systems. Skouras scored the best line--"Your country is the greatest monopoly the world has ever known, colossal, colossal"--but Skouras' needling of Khrushchev brought audience cries of "Sit down," "Shut up" and "Let him alone!"

"I Cannot Find Words." In mid-meal Mrs. Khrushchev passed up a note to her husband informing him that there had been a change in schedule for that afternoon: the Khrushchevs were not going to be driven to Disneyland, as they had requested, because the city police could not guarantee their safety. Disneyland is in another county. The city police had added that nobody agreed with them more than Khrushchev's own security detail.

Nikita Khrushchev, ruler of 200 million people, addressed himself to the Disneyland issue, his voice beginning to shake, but only slightly. "We have come to this town where lives the cream of American art," said he. "And just imagine, I, a Premier, a Soviet representative, when I came here to this city, I was given a plan, a program of what I was to be shown and whom I was to meet here."

Khrushchev's face turned darker; he began to shake his head, clench his fists, pound the table, as the audience looked on in amazement. "But just now," he said, "I was told that I could not go to Disneyland. I asked: 'Why not? What is it? Do you have rocket-launching pads there? I do not know.' And just listen, just listen to what I was told, to what reason I was told. We, which means the American authorities, cannot guarantee your security if you go there.

"What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me? Then what must I do? Commit suicide? That is the situation I am in --your guest. For me the situation is inconceivable. I cannot find words to explain this to my people!"

Reflected Heat. The Khrushchevs were led off after lunch to watch the shooting of Can-Can. Their hosts: Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine. Shirley had barely started the welcome speech she had learned in Russian before she became annoyed by the noises of the scene shifters. She said to them: "Could you do this later because this is awfully important to me?" And she said to Khrushchev & Co.: "I do hope you'll enjoy these parts of our picture Can-Can because we very much enjoy the Soviet artists you have sent to this country." After Frank introduced the song Live and Let Live, he said to Khrushchev: "It's a marvelous idea." And as he heard Frank talk, watched Shirley and the chorus girls upend, Khrushchev grinned. Going back over the Disneyland outburst, he said that the studio commissary had been hot, and he had been hotheaded, and he even apologized for his words. When Kim Novak was ushered up to him, Khrushchev said to Kim: "You realty wowed Mikoyan."

With Disneyland off limits, Khrushchev was driven behind police escort through shopping centers, housing developments, and the U.C.L.A. campus. Ambassador Lodge told Khrushchev that he could stop anywhere; Khrushchev, once again detached and dubious-looking, chose not to stop anywhere, hardly looked out of the windows of his closed car. That night at a civic dinner in the Ambassador Hotel, Khrushchev found himself once again beside Los Angeles' Mayor Norris Poulson. Poulson keynoted a speech in which he was supposed to be introducing Khrushchev to an echo of Patrick Henry. "You shall not bury us," he told Khrushchev, "and we shall not bury you. But, if challenged, we shall fight to the death to preserve it."

"This Favorite Horse." Khrushchev wound up his prepared text on California weather, disarmament, how Los Angeles smog resembled the cold war, then looked at Mayor Poulson. "I want to ask you," he said, "why did you mention that? Already in the U.S. I have clarified that. I trust that even mayors read." The crowd gave Khrushchev a laugh and a round of applause. "In our country," Khrushchev went on, "chairmen of councils who do not read the press risk not being re-elected." The crowd gave Khrushchev another big hand; two-time Mayor Poulson turned crimson. Then Khrushchev went on: "Ladies and gentlemen, you want to get up on this favorite horse of yours and proceed in the same old direction. If you want continuation of the arms race, then, very well, we accept that challenge. And as for the output of our rockets, those are on the assembly line.

"I am talking seriously because I have come here with serious intentions, and you try to reduce the matter to simply a joke. It is a question of war or peace between our countries, a question of the life or death of the people."

"I Can Go." The audience sat silent, as if stunned. "I have never in any of my addresses spoken or mentioned any rockets," Khrushchev said, "but when I did so today I had no other way out, because it would seem that we have come here to beg you to eliminate the cold war because we are afraid of you. If you think the cold war is profitable to you, then go ahead. Let us compete in the cold war. The question as it stands now is whether this meeting of minds with President Eisenhower will lead to the elimination of the cold war, or whether we will simply part. If you do not accept all this, I can go, and I don't know when, if ever, another Russian Soviet Premier Minister will visit your country.

"It is much better to live in peace than to live with loaded pistols."

The audience applauded, but Khrushchev was not to be stopped.

"The thought sometimes--the unpleasant thought sometimes creeps up on me here as to whether Khrushchev was not invited here to enable you to sort of rub him in your sauce and to show the might and strength of the U.S. so as to make him--so as to make him shake at the knees. If that is so, then if it took me about twelve hours to get here, I guess it will take no more than 10 1/2 hours to fly back.

"I am going to close," Khrushchev wound up. "I have tired you out. I believe you suffered through my speech, but so was I made to suffer. I have such a nature that I do not want to remain in debt, and I do not want to be misunderstood."

After one hour and 15 minutes on his feet at the Ambassador, after 10 hours in the City of the Angels, where the impossible happens, after 6 1/2 days in a nation that was unimpressed by his show of power, on the eve of his crucial talks with President Eisenhower at Camp David, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev was clearly not misunderstood.

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