National Affairs: Opinions & Impressions

Confronting President Eisenhower on his return from California last week were the written and oral reports, carefully compiled and closely considered, from U.S. officials who had seen the most of Nikita Khrushchev during his visit. In their considerable bulk, the reports ranged from opinions about Khrushchev’s purposes at the highest policy levels down to some fascinating details about his personal impression of the U.S.

In general the U.S. officials found reason to hope that Khrushchev was sincere in his assurances that he sought peace. Khrushchev himself created the impression of a man who, at 65, knows that his years in power are numbered and would like to win his place in history by working for peace. Khrushchev expressed his belief that the era of bipolar power—i.e., the U.S. and U.S.S.R.—is nearing an end, spoke of the necessity of reaching agreements with the U.S. before Red China and India, with their human millions, come into their own economically and militarily.

Beyond that, Khrushchev said often and emphatically that he wanted to reduce the percentage of the Soviet gross national product now devoted to military projects (about 25%, as compared to about 10% in the U.S.) and convert it to consumer production. The U.S. officials pictured Khrushchev’s frequent public claims about soon catching up with the U.S. in industrial and agricultural production as mere window dressing. In his more private moments, Khrushchev was portrayed as realizing that any such parity will be a long time in coming, can only be achieved by cutting down on military projects in favor of consumer efforts.

Smiling Mike. But the U.S. officials recognized that Khrushchev’s professions of sincerity, genuine as some of them sounded, might well be nothing more than more Communist talk. To test Khrushchev’s good faith, they urged that the U.S. quickly make proposals for East-West agreements in a dozen different areas, e.g., a controlled nuclear ban, renewed negotiations on the U.S.S.R.’s lend-lease account with the U.S., an end to Soviet jamming of U.S. broadcasts beamed to the U.S.S.R.

The nuisance of the Khrushchev visit, according to the reports given the President, was the U.S.S.R.’s Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail (“Smiling Mike”) Menshikov, who missed no chance to downgrade the U.S. to his boss. U.S. officials reasoned that Menshikov had been tailoring his reports on the U.S. so as to fit Kremlin conceptions, and that he was trying to justify his misreporting during the Khrushchev visit. When Khrushchev received a cap as a gift on the West Coast, Menshikov went into elaborate detail about the Italian hat industry’s being far superior. Spotting a small cloud in the sky on a lovely Los Angeles day, Menshikov muttered to Khrushchev the Russian equivalent of “smog, smog.” It was Menshikov who insisted that Khrushchev be driven through Harlem slums, accused U.S. escort officers of trying to “hide” Harlem (infuriated, the U.S. officials worked Harlem in on a schedule already tight). And it was Menshikov who kept waving under Khrushchev’s nose angry news reports of Khrushchev’s heated California meeting with U.S. labor leaders, although Khrushchev privately laughed the whole session off as “oil off the back of a goose.”

Some Hope for Good. Despite his constant public boasting about everything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better. the U.S. officials found that Khrushchev was indeed vastly impressed with many of the things he saw: the thousands of autos spinning over superhighways on the West Coast; the razing of perfectly usable Park Avenue buildings to make way for new and better Manhattan buildings; drive-in theaters; the U.S.’s better-class housing (but not low-cost subdivision housing); Iowa’s flourishing farmland (Khrushchev laughed until the tears came to his eyes in recalling Iowa Farmer Roswell Garst throwing silage at newsmen and kicking New York Timesman Harrison Salisbury in the leg).

In private, Khrushchev expressed his surprise at not seeing U.S. bread lines, which he had apparently been led to expect. More substantively, he was impressed with a speech in which Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor David Lawrence said that the Democratic Party stands squarely behind the Republican President in matters of foreign policy, and by his discovery that U.S. mayors are not actually appointed by and answerable to the President. It was in such impressions, as much or more than in Khrushchev’s avowals of sincerity, that the U.S. officials who accompanied him found some hope resulting from the Khrushchev visit.