As the reverberations of the summit collapse began to fade last week, the nation could count some net gains from what had at first seemed to many to be if not a disaster, at least a calamity. Khrushchev's ranting belligerence had rallied the Western nations closer together, and at home, even amid election-year recriminations, a heightened sense of national unity was evident.
"What about the future?" asked President Eisenhower in his televised report to the nation. Widespread in the U.S. was a sense of a future, a sense of changes astir. Just beyond the threshold of a new decade,...