(10 of 10)
"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 10½ 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 6½ 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.