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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.