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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."