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Speaking to newsmen afterward, Kennedy thanked the Eisenhower Administration for its cooperation. Said he: "I don't think we have asked for anything that they haven't done."
One Nation. The cooperation brought into focus the underlying fact—blurred by all the talk of New Frontiers—that, while much changed on Inauguration Day 1961, much remained unchanged. If John F. Kennedy intends to head toward a New Frontier, he will have to start out on the old paths. He could not abolish the legacy of the Eisenhower Administration even if he wanted to—any more than Ike could or wanted to undo the New Deal.
The Eisenhower-Kennedy transition could well serve to remind the Communist world that beneath the ofttimes deep confiicts of political parties and viewpoints, the U.S. is one nation, indivisible. Nikita Khrushchev, an old hand at fostering divisions within nations, made a point in recent weeks of attacking Eisenhower, stressing that the inauguration of a new President would bring new hopes for U.S.-Russian accommodations. "A new page in U.S. history begins," proclaimed the Soviet newspaper Trud just before the inauguration. But if the page was new, it was a new page of the same book—the book that began on July 4, 1776.