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Sympathetic Relations. Inevitably, some of the Red newsmen succumbed to habit and unreeled a few meters of the Red line. After the race riots in Birmingham and Montgomery, Pravda's Viktor Maevsky discovered a parallel between the "fascists" of the John Birch Society and the "fascists" who beat up the Freedom Riders. Erofeev complained about the "irresponsibility of the American press." Said he: "We met American corespondents at length, and the next morning articles would appear, vindictive and hostile, destructive of sympathetic relations between our countries."
But in Iowa, at least, the newsmen got as much as they gave. On the unavoidable visit to the farm of Roswell Garst—who has played host to Premier Khrushchev (in 1959) and fancies himself a black-dirt diplomat—the visitors listened stonily to a lecture on what was wrong with Russia. The Soviets should build better farm-access roads, said Garst; they could improve their living standards by getting up an hour earlier in the morning. Then Garst broke out some vodka left over from the Khrushchev visit, but the newsmen insisted on U.S. whisky.
Intriguing Idea. In Washington, the Russian visitors watched the U.S. Senate convene, spent an hour talking to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and 15 minutes with President Kennedy. But none of this impressed Pravda's Maevsky so much as a chat with Presidential Economic Adviser Walter Heller, who told him, said Maevsky, that the U.S., in the event of peace, could dismantle its defense industries without disrupting its economy. Maevsky found the idea intriguing.
Back in New York at tour's end, the journalists plundered Macy's, came away with a trove of women's blouses, skirts, dresses and lipstick. Kraminov bought lipstick in nine different shades ("We have lipstick in Russia, but only one color"), and at a final dinner in honor of the visitors, Viktor Cheprakov of Kommunist magazine proposed an old Russian toast: "To my wife, my girl friend, and the girl I have not yet met—who is the most important. I have bought gifts for all three."
Escort Salisbury is confident that the Russian journalists took something much more important than their souvenirs back to Moscow. "It's like a tire picking up bits of gravel in the tread," said he. "But in this case, the gravel is not going to work its way out. It's going to work in deeper and deeper. And that's going to remain a problem for these men all the rest of their lives."