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Some Hope for Good. Despite his constant public boasting about everything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better. the U.S. officials found that Khrushchev was indeed vastly impressed with many of the things he saw: the thousands of autos spinning over superhighways on the West Coast; the razing of perfectly usable Park Avenue buildings to make way for new and better Manhattan buildings; drive-in theaters; the U.S.'s better-class housing (but not low-cost subdivision housing); Iowa's flourishing farmland (Khrushchev laughed until the tears came to his eyes in recalling Iowa Farmer Roswell Garst throwing silage at newsmen and kicking New York Timesman Harrison Salisbury in the leg).
In private, Khrushchev expressed his surprise at not seeing U.S. bread lines, which he had apparently been led to expect. More substantively, he was impressed with a speech in which Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor David Lawrence said that the Democratic Party stands squarely behind the Republican President in matters of foreign policy, and by his discovery that U.S. mayors are not actually appointed by and answerable to the President. It was in such impressions, as much or more than in Khrushchev's avowals of sincerity, that the U.S. officials who accompanied him found some hope resulting from the Khrushchev visit.