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But that evening, walking into the businessmen's reception at the Hotel Sovietskaya (which had been refurbished and restaffed for the visitors), he again was at his most amiable. Sitting at a table, oblivious to the massed diplomats and newsmen who were crowding in to listen, Khrushchev sipped "three-star" Armenian brandy as, one by one, the Americans were guided over to talk to him. Like the master politician he is, K. remembered names, faces and business specialties from the day before, even told a pretty secretary: "You wore a brown dress yesterday." He jokingly hit up Rudolph Peterson, president of California's Bank of America, for a $10 billion loan. With Eugene Beesley, president of Eli Lilly & Co., Khrushchev continued a discussion of possible U.S.-Soviet exchanges in medical research, and when he was reminded that a team of four U.S. doctors is in Russia now doing just that, Nikita nodded. "Good," he said. "And let's give them a laxative if they do badly." He eagerly discussed food-processing techniques with General Foods' Cook, magnetohydrodynamics with Avco's Wilson, and liquor with Seagram's Edgar M. Bronfman ("Our vodka is better than your vodka"). When Stock Exchange President Funston turned up at the table, Nikita
Khrushchev chanted, in English: "Wall Street! Wall Street!"
He seemed to regard the businessmen as doers like himself, and once took a left-handed dig at Communist inefficiency: "Capitalists know what is profitable; capitalists are not Soviet bureaucrats." Often Khrushchev returned to his theme of trade: "Remember, please, that you can always make a profit dealing with us." But the question remained: A profit for whom? Wall Street's Funston, for one, concluded that the U.S. should not trade with Russia, should do nothing to make life easier for them. Said he, in West Berlin: "I went away with a sense of frustration. How do you deal with people who He to you and to whom facts mean nothing?"