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"That is America," spat Khrushchev derisively. "The supreme culture! It's shameful! I ask you, have you seen or heard anything like that in our country?" From NBC's onetime Moscow Commentator Joseph Michaels came the reply: "What about the demonstration in front of the American embassy in Moscow a few years back? Here there are only 100 demonstrators. There it was 100,000!" Khrushchev shot back: "Yes, we could have made it 200,000 or a million! That was in reply to the one here! In our country it's a tooth for a tooth!" The demonstrators, he said, are "scum. They are like manure!" From a woman in a passing car came the cry: "Khrushchev—Idiot!"
Play the Theme. As the Khrushchevian bluster and bromide garnered newspaper space, the real climax was approaching. In Washington, President Eisenhower huddled with his State Department advisers and reworked his speech. U.S. diplomats sensed that Russia had made a fundamental error by taking on the U.N. itself. With that as a theme, the U.S. built its position: while the Communists were repudiating the U.N., the U.S. would uphold and strengthen it. This was likely to win support from the new African nations, for whom the only protected road to real independence, and the most important amphitheater for their own thoughts, is the U.N. itself.
But the heavy emphasis on joint U.N. action—the willingness to channel U.S. aid through the U.N., where its contribution would be the biggest but invisible*—was a sharp turn in U.S. policy. Only a year before, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was vigorously turned down when he tried to sell the Administration on just such a proposal. But having now decided to go all out for the U.N., Ike rearranged his original plans, announced that he would extend his projected stay in New York so that he could meet personally with African, Latin American leaders and Tito, and after that with the new arrivals, Egypt's Nasser, India's Nehru and Britain's Prime Minister Macmillan.
Cheers & Merriment. As the President arrived at New York's Idlewild Airport and sped into Manhattan in his bubble-topped Lincoln, New Yorkers—125,000 of them—lined the streets to cheer him and to wave placards (WE ARE COUNTING ON YOU, IKE) as if he were a fighter climbing into the ring. Even the customary show of political partisanship was gone; Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner, who had never seen fit to greet the President on past visits, rode into town with Ike.
Preceding Ike to the U.N. headquarters was Nikita Khrushchev himself. He bounced merrily into the lobby of the Assembly building and found Yugoslavia's Tito waiting, as if by prearrangement. There the two old enemies made their first formal greetings since September 1956, but it was obvious that both were ill at ease. "How do you spend your time here?" Tito began tentatively. Answered K.: "I have a little balcony. I go out and walk back and forth and take the air."