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Nixon was less forceful on the other main controversy over the summit results: the failure to make any public progress toward a settlement of the Viet Nam War. He said the war was "one of the most extensively discussed subjects" at Moscow, and he seemed to suggest that some undisclosed gain might have been made, by cryptically saying: "It would only jeopardize the search for peace if I were to review here all that was said on that subject."
The specter of Viet Nam loomed, by omission, in an otherwise highly effective television speech Nixon had made earlier from the Great Kremlin Palace to the Russian people. "We, like you, are an open, natural and friendly people," he said. Americans "cherish personal liberty" and "would fight to defend it if necessary as we have done before." Yet, "however much we like our own system for ourselves, we have no desire to impose it on anyone else." Appealing for "a world free of fear," Nixon drew tears from some listeners by recalling the words of Tanya, a Russian girl whose entire family died during the siege of Leningrad in World War II and who wrote in her diary: "All are dead. Only Tanya is left."
Russians generally reacted warmly to Nixon's address. "He hit the right tone and the right note," said a Soviet journalist. "He doesn't sound like an imperialist at all," said a pretty young girl. Yet many Russians noticed his failure to mention Viet Nam even once. "There are kids like Tanya in Viet Nam," complained a Moscow hotel porter. It was the first time a U.S. President had ever addressed the Russian people.
After the summit elevation of Moscow, Nixon's visits to Iran and Poland were inevitably anticlimactic. The Nixon party was received by some 500,000 cheering, flag-waving spectators in Teheran, and a smaller but animated crowd in Warsaw. For the first time on his trip, Nixon got out of his car in Warsaw to shake hands with onlookers. The Polish people responded by surging around him and singing "Sto Lat, Sto Lat," from the song May You Live to Be a Hundred. In Iran, Nixon conferred with Shah Reza Pahlevi, attended an elaborate white-tie dinner in the Niavaran Palace—and was far from three exploding bombs set by terrorists.
Even before Nixon arrived home, the world of course reacted to the Moscow summit. Milan's respected columnist Enzo Bettiza said that the summit marked the start "of a new era of clarification, of ideological realism, of diplomatic maturity in international relations." Never again, he predicted, would a local event, such as "the assassination of an archduke in the Balkans, unleash a world conflict." Yet while the two powers refrain from attacking each other, Bonn's pro-government paper Neue Rhein Zeitung contended, they "tacitly reserve the right to continue beating, tormenting and destroying the other partner's little brother."