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The Ripening. The crudity and violence of Khrushchev's Paris performance suggested that he was about to launch an all-out vendetta against the West. Yet his hanging-on in Paris suggested that the worst was not about to happen. And then he flew into East Berlin. He knew that East Germany's Red bosses, despised by their people, wanted a helping hand. Instead, he announced that he planned to postpone for "six or eight months" his threat to "wipe out" Western occupation rights in Berlin by signing a separate World War II peace treaty with the East Germans. "Let's wait a bit," he said. "It will ripen better." Russia, he added reassuringly, "will not do anything that might aggravate the international situation and bring it back to the worst times of the cold war."
Though it is always dangerous to count on the predictability of Moscow's behavior, it seemed a curiously empty accomplishment Khrushchev was going home with. It was almost as if he promised the world: no real trouble, but more invective.
The most Khrushchev seemed to have in mind was a personal diplomatic boycott of Dwight Eisenhower. Like a jilted suitor, he seemed at times almost aggrieved. By openly admitting that his six-to-eight month delay was motivated by the fact that "a new President will be elected in the U.S. in half a year's time," Nikita left no doubt that he hoped to make Ike a premature lame duck in foreign affairs. But his treatment of Ike was hardly calculated to make either Republican or Democrat—or De Gaulle and Macmillan for that matter—eager to sit down again with Khrushchev. Robert Murphy, retired Under Secretary of State, last week remarked that in 39 years of diplomacy, he had concluded that summitry "is the least effective form of negotiation which has thus far been devised." Along with Khrushchev's diatribes against Ike, the U.S. could undoubtedly expect continual diplomatic harassment, beginning with the Soviet complaint to the U.N. over the U-2 overflights.
Another Time. Having concluded that he was not going to win anything at the summit, and rather than sit down at the table to play a losing hand, Nikita Khrushchev had decided to kick over the table. But another time, with another hand, he might like to try again. Another time might give him another inspiration.