(See Cover) Q. Sir, what did you think of Mr. Khrushchev?
A. Well, he is a dynamic and arresting personality. He is a man that uses every possible debating method available to him. He is capable of great flights [from a] negative, difficult attitude to the most easy, affable, genial type of discussion. —President Eisenhower, last Sept. 28, just after Khrushchev's U.S. visit.
Chunky Nikita Khrushchev took off on one of his "great flights" last week, swooping down to attack the President of the U.S. on a level of invective without precedent even in cold-war diplomacy. The attack was no vodka-party indiscretion, no impulsive reaction to provocation, but a premeditated assault, carried out in front of 400 Russian and foreign newsmen at a Khrushchev press conference in the Kremlin's domed Sverdlov Hall.* With Communist newsmen serving as a claque, Khrushchev's sallies drew such loud laughter that a listener outside the door of Sverdlov Hall might have thought some great Russian comedian was holding forth inside. The official Tass transcript was sprinkled with such notations as [Gay animation in the hall] and [Laughter in the hall]. But to Western ears the performance was far from funny.
Shudder at the Summit. In his tirade, Khrushchev portrayed President Eisenhower as "spineless," incompetent and dishonest. "When he is no longer President, and if he chooses to work in our country, we could give him a job as a director of a children's home—I am sure he would not harm the children. But it is dangerous for a man like this to run a nation. I say so because I know him. I saw the way he behaved at the Geneva summit conference in 1955, and I felt sorry for him."
Whenever the President had to speak up at the Geneva conference, as Khrushchev told it, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was seated at Ike's right, would hand him a note telling him what to say. "The President should at least, for the sake of appearances, have turned aside and glanced through the note before reading it to the meeting. But instead, he would just take it and read it off. We could not help wondering, comrades and gentlemen, who was running the country. Such a President can make God knows what kind of decisions, and the United States is an enormous and powerful country. One shuddered at the thought of what a great force was in such hands."
Khrushchev sneered at the President of the U.S. for playing golf while the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was holding hearings on the U-2 incident. He said that "Eisenhower's presidency is a time of confusion for the U.S. and for the rest of the world." [Animation in the hall, prolonged applause.]
Tossing a bombshell designed to impugn the President's integrity and spread distrust of him in West Germany, Khrushchev charged that the President's professed desire to see Germany reunited is insincere. Actually, said Khrushchev, the President told him that "the U.S. is afraid of building up Germany." The bomb fizzled: West Germans scoffed at the accusation, and the White House speedily denied it.