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"Strange & Incomprehensible." One widespread Western response to Khrushchev's attack on the President was to wonder whether Nikita was "going nuts," as the New York Daily News bluntly put it. "On this assumption," wrote the New York Times's Arthur Krock, "the West must be prepared to protect itself from the very special menace of a deranged operator of a destructive military machine."
Khrushchev may perhaps be walking down a path that leads eventually to madness, but he is not a madman now, any more than he is the bumbling buffoon that the West first imagined him to be when it observed him on his hamming, hard-drinking trips abroad in 1954-57 with then-Premier Nikolai Bulganin.
Nikita Khrushchev is a man who came to power in the Stalinist school, who has dispatched his enemies with relentless political cunning and pressed the harsh realities of Soviet foreign policy from Berlin to Hungary, with tanks and troops. Viewed in the light of his aims, methods and past behavior, Khrushchev's outburst was a calculated tactical thrust that fitted into a sinister pattern of alternating promises and punches. Purpose behind the pattern: to destroy U.S. prestige around the globe by stirring doubt and divisions within the U.S., by straining the bonds between the U.S. and its allies, and by making a grandstand play to public opinion in the vast areas of Latin America, Asia and Africa and thus encourage the overthrow of pro-Western political leaders.
Communists, said Lenin in 1919, must be prepared to "make very frequent changes in our line of conduct which to the casual observer may appear strange and incomprehensible." Communists continue to follow the Leninist doctrine of "very frequent changes" to create confusion and disunity among their enemies—and Nikita Khrushchev is a seasoned practitioner of the art. The "great flights" of attitude that President Eisenhower noted in him spring not just from an erratic personality, as is often thought, but from Communist tactics. It was in keeping with Leninist tactics that, following his threat-shouting, table-pounding press conference in Paris, he flew on to East Berlin and, as the reasonable man of peace, soberly told East German Reds that he was going to let the Berlin situation "ripen" for six or eight months—until after the U.S. presidential election.
Stage Thunder. It was in keeping, too, that last week's display began with a tough-toned warning by Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Defense Minister who accompanied Khrushchev to the summit. Malinovsky had issued a new order to Soviet rocket forces: if any foreign plane flies across the border of Russia or any other Communist country, strike at the base the plane flew from. "We do not trust the imperialists!" he cried in a speech at the Kremlin. "We are convinced that they are only waiting for an opportunity to attack."