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¶ Rapped Secretary of State Christian Herter, Under Secretary Douglas Dillon, Vice President Richard Nixon and Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles as warmongers. Nixon was singled out in Pravda next day for special denunciation as a "hypocrite," "demagogue" and "hysterical adventurer."
¶ Denounced West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as "one who has gone off his nut."[Laughter in the hall, applause.] Adenauer's reasoning, said Khrushchev, must run: "I have lived for 84 years, I have one foot in the grave, and after me let there be the deluge." He ought to be "placed in a straitjacket and taken to the lunatic asylum."
¶ Waded jovially into the U.S. election campaign (see following story) to nominate Nixon as the "best candidate" because he knew that a Soviet blessing could be the kiss of death. But whether the next U.S. President "will be Nixon or, as the Russians say, the devil himself, is just the same to us." More grimly, he said that there "will be a lesson for other politicians of the U.S. as well as for U.S. allies" in the U-2 fiasco.
¶ Warned that if the West does not agree to a summit meeting in six or eight months, Russia would go ahead and sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany. "We want to sign a peace treaty and put out the cinders, which are still glowing." Under the treaty, he added, throwing out a tough threat, "access to Berlin by air, water and land without the permission of the [East German government] will cease"—a condition that the West has held totally unacceptable.
¶ Attempted to sow further dissension among the Western allies by saying that if Britain and France had the "courage" to tell the truth, they would admit that they do not really want to see Germany reunited, and that they disapproved of the U.S.'s U-2 flights.
"I call on all honest people," said Khrushchev genially. "Let us pool our efforts to oppose the aggressors who are set against peaceful coexistence and are provoking a cold war so that it will turn into a hot war. If we pool our efforts, peace will be ensured." The same day, the official news agency Tass announced that Khrushchev had accepted an invitation from Dictator Fidel Castro to visit Cuba at some still undecided future time. That announcement was evidence that Khrushchev meant to pursue the troublemaking Latin American policy he signaled in his Paris press conference after the collapse of the summit meeting: "We are happy to hear the pulse of Latin America's struggle for independence against American imperialism. The welcome accorded to Nixon in Latin America was certainly an omen. And I welcome the events in Cuba, where the people proudly and courageously rose up under the banner of the struggle for independence. I am convinced that other Latin American countries will also rise up."