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Symbol of Good Will. Central to what Khrushchev was trying to accomplish in the week's whirl of clenched fists and clownish grins, rattling rockets and fluttering peace doves, was his assault on President Eisenhower. In part, Khrushchev's attack was read as an outburst of pique and frustration. During the thaw Khrushchev staked his prestige on his mistaken notion that he could take Ike into camp, negotiate with him some kind of U.S. retreat from Berlin (Ike had once called the Berlin situation "abnormal"). The U.S.'s determination to stand firm in Berlin, made evident in tough speeches by Secretary of State Herter, Under Secretary Dillon and the President himself, jolted that conviction.
Then Pilot Francis Powers was brought down over Sverdlovsk, and the revelation that for four years U-2s had been flying over Russia with impunity left, in the words of a State Department official, an "indelible impression of Soviet vulnerability." The failure to win over the President, plus Ike's outspoken defense of the U-2 flights, probably hurt Khrushchev seriously in the eyes of his own people, hurt his position in the Communist bloc as well. (During the U-2 uproar, China's Mao Tse-tung noted caustically: "This ought to convince those naive enough to put their trust in imperialists.") Asked by the New York Herald Tribune's intrepid Moscow correspondent Tom Lambert to explain what he had meant by saying in Paris that his "attitude on the U-2 flight was due in some measure to the domestic political situation in the U.S.S.R.," Khrushchev denied that he had ever made any such remark. "I simply do not understand the question, and it is therefore difficult for me to answer it. What has our domestic situation to do with the flight of the U-2?" Khrushchev did not take the occasion to laugh off the idea of internal political trouble.
Whatever the reason, the attack on Ike was a premeditated cold-war thrust, designed to weaken the U.S.'s prestige and influence in the world by weakening the prestige of Dwight Eisenhower. Russian leaders are well aware that for many millions of people Dwight Eisenhower is a symbol of the U.S. and of its peaceableness and good will in its dealings with other nations—as shown by the movingly warm receptions he got on his December trip to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and his February-March trip to Latin America.
Perhaps the most important reason why Khrushchev withdrew his invitation to Dwight Eisenhower to visit Russia was a fear that in Russia, too, the people would enthusiastically respond to him as a symbol of the U.S. Last week, with the President preparing for a mid-June trip to the Philippines, Formosa, Japan and South Korea, Khrushchev worked desperately to discredit the symbol. Pravda followed up with a warning that it would do Ike "no good" to go to Japan.
An Insult to All. Because Communist chieftains are so eager to see division in the West, they tend to overestimate both the width of the fissures they detect and their ability to widen them with ploys, threats and propaganda. Crude Communist efforts to stir division within the U.S. or between the U.S. and its allies often have the opposite effect of fostering a more determined unity. Inevitably, Khrushchev's attack on President Eisenhower rebounded.