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At first the White House refused to comment on the attack, but the President did not have to reply: congressional Democrats promptly did that for him. "No man can insult the President of the United States without insulting the American people," said Georgia's Senator Richard Russell. "An insult to all of us," echoed Tennessee's Senator Albert Gore. "New heights of vituperation," rumbled Texas' Lyndon Johnson. "It is necessary to go back to the days of Adolf Hitler to find a parallel." Oregon's Republican-baiting ex-Republican Wayne Morse stood up on the Senate floor and said he wanted to associate himself with Majority Leader Johnson's "statesmanlike statement."
Abroad, too, Khrushchev's blast stirred sympathy for the President, disgust at the Premier. A Paris-Jour columnist called Khrushchev's attack "calculated hysteria." Said the London Daily Telegraph: "More mud of this kind sticks to the thrower's hand than to the victim's face." In a speech to a Republican gathering at Bear Mountain, N.Y., Dwight Eisenhower said that Khrushchev's "ill-tempered expressions" had brought the Western allies closer together than at any time during his presidency. Next day, at the Notre Dame commencement exercises, the President added pensively but pointedly: "The enemies of human dignity lurk in a thousand places—in governments that have become spiritual wastelands, and in leaders that brandish angry epithets, slogans and satellites."
At week's end Secretary Herter broke the Administration's official two weeks' silence to directly answer the personal attacks on the President: "All America, I am sure, shares the disgust I feel at the ill-tempered attacks emanating from Mr. Khrushchev. It is understandable that Mr. Khrushchev, in seeking to divest himself of the responsibility for the destruction of the Paris summit conference, should seek to confuse the issue. This, however, does not excuse his personal attempts at vilification."
Battered Illusions. Even after Nikita Khrushchev dynamited the summit meeting, many men in the free world still cherished hopes that some kind of "relaxation of tensions" could be worked out with him. For them, his ranting attack on the President of the U.S. came as a shock and a heavy disappointment. The loss of precious illusions is always painful—even illusions already battered by reality. But Khrushchev's attack can count as a net gain for the free people of the world if it enables the West to shake off clinging illusions about him.
At first the West mistakenly dismissed Khrushchev as a bumbling boozer, and then it mistakenly accepted him as a reasonable fellow, flawed by such personal foibles as a quick temper and coarse vocabulary, but essentially a man of peace at heart. Along with that image of Khrushchev went the timid notions that the U.S. must deal gently with him for fear of fostering a resurgence of Stalinism, and that the aim of U.S. foreign policy is to achieve "relaxation"—rather than a world of freedom, justice and order. It would, indeed, be a fortunate irony if, in trying to destroy the world image of Dwight Eisenhower, Khrushchev instead destroyed the Western image of Nikita Khrushchev as a bad-tempered good guy.