Calculated Thrust

(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.

"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."

Malinovsky's rumblings failed to frighten U.S. allies. The Bonn General-Anzeiger dismissed them as "routine stage thunder." The Pakistan Times denounced Soviet "brinkmanship" (a term that the U.S. press tied to the late John Foster Dulles, seldom applies to Brinkman Khrushchev), added that Pakistan "cannot be thrown into a state of perplexity by threats from any quarter, or allow its power of decision to be paralyzed by bluster."

After the Malinovsky scowl came a Khrushchev smile of sorts. In a clumsy effort to foster division within the U.S., Khrushchev sent a conciliatory message to four top U.S. Democrats--Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Chairman William Fulbright of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Adlai Stevenson--who had urged him to reconsider his insistence that no summit conference could be held until after the 1960 presidential election. Said Khrushchev in his reply: he regrets that President Eisenhower "wrecked" the summit conference, and he knows that the Administration's "doctrine of aggression and provocation" is "not in line with the great democratic traditions of the American nation, traditions of Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt."

Price in Blood. Then came another smile, in the form of a sweeping Khrushchev disarmament plan that was at once a seeming concession to the Western demand for inspection and at the same time an unacceptable demand for the dismantling of deterrent strength before inspection could begin (see FOREIGN NEWS). Khrushchev called his press conference in Sverdlov Hall for the announced purpose of explaining his disarmament plan, but in his very first reply to a question, the scowl reappeared. Asked to explain Marshal Malinovsky's warning, Khrushchev said that it was to be taken "literally."

To make sure U.S. allies got the point, Khrushchev hammered hard at it: "This should especially give food for thought to the leaders of those countries which surround the Soviet Union and where there are American bases. If these bases are used by the Americans against us, the Soviet Union will hit at the bases." [Applause.] The U.S.'s promise that it would stand behind its allies if Russia hits at the bases, Khrushchev went on, was like saying, "Don't be afraid; we will attend your funeral when you have been smashed." [Animation.] Furthermore, Khrushchev added, the commander of Soviet rocket forces, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, has authority to use nuclear warheads in striking at U.S. airbases. But in answer to a later question, he was conveniently vague as to who had the authority to order an attack.

Pounding away in his campaign to frighten U.S. allies into denying airbases to the U.S.--a prime and constant aim of Soviet policy--Khrushchev kept rephrasing the rocket warning in replies to later press conference questions. Nations where U.S. bases are located would suffer the "first blow" in any hot war, would "pay the price in blood," he blustered. "To put the matter in a nutshell, we have a general staff, and they have the locations of these bases marked with circles."

Between bursts of rocket rattling and blasts at the President of the U.S., Nikita Khrushchev:

P: 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."

P: 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."

P: 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.

P: 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.

P: 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."

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.

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.

* Named for Jacob Sverdlov, a leader of 1917's Red Revolution, credited in Soviet history books with having ordered the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family at Ekaterinburg, later renamed Sverdlovsk (where Pilot Francis Powers' U-2 went down on May 1).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.