Word: nikita
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Messages shot back and forth between the bathtub and the Elysée. A Soviet aide phoned to ask if the meeting was a preliminary one or a summit meeting. If preliminary, Nikita would come; if a summit, he would not-unless, of course, President Eisenhower was prepared to apologize publicly and abjectly for the U-2 spy plane and to agree to punish the guilty. After an hour of fruitless telephoning, a tight-lipped Charles de Gaulle decided to end the farce. He wrote out the Western reply: "Mr. Khrushchev's absence was registered, and General de Gaulle...
Next morning Nikita made a 40-minute call on President de Gaulle and was roundly booed in the Paris streets. When he finally arrived at the Palais de Chaillot for his long-awaited, twice-postponed press conference, the hall was jammed with 3,500 newsmen who overflowed seats and aisles, were perched on phone booths and window sills...
...hours, the dictator of all the Russias alternately ranted and wheedled, sought to persuade and intimidate, told rambling anecdotes. As for American "aggressors," he said, they should be treated the way Russian peasants treat cats that steal cream or break into pigeon lofts. When he was young, cried Nikita, "we would catch such a cat by the tail and bang its head against the wall, and that was the only way it could be taught some sense...
Jabbing a finger at the audience, swinging uppercuts in air, Nikita promised to sign a peace treaty with Communist East Germany: "We will write finis to the second World War and thereby deprive the West of the right to maintain occupation forces in West Berlin." But for all his fury, his threats had qualifications-the kind of man who gets carried away, Khrushchev also is capable of the controlled tantrum. "When we do this is our business. When we deem it necessary, we won't hesitate. We'll pull the pen from our pock et, for the drafts...
...next morning Nikita was at Orly Airport, on the same red carpet from which Eisenhower had departed three hours before. Khrushchev convulsed a covey of Soviet aides as he warned Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, about to take off for Manhattan to bring the U-2 spy charges before the United Nations. "Be careful of those imperialists," chortled Nikita. "Be careful to cover your back. Don't expose your back to them...