No details of Mr Khruschev’s arrival had gone unplanned.
He came in at an obscure corner of the airport and the mayor of Los Angeles greeted him in the cryptic, cool manner that has become almost a mark of patriotism among the American officials who have the misfortune to be cast as his hosts.
He was shown what any other distinguished tourist would have been allowed to see. He saw the dancing girls of “Can Can.” He was actually seated at the same table as Gary Cooper, Eddie Fisher, Marilyn Monroe and James Mason. The supreme accolade was reserved for his wife: she was seated next to Frank Sinatra. American hospitality can go no further.
“And yet, and yet…” as the old silent movie captions used to say, and yet the production blew up in the faces of hundreds of skilled politicos, directors and protocol experts who had written it. Nikita Khruschev, the humble shepherd boy who grew up to play the starring role in the lurid melodrama known as “The Hangman of Hungary,” suddenly turned from the home-town boy made good into a frightening “baddie.”
He began, with amazing magnanimity, by greeting Spyros Skouras, the president of Twentieth Century Fox, as a “friend and brother before Christ.” He ended by recalling again the futile invasion of his country by soldiers of America, France, Germany, Poland and Britain, by briefly catching himself in an apology for such a tasteless memoir, and then by swelling the veins in his neck in protest at the State Department’s denial of his wish to go down to Anaheim and make a tour of Disneyland.
“What do you have there – rocket launching pads? Is there a cholera epidemic down there? Have gangsters taken control of the place? Your police are strong enough to lift up a bull; surely they are strong enough to take care of gangsters?” But no, the State Department could not possibly promise to “guard my security.”
Unhappily, the State Department was right. Not for nothing had the Los Angeles police been issued a pamphlet of instructions for the safety of Mr Khrushchev that ran to 73 pages. He did not get to Disneyland.
“This situation is inconceivable,” he bellowed. “I thought I could come to this country in peace, not sit in a closed car in the smothering heat under the sun. I thought I could come as a free man.”
The movie stars could not have been more uncomfortable if they had been sitting there in nothing but their mascara. Miss Monroe ventured that Mr Khrushchev’s speech “was interesting.” Winston Churchill could not have done it better.