Verbosities

Bed-wetter Nation | Campaign for America's Future

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane [in 1959] at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers' family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department's 12,000 acre research station ("If you didn't give a turkey a passport you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey"), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys"), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It's not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, "must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm." Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.

Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?

No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them.

But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.

Of course, the Soviet Union in 1959 didn't represent the existentialist threat to our way of life that The Next Great Evil Hitlerian Islamofascist Dictator Bad Guy Ahmadinejad does now. Khrushchev never claimed to want to defeat America or anything, right? He definitely never did anything that quelled free speech or the will of the population, and never persecuted religious groups that stood in opposition to his political goals.

Obviously, Eisenhower's Great Neville Chamberlain-esque Sin Of Appeasement towards the Soviet leader showed how weak and cowardly and cowed America was in the face of a far lesser existential evil than the All-Powerful TalibShariaMohammaDevilDictatoFascist Ahmadinejad represents. Eisenhower's French-like surrender led to tacit endorsement of Communism and ultimately the Soviet invasion of a small Colorado town where only C.Thomas Howell and Patrick Swayze were heroic in their Awesome Bill O'Reilly Courage in staring down the enemy invaders.

One can only hope that the need for a latter-day Howell and Swayze to emerge (might I suggest Maguire and Gyllenhall?) is mitigated or eliminated by our no-negotiation policy with Evil AraboMightAsWellBeAlQaedaBecauseAmericaCantTellOneFromAnotherofasicst leaders. Further, I do hope that our well-meaning legislators take a hard look at both the 20th Century Fox commissary and the AFL-CIO's willingness to host a(n admittedly far less dangerous) leader of evil like Khrushchev 48 years ago, and issue the stiff and swift penalties those appeasers deserve.

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