THE PRESIDENCY: American Image

Far below the eastbound presidential jet, the flat expanses of the Middle East gave way to the brown plains, the broad desert, the towering, snow-topped mountain ranges of the Indian subcontinent. And as the earth's face changed beneath the speeding plane, something of the old, old world changed imperceptibly too. In Pakistan, Afghanistan and India last week, the shapes and colors and sounds of older centuries mingled and fell around Dwight Eisenhower, as in a vast kaleidoscope, into strange patterns. Each pattern formed a new sensation, each sensation was etched with the faces of the multitudes reaching out from the tangles of the past toward something of the promising future.

By the hundreds of thousands, the people swarmed about the President, engulfing him in seas of teeming, shouting, cheering bodies. They sang and they danced, they performed ancient and breathless feats of prowess in his honor, and they overwhelmed him with music and food and flowers. Their leaders uttered thousands of words of praise for him and his nation, told him their problems, led him to exotic rituals, to farms and fairs and shrines, swept him into ceremonials of such splendor as no Westerner before had ever experienced. It was a wonder that a man of 69, with his medical history, could withstand the exhausting torrents of pomp and tumult ("He's got the stamina of a Karachi camel," said one Pakistani); but Ike, who had seen nothing like it in his whole career, was buoyed up by his own delight and astonishment.

Pipes & Pathans. Six hours out of Turkey, he landed in the brassy, brilliant sun at Karachi's airport to be greeted by Pakistan's President, blunt, Sandhurst-trained General Mohammed Ayub Khan. Together they rode into the city in an open white Cadillac, past half a million cheering people—women in veils or tentlike burgas, tens of thousands of schoolchildren waving flags, armed sailors and soldiers carefully spaced to prevent unruly exuberance. Down the freshly cleaned streets they drove, past prairies of rubble still redolent with the smell of refugees, even though special squads had worked all night to deodorize the area with scented water and citronella (the refugees had been settled elsewhere), on through the jumbled slums where Pakistani women, their pastel veils and head scarves fluttering in the sun, watched from roof tops. At Victoria Road, the two Presidents switched to a stately carriage drawn by six handsome horses. Under a gold-trimmed, brocaded red sun umbrella, Ike sat and waved, raised his hands to the crowds, and 60 colorfully garbed horsemen, former Bengal Lancers, trooped along with him carrying their traditional lances. When at last Ike alighted at the presidential palace, he turned in wonder to a flock of news photographers and said: "I hope you hard-boiled boys were a little bit impressed by this."