Foreign News: Six Days in Geneva

In the beginning were the Russians. They came to Geneva smiling, waving at the crowds, breathing good will, issuing invitations to one and all to come visit the Soviet Union. "Things are different now," cried burly Nikita Khrushchev.

A year ago, for the grim Geneva Conference in the week of Dienbienphu, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had demanded and got a closed, bulletproof limousine. Last week, the Russians climbed into open cars and toured Geneva like politicians running for the town council. Premier Nikolai Bulganin beamed and waved his grey fedora; Party Boss Khrushchev mugged, grinned and snapped pictures like a zealous tourist.

Bulganin playfully pinched the cheek of an American security guard; at a reception, Khrushchev patted LIFE's Photographer Carl Mydans on the shoulder.

The Russian delegation posed willingly and often for photographers, while press officers hovered around, asking solicitously: "Anything more you want them to do?" In one of the new-style chats with a U.S. delegate, Old Stony-Face Molotov got to talking of the picture of him on his recent U.S. visit wearing a ten-gallon hat. "You see," he explained, "I am getting old now, and I'd like the people—including the Americans—to think of me as something more than a man who says no." The hat didn't fit, Molotov added, "but it's more important to have good publicity than to have a hat that fits."

The Russians came to Geneva equipped with their standard stock of hats: the hat of the champion of German unity, of the eager apostle of disarmament and world peace, of the humanitarian opponent of atomic warfare. The publicity was wonderful, and they might have left Geneva as certified international good fellows—until a quiet man made a quiet point.

Dwight Eisenhower showed himself entirely willing to treat them as decent fellows as long as they acted like decent fellows. But in two dramatic statements, he proved to the world that the Russians' hats did not quite fit.

"Like Gangsters." At first, the U.S. Secret Service seemed determined to help the Russians' case. Unlike the waving Russians, Ike traveled in a closed car—to save trouble, he had ordered over from Paris the 1942 Cadillac sedan he used during the war, now inherited by SHAPE Commander Al Gruenther. Swiss civilians who happened to have their hands in their pockets when the President passed were startled to have husky U.S. Secret Service men grab them and pull their hands clear. At the Palais des Nations, Britain's Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden drew up quietly in a Rolls-Royce, France's Edgar Faure in a little Citroën. But Ike's car swept up preceded and followed by carloads of hard-eyed Secret Service men, scanning the crowd watchfully. While the cars were still moving, the men leaped out to form a well-muscled phalanx around the President as he alighted. "It's just like gangsters!" gasped one Swiss girl.