On September 15, 1959, Nikita Khrushchev landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, the first leader of the Soviet Union ever to visit the United States. He had made himself hard to refuse. His tour ran thirteen days, took him to New York, Iowa, California, Washington state and Pennsylvania, and ended with two days of talks with President Eisenhower at Camp David.
The visit was the public side of a change that had been going on since Stalin died. Khrushchev's strategy was peaceful coexistence, which meant competing with the West everywhere except in a direct war, and it required a relationship with Washington that could absorb crises. Eisenhower wanted it too, and less enthusiastically: he did not like Khrushchev, he was being pressed by Congress and by his own party not to appear soft, and he had the Berlin ultimatum hanging over everything, because Khrushchev had demanded in November 1958 that the Western powers leave West Berlin within six months and had been extending the deadline ever since.
What the trip produced was television. No Soviet figure had been like this. He argued. He joked. He interrupted, quoted and threatened, and he did all of it in front of cameras the whole way. He spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, addressed the United Nations in New York, toured a farm in Coon Rapids, Iowa, and lectured the farmers about maize, went to a supermarket in San Francisco, and was refused entry to Disneyland on security grounds, which he complained about for two days.
He also met people who were not official. He had an impromptu television exchange with the head of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, that has been used as an example of his method ever since, and he lost his temper at a luncheon in Los Angeles when the host, the mayor, made a remark about the Berlin wall that was coming sooner than anyone knew.
The Camp David talks ran from September 25 to 27. They produced no agreement on Berlin, no disarmament. They produced no treaty. What they produced was the spirit of Camp David, a phrase for a relaxation in tone, and an agreement in principle to hold a four-power summit in Paris in May 1960.
It lasted eight months. On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over Sverdlovsk and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured and shown on Soviet television. Khrushchev walked out of the Paris summit three weeks later, and the thaw ended. Eisenhower's planned visit to Moscow was cancelled, and the next Soviet leader to come to the United States was Gorbachev, in 1988.