First Big Speech To Press Club

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29002, 17 September 1959, Page 15

First Big Speech To Press Club

(Rec. 9 p.m.) WASHINGTON, September 16. The Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Khrushchev, with a cool but correct Washington welcome behind him, today made his first major speech on United States soil.

The dynamic Russian leader’s first 12 hours in the New World included a State drive from the airport to the capital, watched by an estimated 200,000 people, the preliminary discussions with Mi Eisenhower, a helicopter sightseeing trip over the capital which gave him a first glimpse of busy, prosperous America, and the formal White House banquet. Today’s policy speech, to be carried across the United States by television and radio networks, is at the National Press Club—where he will be exposed to uninhibited questioning by reporters. Before the lunch Mr Khrushchev will drive 20 miles from Blair House, the President’s guest mansion, to more familiar surroundings. An expert on farming, he will inspect the United States Agricultural Research Station at Beltsville, Maryland. After the Press Club luncheon the Prime Minister will drive to the Capitol, the home of Congress, to have tea with members of the Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Democrat Senator William Fulbright There, he will be subjected to

further close questioning on EastWest relations.

The 65-year-old Mr Khrushchev will himself be host tonight when he gives a return dinner for Mr Eisenhower at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Shortly before the dinner at the White House last night, to which the Soviet leader took his family, he had a two-hour discussion with Mr Eisenhower. This was their first talk since they attended the summit conference at Geneva in 1955. They agreed to hold further detailed talks in the seclusion of Camp David, Maryland, at the end of the Prime Minister’s tour of the country. The two leaders will go to the Presidential mountain retreat on the evening of September 25 and stay there until September 27. The opening talks between the President and the Prime Minister were of a preliminary nature and general in scope without being confined to specific issues. They were believed to have gone over in a preliminary way what tiny would discuss later at Camp David, a Reuter correspondent reported.