Sore to the Touch

Detour to a Summit NIXON's proposed trip to Rumania has attracted world-wide attention as much because this will be the first visit by an American President to a communist country after Roosevelt went to Yalta in 1945 as for the choice of the country selected for this honour. Nixon's decision to go to Bucharest has been interpreted as an attempt to exploit difference within the Soviet bloc, Rumania being the most outspoken critic of the Soviet Union among East European communist countries. Liberal advocates in America of a US-Soviet detente have expressed the fear that the visit might unnecessarily put Moscow's back up and queer the pitch for US-Soviet negotiations on pressing issues like arms control.