King suggested four dates for a meeting in Washington. Nixon promptly confirmed what became, in the popular parlance of the new nuclear age, the first “summit conference” between a Negro leader and Nixon or Eisenhower. Still more promising results came from King’s performance at the Pilgrimage, when, only three days after the speech, cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb tracked King down at the Statler Hotel in New York to say that Eisenhower himself would be pleased to see him soon.
