The attack itself was brief but ferocious. Nixon was on a goodwill tour of Latin America when his motorcade was surrounded in Caracas, just months after the overthrow of dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. According to Nixon, Velutini explained the police inaction by saying the communists had "helped us overthrow Perez Jimenez and we are trying to find a way to work with them." The mob shattered windows and battered the car while the world's press watched. Life magazine would later credit Nixon for his "courage" and say "his coolness had been remarkable." Pathe News noted that Nixon reflected "calm, rather than concern." When the ordeal ended, the Nixons made it to the American embassy, where the Venezuelan army quickly surrounded and fortified the building, reinforcing the small U.S. Marine guard force.

Back in Washington, the response was swift and disproportionate. A fleet of ships centered on an aircraft carrier was ordered toward Venezuela. According to U.S. officials at the time, the forces were being readied to "cooperate with the Venezuelan government," though later accounts suggest President Eisenhower was preparing to invade the country should Nixon suffer further indignity. Privately, Eisenhower was reportedly furious. At one point, he told his staff, "I am about ready to go put my uniform on." Nixon himself was shocked when he learned about the military mobilization -- he had not been consulted, and discovered that communications between Caracas and Washington had been cut during a critical period immediately after the riot. Additional activities were cancelled, and Nixon departed Caracas the next morning, seven hours ahead of schedule, his motorcade to the airport escorted by a major deployment of Venezuelan Army infantry and armored vehicles.

For weeks after the attack, Nixon received standing ovations wherever he went -- what biographers describe as "a new high in his life." But the more lasting consequence played out privately. Every year on the anniversary, Nixon would quietly celebrate with Vernon Walters, the military aide who had been at his side during the attack. Nixon favored Walters for the rest of his career, eventually appointing him Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. On the eve of Walters's retirement from government service in 1991, Nixon wrote to him: "you and I have faced death together and that gives us a special bond." When President John F. Kennedy visited Venezuela in 1961, the lesson of Nixon's experience was well learned. President Betancourt pre-deployed significant military forces into Caracas before Kennedy's arrival, ordered the preventive arrest of suspected ringleaders, and closed all 16 kilometers of the highway from the airport -- the same road Nixon had traveled -- the day before Kennedy arrived.

Historians have traced a direct line from the Caracas mob to some of Nixon's most consequential decisions in Latin America. The attack hardened his attitude toward the region, which he came to "equate with violence and irrationality." He would later privately list nations whose populations he believed were too immature for democratic government, specifically citing France, Italy, and all of Latin America "except for Colombia." By the end of 1958, the U.S. National Security Council listed "yankeephobia" as a key challenge to American interests in the region. Some scholars believe the change in Nixon's worldview foreshadowed his subsequent support for covert U.S. actions backing dictatorial regimes across Latin America. The incident even entered fiction: in Paul Auster's novel 4 3 2 1, a schoolboy in 1958 writes an article for his school newspaper titled "Fracas in Caracas," arguing the attack resulted from Latin American resentment of U.S. domination -- and nearly gets expelled for it.