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A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist
by Peter Carlson
Book Reviewed by:This hilarious account of Khrushchev's 1959 U.S. tour is also a supremely entertaining evocation of the history and atmosphere of Cold War America
Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted - "a surreal extravaganza," as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it. Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe.
Published for the fiftieth anniversary of the trip, K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communist's road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in capitalist America, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America.
Excerpt
K Blows Top
Khrushchev’s first meal in America was a sumptuous lunch at Blair
House, the official presidential guest residence—fillet of beef with truffles,
potatoes, string beans, and a Charlotte Russe praline with raspberry
sauce. He was just finishing when he received his first visitor—Henry
Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to the United Nations and the
man Ike had selected to be Khrushchev’s tour guide on his odyssey across
America.
Few men on earth had less in common: Khrushchev was a short,
pudgy, uneducated Russian peasant who’d climbed to power by tenacity
and brutality; Lodge was a tall, thin, Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin
who’d been born into America’s aristocracy, scion of one of the families
immortalized in an old New England toast:
Here’s to good old Boston,
Home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells speak only to the Cabots
And the Cabots speak only to God.
Lodge’s ancestors included...
All in all, this is a well-executed, pleasant piece of historical reportage about a crucial and colorful slice of the twentieth century...continued
Full Review
(629 words)
(Reviewed by Micah Gell-Redman).
Daniel Schorr
This book recreates in vivid detail one of the most astonishing figures in our recent history. The Communist leader's storming of America can be enjoyed by everyone, but especially those with memories of that singular episode in the winding down of the Cold War.
Vice president Richard Nixon spars with Nikita Khrushchev during the former's visit to Moscow.
On the set of the film Can-Can, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra gave the communist dictator a taste of good old fashioned American titillation.
K and wife Nina pose with the family of Iowa corn farmer Robert Garst whose deft salesmanship influenced the development of Soviet agriculture.
Khrushchev embraces the victorious Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in New York city during a meeting of the United Nations. An explosive alliance between the Caribbean nation and the Soviet Union would soon solidify and send the world to the brink of Armageddon.
more images from K's tour
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