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Khrushchevs 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 communists 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.
Review:
"Although Punch magazine famously commented on the humor of Nikita Khrushchev's desire to visit Disneyland during his 1959 trip to America, Carlson a former writer for the Washington Post, can still mine the tour with hilarious results, due in equal parts to Khrushchev's outsized provocateur personality and the bizarre and thoroughly American reaction to his visit. Numerous secondary players provide comic support: then vice president Richard Nixon's fixations on mano a mano debates with the quicksilver premier; Boston Brahmin and U.N. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Khrushchev's tour guide, who dutifully filed daily analysis of Khrushchev's public tantrums; popular gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who in a noteworthy example of bad taste attacked Mrs. Khrushchev's attire. A host of other American icons also make appearances: among them Herbert Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra. Although Carlson's focuses on the comic, there are insights into Khrushchev's personality, many provided by his son Sergei, now a respected professor at Brown University, illuminating the method in Khrushchev's madness. All in all, in Carson's hands the cold war is a surprisingly laughing matter. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
In September 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech before Hollywood's biggest stars at the Cafe de Paris, Twentieth Century Fox's elegant commissary. Forty-five minutes into his talk, as celebrities like Marilyn Monroe (wearing, on orders from her studio bosses, her slinkiest dress) and Frank Sinatra watched in amazement, a red-faced Khrushchev began to punch the air. He wasn't complaining... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) about American nuclear plans or Cuba but an even graver matter: his American guides' refusal to allow him to visit Disneyland. (The problem was security, they said.) Khrushchev's mood didn't really improve as his motorcade went on a meandering, two-hour tour of tract housing developments, while curious Angelenos gathered along the roads to catch a glimpse of the communist dictator. Most were friendly, but one woman, dressed all in black, clutched a black flag and a terse sign that read: "Death to Khrushchev, the Butcher of Hungary." Enraged, the premier asked Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to the United Nations who was accompanying him, "If Eisenhower wanted to have me insulted, why did he invite me to come to the United States?" Lodge was baffled. Surely Khrushchev didn't believe that the president had personally arranged for the woman to stand on that particular street corner? "In the Soviet Union," Khrushchev replied, "she wouldn't be there unless I had given the order." It was never going to be easy to host Stalin's combustible successor, and as Peter Carlson shows in "K Blows Top," Khrushchev's two-week journey across America quickly became one of the most outlandish episodes in the annals of Cold War history. Carlson, a former feature writer for The Washington Post, confesses to being obsessed with Khrushchev's peregrinations ever since first reading old newspaper clips about them several decades ago as a rewrite man at People magazine. Since then, Carlson seems to have sought and discovered every piece of arcana associated with the Soviet leader's American sojourn. A deft and amusing writer, Carlson does a marvelous job of recounting it. The traveling road show, which Carlson discerningly calls the "television debut" of the "multiday media circus," wasn't really supposed to occur in the first place. To Eisenhower's dismay, a senior State Department official had badly bungled matters by inviting Khrushchev without insisting on vital Soviet concessions about West Berlin in exchange. Khrushchev was elated and seized every opportunity to show that under his leadership the Soviet Union had left Stalinist terror behind to steal a technological march on decadent, bourgeois America. Khrushchev insisted on flying to Washington in his new TU-114, the world's tallest aircraft, despite being warned of the plane's potential mechanical problems. The Soviet premier was welcomed by a 120-member military honor guard, four 75-millimeter howitzers to fire a 21-gun salute, and a crowd of 3,000 that included, Carlson reports, Eisenhower, "his face uncharacteristically glum under his gray Stetson." After Eisenhower delivered a dreary homily about universal peace, Khrushchev, who had been hamming it up by holding his homburg over his face like a sunshade and waving to the crowd, walked to the lectern to brag about the rocket Soviet scientists had launched to the moon days earlier. As Khrushchev veered between trying to seduce America and threatening to blow it to smithereens, he met with a mostly fawning reception. In New York, W. Averell Harriman hosted a cocktail party at his Manhattan townhouse, where the titans of American capitalism, including John D. Rockefeller III and John McCloy, chairman of Chase Manhattan, spent the evening trying to persuade Khrushchev that they wielded no great power. Scarcely less ingratiating was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's former henchman G. David Schine, who had gone into his father's hotel business. When Khrushchev arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Schine greeted him effusively. Carlson tartly observes, "Finally, the famous Commie-hunter had found an authentic Communist, and he sent him upstairs to the hotel's luxurious Royal Suite." During a brief stop in San Luis Obispo, Khrushchev plunged into the crowd gathered around his train. After the trip, Soviet relations with America deteriorated rapidly. Thanks to his triumphalism over the downing of America's U-2 spy plane in 1960, his banging of a shoe at the United Nations and his attempted installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev scuttled any chance for an incipient detente. By 1964, his erratic judgment led to his ouster. Still, the Soviet reformer's voyage across America prepared the stage for the biggest Soviet celebrity of all, Mikhail Gorbachev, who visited America and ended the Cold War. Perhaps Carlson can make those trips the subject of his next book, but it won't be easy to top this sparkling effort. Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn, who is a senior editor at the National Interest, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
This hilarious account of Khrushchevs 1959 U.S. tour is also a supremely entertaining evocation of the history and atmosphere of Cold War America
Peter Carlson is a former feature writer and columnist for The Washington Post, where he wrote the weekly column “The Magazine Reader.” The author of Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, and a co-author—with Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton, among others—of The Gospel According to ESPN, he lives in Rockville, MD.
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Although Punch magazine famously commented on the humor of Nikita Khrushchev's desire to visit Disneyland during his 1959 trip to America, Carlson a former writer for the Washington Post, can still mine the tour with hilarious results, due in equal parts to Khrushchev's outsized provocateur personality and the bizarre and thoroughly American reaction to his visit. Numerous secondary players provide comic support: then vice president Richard Nixon's fixations on mano a mano debates with the quicksilver premier; Boston Brahmin and U.N. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Khrushchev's tour guide, who dutifully filed daily analysis of Khrushchev's public tantrums; popular gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who in a noteworthy example of bad taste attacked Mrs. Khrushchev's attire. A host of other American icons also make appearances: among them Herbert Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra. Although Carlson's focuses on the comic, there are insights into Khrushchev's personality, many provided by his son Sergei, now a respected professor at Brown University, illuminating the method in Khrushchev's madness. All in all, in Carson's hands the cold war is a surprisingly laughing matter. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Synopsis"
by Firebrand,
This hilarious account of Khrushchevs 1959 U.S. tour is also a supremely entertaining evocation of the history and atmosphere of Cold War America
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