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K Blows Top: Comedic travels with Khrushchev

K Blows Top, Peter Carlson, PublicAffairs

During his visit to the U.S. in 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev addressed a room full of film stars. Khrushchev had already shown himself to be a prickly, but witty man. Toward the end of a long speech given to Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor, among others, Khrushchev brought up the fact he wasn’t allowed to go to Disneyland. "Why not?" Khrushchev wanted to know. "Do you have rocket-launching pads there?" His audience laughed, thinking it was a joke, especially when Khrushchev said the U.S. government was holding him back due to concerns for his safety. "Is there an epidemic of cholera there? Have gangsters taken hold of the place?" Khrushchev asked. The audience was still laughing, but Khrushchev was serious. He really, really wanted to go to Disneyland, and seemed to threaten nuclear war over the matter.

Years later, when journalist Peter Carlson read about this episode, he became obsessed with Khrushchev’s 13-day visit. It seemed to him to be one long string of hilarious conversations. (Khrushchev, speaking about an American resolution: "This resolution stinks! It stinks like fresh horseshit—and nothing smells worse than that!" Nixon: "I’m afraid the Chairman is mistaken. There is something that smells worse than horseshit—and that is pigshit!") Khrushchev visited model homes in the American suburbs. Confronted with so much household technology, he remarked, "You don’t need a wife." Fifty years after that historic visit, Carlson meticulously records the Soviet leader’s bizarre and highly amusing trip.