Mr Khrushchev says we will bury you
You all know that famous story. The Nike folks even turned it into an ad in the late ’70s (sorry, I don’t remember the tagline). You know, the scandalous shoe-banging incident at the UN in 1960. Having avoided discussing the incident all her life, his granddaughter finally decided to do put the embarrassment behind her and look for photos and first-hand reports of the actual event. Finding conflicting and inconsistent references, however,
made me suspicious: Why are the versions so different? And there are no pictures! What if it had never happened? A supposed 40 years anniversary since the scandalous UN shoe banging could be a great chance to commemorate an event that never happened. In my zeal to uncover the truth, I felt very much like Sherlock Holmes.
Magazines from October 1960 covered Khrushchev’s visit to the United States better than books. They reported on everything, but still there was no shoe . . . My heart was pounding. For so many years, I had been ashamed in vain. What if the whole incident was just an anecdote based on the general mode of Khrushchev’s behaviour? He was known for strong language, interrupting speakers, banging his fists on the table in protest, pounding his feet, even whistling. None of this, however, was enough to be transformed into a physical symbol of the cold war.
She narrates her efforts at historical research here, but to save you the trouble, dear reader, I’m skipping ahead to the punchline.
On Wednesday 12 October 1960, there it was, on the front pages of all national papers: Nikita Sergeyevich and his famous shoe. … The head of the Philippine delegation, Senator Lorenzo Sumulong, expressed his surprise at the Soviet Union’s concerns over western imperialism, while it, in turn, swallowed the whole of eastern Europe. Khrushchev’s rage was beyond anything he had ever shown before. He called the poor Filipino “a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism”, then he put his shoe on the desk and banged it.
That paragraph is five kinds of funny, not least because the target of dear Nikita’s anger was a kababayan. Of course if I even cared about Lorenzo Sumulong before this day, I would have wikipedia’d him and discovered his main claim to fame.