by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The first show I watched last night on PBS was an American
Experience episode with the intriguing
title “Cold War Roadshow,” dealing with the 12-day visit of Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev to the U.S. in September 1959. According to the official synopsis on
the PBS Web site, “For both men, the visit was an opportunity to halt the
escalating threats of the Cold War and potentially chart a new course toward
peaceful coexistence. For the American press, it was the media blockbuster
story of the year.” The show turned out in a weird way to be a prequel to the
one the same series had done several years ago, “Spy in the Sky,” for it
suggested that Khrushchev’s visit to the U.S. had been a key road-not-taken in
the history of the Cold War, a potential for reopening positive relations
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that got sandbagged when U-2 spy plane
pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russian soil just a week before Khrushchev
and President Dwight Eisenhower were scheduled to hold a summit meeting in
Paris, following which Eisenhower had been scheduled to tour the USSR as a
reciprocal visit to Khrushchev’s in the U.S. — and the remaining four years of
Khrushchev’s tenure as Soviet leader were a series of hard-line bits of
brinkmanship (including sending ICBM’s to Cuba) and his eventual overthrow by
old-line Kremlin people who didn’t think Khrushchev was defending the
Fatherland quite aggressively enough and who were particularly upset about the
supposed “weakness” he had shown in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
What’s most fascinating about Cold War Roadshow is not only the sheer amount of footage that exists
of the tour — including plenty of color home movies taken by Sergei,
Khrushchev’s son, who is interviewed as part of the program and wryly admits at
the end that he came to admire America so much he eventually moved here and
became a U.S. citizen — but the bizarre mixture of fascination and revulsion with
which he was greeted by the American crowds that came out to see him. After
all, Khrushchev had been the target of American propaganda that had literally painted him as the most evil and dangerous man in
the world — particularly via his oft-repeated quote that “we will bury you,”
which was widely misinterpreted as a threat of war when he meant it as quite
the opposite (as a statement that Communism was so obviously superior to
capitalism that eventually the U.S. and the rest of the Western world would adopt
it), and his actions (not mentioned here) in sending the Soviet army to crush
the Hungarian revolt in 1956. At the same time the show makes clear how amazing
it was that Khrushchev did make a
state visit to the U.S. — as historian William Taubman says at the beginning of
the show, “Stalin had never come to the United States. Hitler never came of
course. Mao Tse-Tung never came,” and Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan said it
was “far riskier” to have Khrushchev come to the U.S. in 1959 than it would be
to have Vladimir Putin visit now. Khrushchev had his share of disappointments;
when he went to Los Angeles he got fêted at an official luncheon at 20th
Century-Fox and was treated to watching a scene from the musical Can-Can
being shot (he regarded the scene as
morally offensive), but he was denied permission to visit Disneyland. The show
indicates that was the “call” of then-L.A. Mayor Norris Poulson, but Disneyland
was in Anaheim and Poulson couldn’t have prevented Khrushchev from going there
(my understanding was it was the formidably Right-wing Walt Disney himself that
nixed the idea of the Soviet premier setting foot in the Magic Kingdom).
It
also includes an archive clip from Marilyn Monroe, who was famous for being
late for her film shoots but came to the Khrushchev lunch right on time —
causing Billy Wilder, who’d suffered her tardiness throughout the films he’d
directed her in (The Seven-Year Itch
and Some Like It Hot), to joke,
“Finally we have someone who can get Marilyn to come on time. Now we know who
should direct all her future pictures — Nikita Khrushchev.” And of course the
show includes the famous anecdote of 20th Century-Fox president
Spyros Skouras and Khrushchev clashing over the relative merits of capitalism
and Communism, and in particular the potentials they offered for upward
advancement, with Skouras saying, “I came here as a Greek immigrant and I
worked as a busboy and I worked my way up and now I’m the president of a movie
studio.” Khrushchev replied, “I grew up as a shepherd. And then I worked in a
mine owned by the French. And then I worked in a factory. And now I’m the head
of the Soviet Union.” Though little actually got settled at the summit meeting
between Eisenhower and Khrushchev at Camp David that ended the trip, it was
probably the most relaxed encounter between a U.S. and Soviet leader until
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, and if it hadn’t been for
that pesky spy-plane program and its incompetent pilot getting himself shot
down the horrific tensions of the Kennedy years (including the
near-annihilation of the world in a nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis)
and the even harder lines that emerged when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy and
Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev, just might have been ended and the Soviet Union might have made
a peaceful transition to a more liberal mixed economy instead of carrying on
until it was unsustainable and then breaking apart at the end of the 1980’s.
(When Putin says the breakup of the Soviet Union was one of the world’s great
historical tragedies, I can’t help but think he was right; the world in general
and the former USSR in particular would be a lot better off today if Gorbachev’s reform program had
succeeded than they are now, with Russia an effective dictatorship again and
most of the other former Soviet republics in the hands of kleptocrats.)
