For those of us of a certain vintage, the image of the evil dictator of Communist Russia, an ugly
little man who resembled a pig, pounding his shoe on a table at the United Nations confirmed our worst fears
that the possibility of a nuclear World
War III was in the hands of a crude mad man. And that’s exactly what we were supposed to think.
According to most of the almanacs I consult regularly in
preparation of these blog posts, it was October 12 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev, First
Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union
threw that famous temper tantrum.
But it turns
out that it may have been September 23
or 29, or October 13 during the Plenary Meeting of the UN General
Assembly in New York. It may have come in protest to a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan or
remarks by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong. He was visibly
upset by statements of both men.
He may have banged his shoe at the podium…or at his seat in the Soviet delegation…or perhaps not at all.
And the old man was not really a
dictator, as in the single,
unquestioned authority of the nation in the way of Hitler, Stalin, or Third World generalissimos.
How could we have gotten it so wrong?
The trouble is, there is no documentation of the event in the official records of the United
Nations. In the daily press it was not mentioned in reports on any of
the possible dates. No footage could be found in the archives of NBC and CBC, both of
which covered the General Assembly
regularly and often broadcast important
speeches live. Nor has any authentic photograph of the episode
been found—more on that later.
Fuzzy
accounts of the event have been pieced together from memories and memoirs, many of which don’t agree.
In retrospect, it is astonishing
that the leader of one of the most powerful
nations on Earth came to the major city of his chief rival to sit for hours daily over a span of weeks for the meeting of the Security
Council. And he wasn’t the only
one—Macmillan was only one of the top
Western leaders who did the same, as did a parade of presidents, prime ministers, kings,
and despots from lesser nations. If Dwight
Eisenhower elected only to attend
briefly to make his annual speech
and to consult with world leaders in
private meetings, the United States was represented at the top level by Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles as well as the Cabinet
level Ambassador to the world body. It shows how important the UN
was viewed in those distant days.
Most historians now discount the
possibility that the shoe came off in September. He did take to the podium, pounding his fists, in angry denunciation of Macmillan’s speech that
day. Later an AP photo of that diatribe would be altered by someone, and a shoe inserted into Khrushchev’s fist.
It was released and widely circulated by the media
within weeks of the alleged event and not questioned at the time. Who made the alteration and how did get to the media? No
one seems to know, but it has all the earmarks of a classic intelligence service disinformation
operation.
The consensus
now is that it was Sumulong’s speech on October 12 that
was the trigger—if the event
happened at all. The Philippine delegate
rose in support of an anti-colonial
resolution that had the support
of the Soviets and their allies. The delegate spoke
as a representative of a nation with
a colonial past which had achieved its independence. Of course, the Philippines, while
independent, were known as a staunch
ally of their former colonial master,
the United States. Although the
resolution was tailored to the remaining colonial holdings of the Western
powers, Sumulong strayed from the topic at hand
to offer a slap at the Soviet Union:
…It is our view that
the declaration proposed by the Soviet Union should cover the inalienable right
to independence not only of the peoples and territories which yet remain under
the rule of Western colonial Powers, but also of the peoples of Eastern Europe
and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and
political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet
Union.
An enraged Khrushchev was recognized
on a point of order and rushed the podium. He shoved the
Philippine diplomat aside and
launched an extended diatribe calling Sumulong a “jerk, a stooge, and a
lackey…a toady of American imperialism” and demanding that he be ruled out of
order. Assembly President Frederick Boland of Ireland did caution the
Sumulong to “avoid wandering out into an argument which is certain to provoke
further interventions.” But Sumulong was
permitted to continue his speech
and Khrushchev returned to his seat in the Soviet delegation.
At least one person remembers
the Soviet premier as using his shoe at the rostrum in this confrontation.
But
most agree that it happened after he sat back down. As the Filipino continued to speak,
Khrushchev pounded both fists angrily on his desk, joined obediently by
other members of the Soviet delegation and Eastern Bloc nations. In fact, he pounded so hard that his watch
stopped or flew off his wrist—not speaking well of quality
of Soviet consumer goods.
According to a memoir by Khrushchev’s daughter Nina, confirmed
by interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev who sat next to him, he looked down and
saw his shoe, which he had removed for some reason earlier and
spontaneously picked it up and began pounding the table. He never, as some reports had it, removed the
shoe from his foot, a virtual impossibility in the cramped space
of the desk and given his girth.
Decorum at the session
soon broke down and it was gaveled to adjournment by President
Boland, who was being abused and booed from the Soviet bloc
seats.
However,
other accounts do not remember or mention the shoe at all.
To
make matters even more confusing in his own memoirs Khrushchev remembered a
shoe pounding incident but placed it in an entirely different context—a
protest to remarks by a diplomat from Franco’s Spain. A later published edition, however,
contained a footnote saying that the incident was misremembered.
That United Nations trip is also
remembered for Khrushchev’s own address
to the world body in which he famously
said of the United States, “We will bury you.” That was played in the U.S. press as a threat
of nuclear annihilation. In fact,
translators and linguists are unanimous that
he had a different, less threatening meaning. He was quoting a well-known Russian
proverb that means “we will survive you and see you in your grave.” It was a prediction
of the triumph of Communism over capitalism as
inevitable, but not a threat of war.
No matter what happened, Americans
were soon convinced that Khrushchev
was an arch-villain and
dictator. In fact, although he had consolidated considerable power in the Party, Khrushchev was never able to rule alone. He was answerable to the Presidium of the Party and to the larger Polit Bureau, each of which included
powerful rivals who limited his freedom of
action.
Moreover, in the Soviet sense, Khrushchev was a liberal and reformer. He had presided over de-Stalinization of the Party.
He had also loosened economic
regulations, liberalized the
still restricted freedom of writers and intellectuals
to express themselves, and broke with
the most aggressive military ambitions of hard liners. Western
intelligence agencies undoubtedly knew all of this.
In fact, four years later Khrushchev
was deposed by the hardliners led by
Leonid Brezhnev.
But to keep up public support
for continued high defense spending and the proclaimed policy of aggressive containment of Communism, it was necessary to paint the Soviet leaders in the same stark terms as the
U.S.’s late enemies in World War II.
All of this should be kept well in mind as one after another leaders of small
and weak nations are portrayed to the American people as, inevitably,
Hitlers.
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