Cold War Veterans Blog

The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen

EXACTLY one-half century ago, one of the great confrontational moments of the cold war seized the world’s attention: Nikita Khrushchev, bombastic anti-capitalist leader of the Soviet Union, and Richard Nixon, vice president of the United States with the reputation of a hard-line anti-communist, came to rhetorical grips in the model kitchen of the “typical American house” at the 1959 American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow.

I was in that kitchen, not because I then had anything to do with Nixon, the exhibition’s official host, but as a young press agent for the American company that built the house. The exhibit was designed to show Russians that free enterprise produced goods that made life better for average Americans. However, my client’s house was not on the official tour.

Instead, “Nik and Dick,” as the adversaries were promptly dubbed, were steered into the RCA color television exhibit, a consumer marvel at the time. This display of technical superiority must have irritated the Russian leader, who noticed the taping going on and demanded “a full translation” of his remarks be broadcast in English in the United States. Nixon, in his role as genial host, readily agreed, expressing a hope for similar treatment of his remarks in Russia.

Khrushchev then promptly denounced a recent proclamation by the United States of “Captive Nations Week” — dedicated to praying for “peoples enslaved by the Soviet Union” — as an example of thoughtless provocation. “You have churned the water yourselves,” he warned the vice president. “What black cat crossed your path and confused you?” Then he wrapped his arms around a nearby Russian workman: “Does this man look like a slave laborer?”

Nixon, trying to be Mr. Nice Guy, noted that Russian and American workers had cooperated in building the exhibition and added: “There must be an exchange of ideas. After all, you don’t know everything — ” At which point Khrushchev snapped, “If I don’t know everything, you don’t know anything about communism — except fear of it.” On the defensive, Nixon said, “The way you dominate the conversation ... if you were in the United States Senate you would be accused of filibustering.”

Coming out of the RCA studio and being led into the innocuous Pepsi exhibit, Nixon looked glum; by playing the gracious host in the face of an aggressive debater, he had made a mistake soon to be replayed by leaders around the world. His military aide, Maj. Don Hughes, was looking around for a venue — off the planned route — where the vice president could regroup in front of the crowd of reporters.

I hollered at Major Hughes, “This way to the typical American house!” He didn’t hesitate, steering Nixon, Khrushchev and their entourages off the path and toward the structure we called “the Splitnik,” because it had a path cut through the middle to allow crowds to walk through the interior.

Problem: the momentum of the following crowd threatened to push the party all the way through the house without stopping. Thanks to Gilbert Robinson, a coordinator of the exhibition (and later head of State Department public diplomacy in the Reagan years), I arranged to make a certain section of fence disappear, allowing a crowd from the other side to spill in and trapping the official party inside the house. Nixon made a beeline to the railing that exposed the kitchen.

Nixon: “I want to show you this kitchen. It’s like those of houses in California. See that built-in washing machine?”

Khrushchev: “We have such things.”

Nixon: “What we want to do is make more easy the life of our housewives.”

Khrushchev: “We do not have the capitalist attitude toward women.”

Next problem: during this opening banter, I was in the kitchen, but the principals’ backs were to the reporters, who couldn’t hear. Harrison Salisbury of The Times, who spoke Russian, was trying to squeeze past burly Russian guards into the kitchen; I explained to them that he was the refrigerator demonstrator. They let Harrison in; he sat on the floor and took notes for the press pool.

read rest of NY Times article