One of the odd little details that has always stuck with us down through the years was something we read in The Book of Lists when we were in junior high, something about how Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had been given a tour of the 20th-Century Fox studios and expressed moral outrage at the costumes that Shirley MacLaine and the other dancers in Can-Can were wearing. It’s the only thing we remember about that trip, other than the whole shoe-banging at the United Nations incident. Anyway, we were amused a few weeks back when we got “a postcard from Khrushchev” with a picture of that famous scene—a little later, we got another card in which “K.” told us about the protestors that greeted him in New York, and then another recounting a confrontation with the press in Iowa.
Turns out the postcards were part of a promotional campaign alerting the media to the impending publication of K BLOWS TOP: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist, an account by Peter Carlson that casts the Soviet Union’s leader as, in the words of the PublicAffairs press release, “the real-life Borat of his day.” It makes us wonder if some enterprising Russian journalist is putting together a similar project about Richard Nixon‘s confrontation with Khrushchev at the Kitchen Debate. (Sure, you laugh, but somebody managed to get an entire book out of Elvis Presley’s visit to Nixon at the White House…)