K Blows Top
A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, Americas Most Unlikely Tourist

Khrushchevs 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted. He told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed coeds in an Iowa homeeconomics class, and ogled Shirley MacLaine. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller and Marilyn Monroe. The trip took place in the fifties, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hottempered man with the power to incinerate America.