A Giant Among Men: Author Peter Carlson

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PETER CARLSON'S "K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist," may be the most entertaining historical account you'll ever read. After being accidentally invited to the United States by President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the height of the Cold War, the Soviet leader ambled through a two-week cross-country visit in 1959, an episode aptly termed "a surreal extravaganza" at the time.

While the book teems with strange comic incidents — K throwing a tantrum before an audience of stunned Hollywood stars after being told he couldn't go to Disneyland (bellowing, "What must I do, commit suicide?") the set pieces are the tip of the iceberg. The book's funniest sections are due to K's own remarkable wit. Carlson sees the heroically benevolent dictator as a "giant among men" who was alternately terrifying and hilarious.

» EXPRESS: Do you see Khrushchev as a giant among men?
» CARLSON: He was. He took over for one of the worst dictators in human history. Compared with Stalin, he was Mother Teresa. He denounced Stalin and he released hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million, people from the Gulag.

» EXPRESS: I love when Khrushchev said he hadn't come to learn anything, because he'd already learned everything from Marx. Like when he goes to Pittsburgh and they give him the key to the city, he says, "I suppose if anyone's house is broken into tonight, I'll be blamed."
» CARLSON: As soon as I started working on the book, I remember thinking, "My God — this is a nonfiction Kurt Vonnegut book!" You have all these humorous, zany things happening, but lurking in the shadows is the destruction of human civilization.

» EXPRESS: It's not even in the shadows — Khrushchev repeatedly makes the possibility overt.
» CARLSON: Yeah, he keeps bringing up the idea that he could blow us up. He asked, "What's the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?" [Laughs] "An optimist thinks it'll take a dozen nuclear weapons to wipe out England. A pessimist thinks it'll only take a half-dozen." He had a great, gallows sense of humor.

» EXPRESS: Do you think the trip helped maintain peace, though?
» CARLSON: I think it did. Khrushchev realized that the U.S. was bigger, richer and more powerful than the Soviets had been telling their people. And from the American side, they saw that, after Stalin — here was a guy who was like your crazy uncle saying funny things. He's so human. When he left, he left good will behind.

» EXPRESS: A lot of people only know about Khrushchev's second trip here.
» CARLSON: It's funny how legend accrues. People know that he said, "We will bury you." They know that he banged his shoe at the U.N. And they know that he wasn't allowed to go to Disneyland — and these facts get jumbled together. Those were wildly different events.

» EXPRESS: What kind of woman was Nina Khrushchev?
» CARLSON: She was very smart. She was Khrushchev's teacher in Marxist economics or something — that's how they met. The right-wing press kept talking about how she was a die-hard communist — and she looked so grandmotherly. They kept trying to paint her as evil. She probably wasn't evil.

» EXPRESS: What do you see as the funniest parts of the book?
» CARLSON: I like when Khrushchev gets stuck in an elevator in the Waldorf-Astoria and [former senator] Henry Cabot Lodge helps him climb out by pushing on his butt. It sounds like something from a slapstick movie.
And then there are the various media riots and the crazy scene at Roswell Garst's farm in Iowa, where Garst is throwing silage at photographers. Garst wanted to show Khrushchev all this stuff, and all these reporters were getting in his way. He's the only guy in the world who could steal a scene from Khrushchev.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Fri., June 19, 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness-UDC)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo courtesy George Ramick
Photo by George Ramick; courtesy Public Affairs