K's Shoe Redux

Dreamtime's already received some interesting emails on our K Blows Top! post of Wednesday, including a nice note from author Peter Carlson, who wrote the book that inspired our title and article, the original (and highly recommended) K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist. Mr. Carlson writes the he's "a big fan of Dylan and his radio show" and goes on to say about the controversy over whether the shoe-banging actually happened or not...

"... it was reported in newspapers the next day by people who did see it and then K admitted in his memoirs... [But] it has become a mythic event and so it's not surprising that people deny that it happened."

We also received a lengthy and fascinating email from a correspondent who writes that he was the T.V. Director at the U.N. at the time...

"...The U.N. TV signal was fed to closed circuit monitors within the International facility, to a pool of outside subscribers, as well as an in-house instant kinescope setup, supervised by a kinescope director. From what I have been able to determine, the kinescope cameras were not rolling when the shoe incident took place...

...CBS- (or WCBS) News had nevertheless booked a daylong feed and their VTR machine(s) recorded Mr. K's parliamentary transgression. That very evening, sitting at home, I watched a Special Event broadcast on Channel 2, WCBS-TV, wherein the shoe banging was repeated several times, almost ad nauseam."

Our correspondent goes on to note that as we recorded in our post and as Peter Carlson writes in K Blows Top, all visual evidence of Khrushchev's shoe-banging - including that WCBS tape - seems to have been lost. To avoid confusion and emails , I'll again point out that the image above, which circulates on the Web as a still from the incident, is a Photoshopped fake.

Finally, our correspondent provides a correction to an error: "You report that 'Many in the Soviet delegation were embarrassed, although they all dutifully banged their shoes along with their Premier'. That is incorrect. They – and other Iron Curtain-country delegates did however bang their fists in unison w/ Mr. K. But that was during the Harold Macmillan and Dag Hammarskjold incidents, earlier in the session."

Never know what you'll get when you do a Dreamtime post. As always, I appreciate the emails, comments, and corrections. It's what makes Dreamtime a joy to write.