Let's get back to the question of shoes and politics.
A few blogs back, as W was making his Administration an even more ghastly embarrassment by ducking a journalist's shoe in Iraq, I mentioned the speculation over whether Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev actually banged his shoe on the desk in the infamous 1960 U.N. incident or merely banged his fist while holding the shoe.
Hey, this matters. I'm not sure why, but it does. So I did a little digging.
What we know for sure is that on October 13, 1960, the notoriously trigger-tempered Kruschev, inflamed by the oratory of a Philippine delegate about the imperialist wrongs of the Soviet Union, wielded his right shoe while making an enraged rejoinder.
But did he bang the shoe?
William Taubman, in a 2003 International Herald Tribune article, waded through newspaper accounts and testimonies of people who insisted that they clearly saw Kruschev bang the shoe, and others who swore just as adamantly that they saw him not bang the shoe. For instance, Taubman cited a 1960 New York Times account that reported that Kruschev brandished and then banged the shoe. But, says Taubman, another Times reporter who was there remembered it later as a definite nonbanging in which Kruschev waved the shoe "pseudomenacingly" and placed it on the desk without banging it. A KGB guy claimed Kruschev not only banged the shoe but did so rhythmically. A UN staffer said Kruschev didn't remove his shoe himself because his stomach was too big, but it fell off his foot and when someone handed it to him he then banged it. A Life photo editor told Taubman that Kruschev never banged it and the whole thing was a myth. Yet another witness insisted that Kruschev held the shoe and banged the desk but that his hand, not the shoe, made contact with the desk.
That last one is interesting. The hand came between the desk and the shoe? Let's take a closer look:
It does look plausible, doesn't it? But it depends on his arm trajectory. If he swung the shoe like a mallet, the top surface of the shoe, rather than his hand, would have struck the desk. But if he slammed the shoe straight down on the desk like a stone, his hand may indeed have gotten in the way and precluded any direct shoe-to-desk contact.
And then there was the shoe-banging investigation mounted by Kruschev's granddaughter.
In 2000, the granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, in a piece in The New Statesman, agonized about the alleged shoe-banging as a scar on her family's cultural legacy, one that she had hoped to erase by discrediting the event as a fiction. But sadly, as she revealed in her essay, her probing led her to accept the shoe-banging as a crude fact. She reached this conclusion, she wrote, after being dismayed to discover photographs of her grandfather wielding his shoe in his hand above the desk. So it appears that she either didn't know about, or rejected, the accounts that claim that the shoe never actually struck the desk.
What I find most interesting, and kind of surreal, about Khrushcheva's account is the way her shoe story becomes a (failed) search for emotional redemption, and the personal angle she brings to explaining Kruschev's shoe stunt. As she tells it, in the heat of the Cold War her grandfather needed a way to defy the West and its friends that wouldn't force him into the ill-fitting style of Western erudition. Her family, she wrote, explained to her that Kruschev chose to theatrically bang his fist on the desk on that fateful day, whereupon, she said, the following happened:
"As a good performer, Khrushchev needed a strong, convincing exit [from the U.N. session], true to the role he chose, and that is what happened: in the excitement of fist banging, his watch fell off. Meanwhile, his shoes, made of durable Soviet leather in a special shoe atelier for the Soviet nomenclature, were too new and too tight, and he removed them. He bent down to pick up the watch and saw his empty shoes. How lucky!"
As for me, I was five years old when this happened. My retroactive opinion is that Kruschev banged the shoe. The photos show him in just too shoe-banging a stance for me to believe otherwise.
In any case, you might want to visit The MorningCall.com's Shoes and Politics: Moments in History, a photo procession that includes the recent Anti-Bush Show Throw, ex-Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos posing with some of her more than 1,200 pairs of shoes, the fizzling sneaker that busted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. and more.
Thanks to Cathleen for background info.