Twenty: Kitchen Talk

On July 24, 1959, Vice-President Richard Nixon met Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev at the opening of an exhibition about America in Moscow, and they engaged in a series of discussions about the relative merits of their respective economic and political systems. This wandering debate took place at several places in the exhibition, but these discussions are usually called the “kitchen debate” since it primarily happened in the model kitchen of the exhibit. These conversations were partially recorded on color videotape, a very early demonstration of this technology, but the original recordings have been lost. Several reconstructions of the debates have been attempted, with varying degrees of success. Technology fails, memory fails, and myth replaces truth in the absence of real evidence. This book proposes a few possible reconstructions of these debates, presented in a Russian kitchen.