In September of 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States on an unprecedented goodwill trip spanning several days, thousands of miles and which was covered by a huge press corps. In stark contrast to the finely orchestrated tours and campaign stops that are common nowadays, the visit was a series of flubs and fiascoes, which led people to criticize the ineptitude of the State Department. And yet the chaos of the first leg of the trip, detailed in Act I, was nothing compared to what was to come in San Francisco and Iowa.
In Act II, Khrushchev's Cold War Comedy of Errors continues with disastrous press encounters and an unwilling host whose petulance led to the corn battle at Garst Farm. Richard Townsend Davies, who was an integral part of the trip, describes the myriad problems of “an abysmal failure” in PR.
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