It was 57 years ago today

It was 57 years ago today July 24, 2016

That the great Kitchen Debate took place.  The American Catholic demonstrates the degree of art that is history.  Growing up and going through a state university in the 1980s, the Kitchen Debate was portrayed as a resounding coup for the Soviets.  There we were, thinking our little suburban houses and Mr. Coffees were all that and a bag of chips, and suddenly in swooped Khrushchev, mopping the floor with a bumbling, befuddled Nixon.  I remember seeing a clip of this in a college course on the history of the 20th Century, with the class and professors laughing on cue at the oh-so boisterous Khrushchev and his domination of that wastrel Nixon.

Yet Don McClarey gives a different view, one where the US and Nixon actually come out on top.  At graduate school, I got to know students from various nationalities.  Being the early to mid-90s, there was a group fresh from the former Soviet Union.  We all shared the same housing, which was low income school housing for families with children.  Once we visited a couple, one from Russia and one from the Ukraine.  All they could talk about was how much they loved our housing.  My wife and I looked around.  This?  We call this a ghetto.  We can’t wait to get out of here.  And yet they said they’d never lived so well.

Then again, the cultural spin impressed on my memory regarding the 1985 Geneva Summit was that Gorbachev single handedly started us down the path toward peaceful resolution to the Cold War.  Reagan was just some dumb, senile old fool who stumbled around looking for a bathroom.  Peter Jennings produced a special on the Reagan legacy that presented the Summit in those terms, and even our professor, a self proclaimed liberal, admitted he felt sorry for Reagan and felt the special was a bit slanted.  It took meeting people from the former Soviet Bloc, and watching a PBS special on the Summit, to find out that the Russians themselves gave much credit to Reagan for the Summit’s success.

So there you go.  Current events and history are pliable disciplines, and you can make them say what you want.  If you’re a modern America, it might be taking the worst spins possible on the history of the US.  If you’re from somewhere else like Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, it might just be a positive spin on America and the contribution of its leaders.  You never know.


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