"K Blows Top," by former Boston Herald-American and Washington Post writer Peter Carlson fits the bill. I wish I had written it, in part because it would have been fun to work on. For instance, Carlson conducted some key research with barber-scholar Jerry O'Brien, an expert on Marilyn Monroe and J. Edgar Hoover. O'Brien has a Monroe photo gallery and Hoover's back brace hanging on the walls of his Yankee Clipper barbershop in Rockville, Md. To be fair, Carlson also spent time in the State Department archives and interviewed many still-living participants in the 1959 hijinks.
"K Blow Top" - the title quotes a classic tabloid headline - tells the story of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's bizarre, two-week US tour that took place 50 years ago. The context has been largely forgotten. The Cold War was very much on. The United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union had huge nuclear arsenals aimed at each other.
The diffident, not very happy warrior Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House. The bumptious, red-baiting Richard Nixon was his vice president. Nixon visited Russia in early 1959, slurping Pepsi-Cola prior to the famous "kitchen debate" in Moscow's Sokolniki Park, making a return visit from Khrushchev all but inevitable.
Eisenhower grudgingly invited Khrushchev to Camp David to talk about reducing political tension in Berlin. Khrushchev's natural reaction: Why not make a trip of it? Bring the wife and kid, which he did. Meet the capitalists, the farmers, the downtrodden workers, the movie stars! Climb the Empire State Building and see Disneyland! Most of which he ended up doing.
Even before departing Moscow in his TU-114, the world's tallest airliner, Khrushchev was dominating America's news. The FBI estimated that at least 25,000 Americans wanted to kill him. William F. Buckley's National Review magazine was selling stickers that read, "Khrushchev Not Welcome Here." Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo sent a letter to his predecessor, Christian Herter, who had become Ike's secretary of state: "I don't know what Mr. Khrushchev's itinerary is, but I strongly recommend that it not include Massachusetts," for security reasons.
In the end, Khrushchev gave the Bay State a pass.
