Khruschev - We will bury you

disaster looms large. As our image is revealed, we find ourselves in New York City in October of 1960. Inside the U.N. General Assembly, Nikita Khrushchev is pounding his shoe-- and his fists, interrupting a special conference on Third World decolonization. This outburst quickly overshadows the purpose of the conference and forever remains a petulant symbol of communist defiance in an age of superpower hostility. >> Sergei Khrushchev, Ph.D.: It was a very good image of the enemy, with banging of the shoe, is very unusuauauauaual. >> Rowe: One person who remembers the image well, is Sergei Khrushchev, son of the Soviet leader. According to the son, the leader was itching for a fight. Just five months earlier, in May, an American U2 spy plane in the skies over the Soviet Union was shot down and its captured pilot, Gary Powers, put on trial. But America was unrepentant, and refused to end the spy flights. >> Sergei: >> Rowe: Khrushchev intended to press for greater freedom for Africa from western powers. But a speech by British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan deriding communist colonization of eastern Europe, quickly set off Khrushchev's loud outburst. The Soviet leader later gives a speech railing against the west, and is quoted in the media as saying "I will bury you." >> Sergei: >> Rowe: In reality, what he did say can be more closely translated as a promise that communism will outlast capitalism. Yet the world would remember this mistranslated threat to bury the west and the image of the Soviet premiere banging his shoe. Khrushchev had hurt onononononof and he knew it. >> Sergei: >> Rowe: Despite Khrushchev's feelings, he would soon bring the Cold War to a boiling point. Just two years later, the world would come the closest it's ever been to all-out nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And by engaging in this Cold War saber rattling, Khrushchev became distracted from more pressing needs in his home country. >> Sergei: >> Rowe: Eventually the Cold War would come to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was then that Sergei Khrushchev emigrated to the United States, becoming a citizen eight years later. But for many, it is the historic image of his father that continues to symbolize the war of words that nearly brought the world to its knees. >> Sergei: >> Rowe: Four years after his violent outburst at the U.N., Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power. And though U.S.-Soviet relations would remain strained for almost three more decades, the glasnost of the 19898989898989898980s prn that peace cannot be found in the banging of fists, but at the shaking of hands.