Documentary history

Currently I'm reading Ask Me Anything: Our Adventures with Khrushchev, a memoir by William Randolph Hearst Jr., Bob Considine and Frank Conniff, three reporters from the Heart Newspaper Group who were among the first American journalists to not only travel extensively in the Soviet Union but also interview Khrushchev during his tenure as Soviet premier.

The book was published in 1960, on the heels of Nixon's groundbreaking visit to the Soviet Union, which featured his "kitchen debate" with Khrushchev. I made a remark yesterday to some friends about how it was really interesting to read as a historical document because it's such a snapshot of that particular moment in time. The authors gush about Khrushchev's rise and seem blissfully naive of the trouble spots that would plague him in the near future, things like the SIno-Soviet split, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.

But I really understated the impact of that. This morning, as I was reading more on my way to work, I came across this hilarious passage that couldn't have been any funnier had it been written with total foreboding of the future (and indeed is all the more amusing because of the temporal irony):

Two other Presidium members deserve special mention because of their power and influence, although neither, for varying reasons, has any chance of becoming Khrushchev's successor.

The first of these is Leonid I. Brezhnev, a hatchet man.

You know, the guy who succeeded Khrushchev.