Take that! Richard Nixon, then U.S. vice-president, gives Nikita Khrushchev a poke during their infamous 'kitchen debate.' The Soviet premier scored a few points of his own.
Barack Obama did not merely deliver speeches during his recent travels to Egypt and Ghana, his newly installed Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Judith McHale, told the White House press gallery last week. Instead, she said, the U.S. President had launched an era of "unprecedented engagement with people in Africa and around the world," with an aggressive outreach campaign "designed to reach deep into these countries" and show them "that America listens and wants to engage."
Embassy officials distributed podcasts of Mr. Obama's Ghana speech by bicycle to radio stations throughout Africa, she said. They rented cinemas in Sierra Leone to show videos of it for free. They gathered millions into a Facebook group to discuss it. Using new media and old to rearm a neglected arsenal of "soft power," the Africa campaign was "a model of creative public diplomacy for the 21st century," according to Ms. McHale, a former media executive in charge of reviving the hearts-and-minds file for the Obama administration.
Certainly the timing is auspicious. Fifty years ago today, the same embattled superpower reached deep inside the hearts and minds of its then-enemies with the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, a quickly thrown together mini-expo that detonated like a sapper's bomb inside the well-fortified cultural heartland of the Soviet empire.
Dimly remembered on this side of the former Iron Curtain as the place where Richard Nixon, then Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice-president, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev debated the relative merits of communist and capitalist kitchen appliances, the 1959 Moscow exhibition has entered history as a decisive moment in the Cold War - a struggle that, in the end, turned as much on a deliberate policy of "cultural infiltration" as it did on warheads and moon shots.
Today, serious historians are as likely to attribute Cold War victory to the Beatles as to Ronald Reagan and his "Star Wars" weaponry. But before them all, a remarkable constellation of U.S. cultural leaders - including design geniuses George Nelson, Buckminster Fuller and Charles and Ray Eames, film director Billy Wilder, producer Walt Disney, photographer Edward Steichen, painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell - gathered under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) to stun Moscow for six giddy weeks that summer.
Old idea new again
The accomplishment could not be more relevant 50 years later, with the United States once again floundering in its leadership of a worldwide campaign against a new totalitarianism. As a model of successful "public diplomacy," also known as propaganda, the 1959 Moscow exhibition will likely remain unequalled until such time as NASCAR runs its first race in Tehran.
"The exhibition ended a long period of almost total cultural estrangement between the United States and the Soviet Union, and ended it with a smile," Stanley Abercrombie wrote in his biography of George Nelson, the legendary "designer's designer" who led the team of geniuses who programmed the fair.
Recently declassified National Security Council documents describe it rather differently as "the most productive single psychological effort" of the Cold War, a description amply reinforced by the memories of Muscovites who attended.
It had the effect of a "poisoned blanket" that helped to destroy the credibility of communist ideology among the capital's cultural elite, according to Vladimir Paperny, an émigré who was among the 2.7 million Russians who crammed the 10-acre site in Sokolniki Park to get their first view of what they thought was the real America.
"The exhibition was a very significant cultural shock for all the people who went there," says Mr. Paperny, now 65, an architectural historian and graphic designer living in Los Angeles. "All of a sudden, we were exposed to things and themes we had never seen before. It was something that came from a different planet."
One consequence of the exhibition, he jokes, is that today he and his friends drink "Jack Daniels, not brake fluid" when they gather to discuss its influence. But it wasn't the so-called kitchen debate that made such an impression on the young Muscovite, nor even the Fuller-inspired geodesic dome in which the Eames brothers staged the world's first multimedia extravaganza, Glimpses of the U.S.A., a McLuhanesque barrage of more than 2,000 images flashed on seven giant screens over 12 breathless minutes.
"If you ask people of my age who went to the exhibition, 'What is the single thing you remember most?' everybody would say Pepsi-Cola," Mr. Paperny recalls.
"It's hard to explain why," he adds, describing a game of endless refills of free soda pop, an adolescent orgy that ended either "when we would just explode from Pepsi" or when one of the innumerable Soviet security officers who circulated the fair in plainclothes would intervene and say that "you better leave right now."
Pepsi was the subject of the first disagreement between Mr. Nixon and Mr. Khrushchev, who toured the fair together the day before its public opening, the latter claiming to prefer the version made with local water over one made with imported water.
But to the world at large, including Americans shocked by the success of the Sputnik space program, Mr. Khrushchev was entirely credible when boasting the Soviet Union would surpass the United States economically.
"As we pass you by, we'll wave 'Hi' to you," he taunted.
'Golden half-apple'
A massive Soviet counter-propaganda campaign timed to coincide with the exhibition belied the premier's bland confidence in Soviet achievement. "A beautiful golden half-apple," Pravda said of the geodesic dome. "But what about the rotten half the Americans are not showing us?" The Soviet propaganda apparatus laboured heroically to fill in the picture while KGB agents monitored fairgoers.
Arrayed against them was a corps of 75 Russian-speaking guides instructed to be as permissive as possible. One of them winked as Mr. Paperny's father, a literary critic and Communist Party member, "liberated" a book he especially wanted, his son recalls. But the KGB arrested him outside the fair, releasing him after a stiff grilling and recording the ideological transgression in letters to the institutions that employed him.
After the exhibition, Mr. Paperny says, he and his circle became "semi-dissidents," who believed firmly that the United States was "an ideal place." His father was eventually expelled from the Communist Party. He, Vladimir, fled the country.
Only after leaving did he and his fellow émigrés realize that the United States "wasn't the paradise we imagined," says Mr. Paperny, who speculates that anti-American feeling in Russia today is due in part to the same disillusionment - an enduring testament to the seductive power of the golden apple in its day.
It was not the miracle of functional washing machines that enchanted visitors, Mr. Paperny recalls. It was the short skirts of the ice skaters whose exposed flanks somehow harmonized with the shockingly large cars on display, the be-winged 1959 Chevy Impala in particular, and the beautifully printed catalogues written in a "soft-sell, friendly style nobody could understand."
Remembered by most American commentators today as a crude commercial cornucopia, the fair is more notable as the stage where U.S. mass communication triumphed over the good-for-you models once promoted by Marxist intellectuals in Western Europe. Carefully choreographed in accordance with advanced research on sense perception and communication, Glimpses of the U.S.A. was the most ambitious real-life "brainwashing" experiment of the 1950s.
"It was the new media of its day," says Jack Masey, who co-ordinated the fair on behalf of the USIA. "It took a certain sophistication to grasp the multimedia effect. It wasn't easy back in '59." The Moscow audiences were unwitting pioneers in a communications revolution still changing the world.
It was also brilliant propaganda: Simultaneously showing thousands of cars jammed together on hundreds of cloverleaf intersections banished Soviet doubts about the typicality of the voluptuous dreamboats on display next door. "So, for a minute or two," recalls Mr. Masey, now 85, "people said, 'Hey, I think these guys have got cars.'"
Visitors were even more enthusiastic about The Family of Man, an exhibition of 500 photographs curated by Edward Steichen, then director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
"The Soviets were struck," Mr. Masey says. "This was not a propaganda show about the U.S. This was the world. It was about the basis of life in every country, including their own. It was about human beings, and they loved that."
They also loved Circarama, a Disney theatre that used nine projectors to create a virtually seamless, wraparound moving image (technology that was improved with the opening of Moscow's own Krugovaya Kinopanorama the same year).
Not everything was a hit - Soviet authorities were infuriated and artists stunned by their mutual encounter with abstract expressionism - but "we ended up connecting with these people," Mr. Masey explains. "Whether they liked everything - that's debatable. I can't pretend they did. But at least they saw it."
As a director of design for the USIA, he was a 28-year veteran of America's "public diplomacy" during the Cold War. Even so, he feels the Moscow expo was little more than a prelude to the global lovefest that took place six years later in Montreal: "We took a shot at it in '59, but in 1967 you guys really ran with it and did a spectacular job."
Expo 67, he says, "was the best expo I had ever seen, and I was a professional expo follower. Canada put it over in a major way."
McLuhan 'one of my heroes'
Mr. Masey's role as design director for the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67 - another dome, but fully rounded and completely transparent - allowed him a quick side trip to absorb the wisdom of Marshall McLuhan, whose writings were a seminal inspiration for the soft-power outreach of the USIA.
"I had to find him because he was one of my heroes," Mr. Masey says. They talked for hours, alone in a basement cafeteria at the University of Toronto, at the time the global nerve centre of advanced communications theory. "I'm not sure I understood altogether what Mr. McLuhan was saying. But I liked it. I liked it immensely."
As his hero might have done, Mr. Masey sees the significance of the Moscow expo in the fact that it happened, not in its frankly propagandistic message. "Connection is the word," he says. "To me, that's the important thing."
The USIA was shut down 10 years ago because the Cold War was deemed to be over, and the agency has no equivalent today. In light of the hyper-militarized diplomacy of the Bush era, however, the lustre of its achievements glows brighter than ever.
That could be the reason why the new U.S. government has suddenly decided to participate in Shanghai's Expo 2010 - three years after receiving an invitation from the Chinese government and less than a year before the fair is to open. But the world-changing Moscow expo was put together on a similar impossible schedule, and Mr. Masey says: "It's just as important that we connect with the Chinese now - with everybody, in fact - as it was in 1959 when we connected with the Soviets."
John Barber is a Globe and Mail reporter.