© Victor1558
Once upon a time there was a land of milk and honey called the United States of America. America was a great country, but it faced a powerful enemy, the evil Soviet Union. In 1959, there was a trade exhibition of American products in Moscow, the capital of that evil empire. The vice president of America, one Richard Milhous Nixon, attended the exhibition on America's behalf.
A 29-year-old future journalist named William Safire was there at the exhibition representing the American building industry. Doing his job very well, he steered Nixon and his Soviet nemesis, Nikita Khrushchev, toward a walk-through display of the typical American home.
As they toured the model American home, Nixon and Khrushchev debated the relative merits of the American and Soviet systems. The debate came to a climax in the kitchen, and so it went down in history as the "kitchen debate."
Khrushchev argued that the Soviet Union had surpassed America in rockets and high technology. Nixon responded by showing Khrushchev around the model American kitchen with its modern 1950s appliances. Nixon told Khrushchev how any ordinary American, a military veteran or a steelworker earning $3 an hour (worth
$24 today), could afford a brand-new home with modern appliances. And he was right.
In
The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 journalist and policy analyst Sam Pizzigati tells the story of how that American workers' paradise came to be. (
Seven Stories Press, 2012)
Comment: Dr. Lance deHaven-Smith, Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University, speaks below on elite political criminality. DeHaven-Smith coined a term in 2006 to delineate crimes of high office: State Crimes Against Democracy, such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Plamegate, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the staged Gulf of Tonkin incident.