I was leafing through a Life Magazine from 1959 that covered the so-called Kitchen Debate between Vice President Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. The two of them essentially flung generalizations about Communism vs. Democracy at each other. Life said the topics even included jazz, and I couldn't imagine how that came up. At cia.gov I found our government's transcript of the 'debate'. Unfortunately it didn't touch on jazz, but it had this weird exchange, that I love:
Khrushchev: I know I'm dealing with a very good lawyer. Therefore, I want to be unwavering in my miner's girth, so our miners will say, "He's ours, and he doesn't give in."
Nixon: No question about that.
Khrushchev: You're a lawyer of Capitalism, I'm a lawyer for Communism. Let's kiss.
(This just begs for John Waters to do a film version.)
P.S. The vagaries of translation are rather wild on this exchange...I just visited the film footage of the exchange on YouTube, and Khrushchev's English subtitles have 'dignity' in place of 'girth', and he doesn't say "Let's kiss", he says "So let's compete." Perhaps there's a Russian idiom that plays on kiss/compete? I much prefer the kiss.