Pencilling in a round on the UN at the Marlborough last week and I'd put the shoe in as the gentle opener, because everyone knows the shoe. Then I went looking for the picture.
Question: how many photographs show Khrushchev actually banging it on the desk? Answer: none that anyone has ever managed to put in front of me. There are stills of him at the desk with a shoe in hand. There are images that have clearly been helped along somewhere down the line. And there are a great many people who will tell you, hand on heart, that they've seen it. (Me included, right up until last week.) This was the 902nd plenary meeting, 12 October 1960, in a hall absolutely crawling with press photographers.
The delegate he was objecting to was Lorenzo Sumulong of the Philippines, which is the name nobody ever remembers. The shot attached is Khrushchev at his desk, earpiece in, looking off to one side, nameplates along the row, half of UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA readable. No shoe anywhere in it.
The UN's verbatim record of that meeting writes down what was said, not what was done.
A hall full of press men with Speed Graphics and Leicas, flashbulbs going all afternoon, and not one frame of the actual bang. Plenty of photographs of a shoe at rest, though. Hard to think of a quieter desk in 1960.
Pip, the detail the record does keep is the gavel: Frederick Boland of Ireland, presiding, hammered for order hard enough to break the thing, and the meeting carried on without it. A chairman losing his gavel is the sort of procedural fact that never gets a photograph.