'Car Guys' Putin and Kim in Pyongyang Recall Antics of LBJ, Nixon and Khrushchev
Images from the Russia-DPRK talks in North Korea bring back memories of the Lincoln Continental convertibles at the LBJ Ranch and the 'Kitchen Debate' in Moscow
It’s way above my pay grade to analyze the implications for global stability stemming from this week’s bilateral talks and agreements in North Korea between Russia President Vladimir Putin and DPRK Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.
If you want a diplomatic and strategic analysis, here’s one from The Washington Post.
But if you want to know what Putin and Kim revealed about themselves, that’s easy. They are car guys.
In Pyongyang, Putin made a gift to Kim of a presidential limousine manufactured by Russia’s Ausus brand at a former Toyota plant near Saint Petersburg. The vehicle is reportedly similar to the limos that Putin uses. And it’s not the first limo given to Kim. Putin gave Kim a similar car back in February.
Despite all the export controls on vehicles to North Korea, Reuters’ chief Moscow correspondent, Andrew Osborn, reports that Kim has smuggled a collection of luxury cars into Pyongyang that would make Jay Leno jealous.
At first, Putin drove Kim in the vehicle. After aides opened the driver and passenger doors, the two authoritarians switched places so that Kim could drive Putin.
After reading Reuter’s account of yesterday’s limo jaunt, four thoughts came to me:
Yep, they are car guys. (Later, I found out they are dog people, too.)
The new Kim-mobile has an odd device placed on the windshield near the “A-Pillar” on the passenger side. Is it a dash cam? I’m pretty certain that it’s not an E-ZPass transponder!
It’s rare to see pictures of world leaders driving themselves around without staff and a chauffeur. I immediately remembered another world leader who famously drove his own car. That was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who served from 1963 to 1969. He loved to drive visitors in his big Lincoln Continental convertibles around the vast LBJ Ranch in the Texas Hill Country north of Austin. Since he owned all the land and wasn't on public roads, the Secret Service didn’t protest the president turning the key on the ignition and speeding away.
The Reuters account also shows a video of Putin and Kim admiring dogs kept in a fenced-in pen. The fence reminded me of a whole other long-ago episode, the famous “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow in 1959 between then-Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Harkening to Lincoln (cars, not the president) and Johnson
Driving visitors around his ranch constituted moments of delight in the life of the 36th American President. The LBJ Ranch is now a museum managed by the National Park Service. Two of the Johnson Lincoln Continentals are on display at the ranch.
Don’t you just see the same satisfaction on LBJ driving the Lincolns in Texas sixty years ago that Putin and Kim displayed driving the Aurus limo in Pyongyang?
The Pyongyang dog pen fence harkens to a Moscow display
Here is a screenshot from a Korean-language video of Putin and Kim hunched over a fence admiring dogs. I know nothing more about this setting; the captions and sound for the video are in Korean.
See that fence surrounding the dogs, with Putin and Kim on the outside?
It looks just like the fence in 1959 separating Premier Khrushchev at Vice President Nixon from a display of a modern American kitchen at an American cultural show in Moscow in 1959!
The American National Exhibition was a chance to show off American technology and labor-saving devices to the Russians. The story in the video below is worth watching. You should click on it! (And Khrushchev had a sense of humor, too.)
I was so glad to discover a book about this episode, published just four years ago and available on Amazon, called Nixon, Khrushchev & Safire In My Kitchen, by Ernie Hurwitz. Hurwitz was a housing developer in New York State whose business ties led to him developing the display home in Moscow. There is also a splendid website about Hurwitz and his book from which the images here were taken.
After the success of movies such as Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Courier (2020), which both feature businessmen (of course they were men) during the Cold War war era performing delicate non-governmental secret diplomacy behind the Iron Curtain, you’d think Hollywood would be working on making the Kitchen Debate and Ernie Hurwitz into another major motion picture.
Perhaps a coda about Putin and Kim could be added to the end.
And what about those dogs, anyway?
Literally, as I was researching and writing this post, Reuters published a story reporting the dogs are gifts from Kim to Putin. They are Pungsan dogs, a hunting breed from the similarly named mountainous region of what is now North Korea. In 2018, Kim gave another pair of Pungsans to then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in during a thaw in relations on the Korean Peninsula. (Pungsan dogs are rarely found outside Korea.)
The dogs in 2018 were also white. They were named “Gomi” and “Songgang.”
No word yet on the names of Putin’s new pups.
