One of the iconic images of the Cold War was that of an angry Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist  Party of the Soviet Union, removing his shoe while attending a meeting of the UN General Assembly in September 1960 and then banging it on the podium to emphasize his belief in the eventual, and inevitable, victory of world communism.  Critics and pundits (both then and now) pointed to the behavior of the Soviet leader as "boorish," and many still recall the image when
discussing the political career of Khrushchev.  But did the shoe waving and banging event really ever happen?  Did it really happen as so many think that it happened?

What Allegedly Occurred

A pretty standard account of what allegedly occurred at the United Nations can be found in in wikipedia:

The notorious shoe-banging incident occurred during a debate, on October 12 [1960], over a Russian resolution decrying colonialism.  Khrushchev was infuriated by a statement from the rostrum by Lorenzo Sumulong which charged the Soviets with employing a double standard, pointing to their domination of Eastern Europe as an example of the very type of colonialism their resolution criticized.  According to newspaper reports, published the following day, Mr. Khrushchev thereupon pulled off his right shoe, stood up, brandishing it at the Philippine delegate on the other side of the hall and began to furiously bang the shoe on his desk.  The enraged Khrushchev accused Mr. Sumulong of being "Холуй и ставлeнник импeриализма" (kholyi i stavlennik imperializma), which was translated as "a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism".  The Premier alternately shouted, waved a brawny right arm, shook his finger and removed his shoe a second time.  The second shoe incident occurred during a speech by Francis O. Wilcox, an Assistant U.S. Secretary of State.  The chaotic scene finally ended when General Assembly President Frederick Boland broke his gavel calling the meeting to order, but not before the image of Khrushchev as a hotheaded buffoon was indelibly etched into the collective memory of the international community.  Another observer said that while Khrushchev was banging a shoe on the table, he had shoes on both feet, which would imply that he had brought a third shoe for the gesture: in other words, the incident was staged and was planned in advance.

Images

Doing a quick search for an image of Khrushchev at the UN in 1960 does yield a few pictures:

And there are even some "photos" that purport to show the shoe incident:

Sergei Khrushchev Explains

Sergei Khrushchev, Senior Fellow of The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, author of The Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev and other books and son of Nikita Khrushchev, spoke about the impact of the launch of Sputnik (4 October 1957) on events during the Cold War at the Loudoun campus of Northern Virginia Community College on 2 October 2007.  During the question-and-answer section of the program, Sergei Khrushchev responded to a question from the audience about this very shoe banging incident.

Some other references

Nina Khrushcheva, Khrushchev's granddaughter, has written about this incident, The Case of Khrushchev's Shoe" (New Statesman, 2 October 2000).

As has William Taubman, "Did He Bang It?: Nikita Khrushchev and the Shoe (International Herald Tribune, 26 July 2003)

Stephen Boykewitch, also addressed the incident in the Moscow Times (14 September 2005), Khrushchev Forever Etched in UN Memory.

There is also an interview on Johnson's Russia list, Johnson's Russia List, ed. Stephen D. Shenfield, Did He Bang His Shoe? which also refutes that Khrushchev actually banged his shoe.

This is more directly explored by the recollections of New York Times reporter, James Feron (5 October 1997), Westchester Q&A: James Feron; Turning Outpost into a Career Milestone by Donna Greene.