At the White House the President remarks that the outcome seems to him to be touch and go, that it can now go “either way.” McNamara, glancing at the sky on his way back to the Pentagon, wonders aloud how many more sunsets he will see. Thompson tells his wife that if he does not come home, he will let her know where she and the children will join him should the capital be evacuated.
***
Sunday, October 28
Another magnificent October day. A few minutes before 9 A.M. (4 P.M. in the Russian capital) Radio Moscow announces that an important announcement will be broadcast on the hour. This is the very last chance for peace. If Khrushchev rejects Kennedy’s terms the American attack will go in. McNamara’s estimate of U.S. casualties is now 40,000 to 50,000.
The Soviet announcer begins reading the Russian answer. The key to it is in the third paragraph:
In order to eliminate as rapidly as possible the conflict which endangers the cause of peace… the Soviet government… has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.
Castro, who has not been consulted, declares that he has been betrayed, that he will ignore the settlement. But while he can delay the end of the crisis, he cannot stop it; though the missiles are on Cuban soil, they are in Russian hands, and there are no Cubans who know how to fire them anyhow. At 1:30 P.M. the Joint Chiefs signal Task Force 136: there will be no more boarding of ships, no show of force. The Ex Comm is jubilant, but the President speaks of how difficult it must have been for Khrushchev to back down; he warns them that there must be no claims of an American victory. He writes the Soviet premier a careful letter ending:
I think we should give priority to questions relating to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, on earth and outer space, and to the great effort for a nuclear test ban.
That evening the Kennedy brothers review the thirteen days of crisis. At the end the President says, “Maybe this is the night I should go to the theater.” Both of them laugh uproariously. Then Bob says, “If you go, I want to go with you.”
Portrait of an American
PETER CARL GOLDMARK
Born in Budapest on December 2, 1906, he was one of that generation of brilliant Hungarian scientists which included Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Eugene Paul Wigner. But while they dedicated their talents to the technology of death, he became a leader in the communications revolution. They gave America the Bomb. He gave it the long-playing record, color television, and the promise of a whole new world of sight and sound.
His was a creative family. One great-uncle, Karl Goldmark, was one of the nineteenth century’s most interesting composers of opera. Another great-uncle, Joseph Goldmark, discovered red phosphorus, essential to the manufacture of kitchen matches. Joseph defied the government of Austria-Hungary, fled to America, fought in the Civil War, and contributed to the defeat of Lee by inventing a new kind of percussion cap for the Union Army.
Peter was a precocious child. Showing the Joseph in him, he exasperated his parents by taking over the family bathroom for his experiments, and before the onset of adolescence he had assembled a huge motion-picture projector. Later in his youth he told his teachers that he had found a mistake in a paper by Britain’s most celebrated physicist, Ernest Rutherford. They were amused—until he reconstructed the experiment for them and proved himself right.
In a magazine he read an article by an eccentric Scotch stocking salesman, John Logie Baird, who devised a primitive television system in the early 1920s, convinced the Royal Society that it would work, and talked the BBC into transmitting experimental broadcasts. The article told how to assemble a receiver and advertised a kit. Peter sent for one. Years afterward he described the result: “The picture came through in postage-stamp size. You could hardly make it out, it flickered so. It was also in color—all red. But it was the most exciting thing in my life.”
It remained so. He took an engineering degree at the Berliner Technische Hochschule and a doctorate in physics at the University of Vienna, where he displayed the Karl Goldmark in him at a series of concerts in which he performed as a pianist and cellist. But Baird had captured his imagination; his dissertation, “A New Method for Determining the Velocity of Ions,” which he read before the Academy of Science in Vienna, laid much of the groundwork for television projection. When his faculty advisers urged him to continue as a physicist, he politely declined, packed his cello, and sailed for England.
Hired by Pye Radio, Ltd., in Cambridge, he built a mechanical TV transmitter. Although it worked, the Pye studios seemed indifferent to its possibilities, and after two years he left Cambridge with savings of $250 and boarded a boat for New York. There he applied for American citizenship and a job at RCA. To the subsequent chagrin of David Sarnoff, Sarnoff’s underlings at NBC turned the slight Hungarian scientist away. CBS then hired him.
The next thing Peter’s new superiors knew, he was glimpsed atop the Chrysler Building putting up a television antenna. Four relatively fallow years followed. Then, while visiting Canada in the spring of 1940, he happened to drop in at a theater showing the Technicolor Gone With the Wind. Stunned by the beauty of the color, he said later, he came away with “an inferiority feeling about television in black and white.” He developed color television in just three months.
His color system was built around a revolving disc with transparent color segments of green, blue, and red. The disc spun in front of the camera tube. When a picture representing, for example, the green in a scene was being sent out, the green transparency was in front of the camera; in the viewer’s set another spinning disc, synchronized with the one in the camera, turned the picture into the right color, and the colors followed each other so rapidly that the viewer’s eye mixed them together. In August 1940 Peter put on a demonstration for CBS executives. They saw an experimental set project, in succession, a lovely zinnia, black-eyed Susans, red sails in a sunset, a brunette with a red scarf, a blonde chasing a colorful beach ball into surf, and at the end—like a vaudeville show—an American flag waving in a spanking breeze.
Then war intervened. Peter led a team of engineers making devices to jam Nazi radar. In 1945 he turned again to color television. When the FCC held trials at the end of the decade, his pictures were beautiful, while RCA’s, to the humiliation of David Sarnoff, showed green monkeys eating blue bananas. The FCC adopted the CBS system. Sarnoff hired a hundred expensive technicians, gave them a budget of 130 million dollars, and told them to develop better color. Meanwhile Peter came up with an improvement of his own called the shadow-mask tube. The FCC approved of RCA color, but RCA needed the shadow-mask tube for proper color projection—and had to pay CBS royalties for it. Later the Soviet Union and NASA’s Apollo flights used Peter’s original system.
One postwar evening he and several friends were listening to a record of Horowitz playing Brahms. “Suddenly,” as he recalled afterward, “there was a click. The most horrible sound man ever invented, right in the middle of the music. Somebody rushed to change records. The mood was broken. I knew right there and then I had to stop that sort of thing.”
After three years he had the 33 1/3 rpm microgroove record as we know it, stamped from Vinylite to reduce surface noise. The old 78 rpm records had from 85 to 100 grooves to an inch; Peter increased this to from 224 to 300, which meant that 45 minutes of music could be played on the two sides of a 12-inch record—a whole concerto, or an entire symphony. Sarnoff announced that RCA had a 45-rpm record and ridiculed the notion that a slower speed was needed. But Columbia’s first LP album was a tremendous success, offering everything from Bach to Harry James at prices ranging from $2.85 for a 10-inch popular disc to $4.85 for one of its 12-inch Master-works, and RCA’s challenge failed.
By Peter’s fiftieth birthday CBS had assigned one executive to be his full-time factotum. (He was known as the “Vice President in Charge of Peter.”) Then Peter was designated president of CBS laboratories, and the network built a worksh
op for him on a grassy knoll overlooking a Stamford thoroughfare not far from his home. Frank Stanton said, “The smartest thing we ever did was to build Peter a lab in the country to play with.” From it CBS acquired patents on over a hundred of his inventions. One was the Rever-batron, which reproduces the vibrations of a large concert hall, adding depth to sound. Others included a record player for the blind and a miniature color television camera to transmit pictures for surgeons from inside the stomach, developed by Peter in one of his several roles—professor of medical electronics at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps his most extraordinary creation was EVR (Electronic Video Recording), a tiny device enabling the viewer to play programs on his home set without commercials—a seven-inch reel of tiny film covering a half-hour of color or an hour of black-and-white that would drop in place like a phonograph record and rewind automatically when finished.
In suburban Connecticut legends about him accumulated: stories of his musical evenings with Benny Goodman, a neighbor; his chess playing; his fantastic LP library; the speakers cunningly concealed about his house which could convert it into a church, with a choir singing in every corner. If a secretary came to work late and said her car was defective, Peter would repair it on the spot. Fastidious about his own Mercedes-Benz, he would clean up after the filling station attendants who serviced it. And he worked all hours, calling assistants at 3 A.M. or 5 A.M., saying, “Just thought of something, meet me at the lab,” and hanging up.
There were tales about his temper, too. Yet he was one of the few scientists of his time with a social conscience, finding work for jobless blacks, heading the Stamford antipoverty office, and putting in long hours crusading for the use of educational television in public schools. He gave Stamford’s Riverview Elementary School a complete television studio. Thanks in part to his efforts, by the time he retired in 1971 the teachers in nearly one-third of American schools were using film strips, projectors, or other visual teaching aids.
It was a measure of Peter’s genius that CBS was very nervous about his retirement. The network offered him $75,000 a year for ten years to do nothing. He refused. Instead he threw his vast energies into a scheme for establishing as many as forty coast-to-coast TV channels by uniting domestic satellites and cable television. In his vision of the future there were nationwide chains of movie theaters of the air, free TV access to the voters for campaigning politicians, home instruction for students, and national facsimile newspapers delivered through television sets.
Once in the late 1960s a radio interviewer asked him whether he thought mental telepathy would ever replace TV. Peter paused, adjusted his glasses, and said it was conceivable that undiscovered radiation from the brain might be used someday. He added: “But that’s a long way off.”
There was a protracted silence in the studio. With Peter you couldn’t be sure.
TWENTY-NINE
Don’t Let It Be Forgot
Now in the third year of the Kennedy Presidency a fundamental change loomed in the character of the civil rights movement. Beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and extending through Little Rock, the freedom rides, and Oxford, Mississippi, the struggle for racial equality had been in the form of a serial drama, with whites in the role of bullies and blacks as martyrs. The conscience of the nation’s great white middle class had been aroused, and its indignation had become a solvent eroding barriers of law and custom which had endured for generations. But that era was about to end. Angrier, fiercer, more headstrong blacks were fighting their way to the center of the stage. The established black leadership was discovering that young Negroes were approaching the end of their patience. The emergence of the eye for an eye trend foreshadowed a new, darker period in the struggle for integration, but first there were a few more episodes in the serial to be played out. The bully who made black martyrs best was the police commissioner of Birmingham, T. Eugene “Bull” Connor, who had first come to the nation’s attention during the freedom rides. Two years had passed; he was about to assume a star role.
Martin Luther King had called Birmingham “the most segregated city in the United States.” Connor liked to quote him on that; he wore his bigotry like a badge of pride. For twenty-three years the commissioner had used terror and brutality to cow Negro leaders, always with success. Not only were Birmingham’s schools completely segregated; so were its public toilets, drinking fountains, theaters, parks, playgrounds, restaurants, and even churches. Federal rulings prohibiting discrimination did not intimidate Bull Connor. To him they were just contrivances for disrupting law and order in Birmingham and, as such, opposition to be ruthlessly crushed. Until the spring of 1963 civil rights leaders tried to stay clear of him; he was running for mayor, and racial demonstrations would merely give him more white votes. In April the election was over. He had lost, which made him meaner, but they were ready for him.
King’s campaign opened April 2 with sit-ins and marches. Connor retaliated swiftly, arresting over four hundred Negroes on charges of parading without a permit, loitering, or trespassing. King then sent groups to worship in white churches, defying the police to seize them there. Connor refused to be drawn. He counted on Birmingham’s white Christians to draw the color line, and most of them did; four churches admitted the Negroes, seventeen turned them away. King called for a protest march on Good Friday, April 12. Connor obtained an injunction forbidding it. Burke Marshall urged the black leaders hold off until the inauguration of Albert Boutwell, the moderate mayor-elect. Little could be expected from Arthur Hanes, the outgoing mayor, who said of Robert Kennedy, “I hope that every drop of blood that’s spilled he tastes in his throat, and I hope he chokes on it,” and of King, “This nigger has got the blessing of the Attorney General and the White House.” But the black leadership had no choice. Their people were ready to march without them. The demonstrations were held in defiance of the injunction, and the inevitable arrests, including King’s, followed.
On May 2 about five hundred Negroes were locked up—high school students, most of them, carried to jail in school buses. Other students paraded in protest the next day. White spectators pelted them with brickbats and bottles. King held a mass meeting in the New Pilgrim Baptist Church to protest; a thousand blacks came, and Connor threw police lines around the church. There were no incidents then, but when twenty-five hundred Negroes surged into downtown Birmingham the following day in another demonstration, Connor met them with police dogs and fire hoses. The dogs were trained to rip clothing with their teeth, and the hoses, with 700 pounds of pressure, smashed the blacks against buildings or to the ground. On May 4 newspaper readers around the world were shocked by a brutal photograph showing a huge, snarling dog lunging at a frightened Negro woman. President Kennedy said the picture made him “sick,” and he said, “I can well understand why the Negroes of Birmingham are tired of being asked to be patient.” An ADA delegation asked him to intervene, but at this point there was little he could do under the Constitution. He did send Burke Marshall down to open the channels of communications. In quiet talks with Birmingham businessmen Marshall negotiated a fragile truce which lasted five days. On May 11 the home of a Negro leader and a desegregated hotel were bombed. The next day, Mother’s Day, enraged blacks again erupted into the streets, and this time they were too much for the policemen, the dogs and the hoses. After a night of riots and fires Connor asked the new governor, George C. Wallace, for reinforcements.
This was the first the rest of the nation heard of Wallace. He had been expecting something of this sort, and he was ready with a motley force—seven hundred deputy sheriffs, game wardens, liquor agents, and highway patrolmen. Shouting threats, they stomped around the city shoving blacks into doorways and snapping the safety catches of their guns menacingly. The blacks weren’t surprised. They distrusted Wallace, and with good reason; he had already told the press that he would use the power of his office to suppress King. Of Marshall’s truce he said that he would not be party to any “compromise on the issues of segregation.
” It was his avowed purpose to sabotage Marshall, and the only thing that stopped him was the decision of President Kennedy to fly three thousand troops to an air base near Birmingham. “This government,” the President said, “will do whatever must be done to preserve order, to protect the lives of its citizens, and to uphold the law of the land.” Any misuse of force by the governor’s officers now would bring in an overwhelming counterforce. Mayor Hanes denounced “bayonet brotherhood.” Wallace, furious, filed suit with the Supreme Court, charging that the President’s action was “unconstitutional and void.” The governor said, “This military dictatorship must be nipped in the bud.” The Justice Department quietly replied that as commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces the President could move troops to any base he wished.
Marshall reconciled the black and white leaders once more, and this time a lasting peace returned to the littered but integrated streets of Birmingham. The outcome was clearly another triumph for Martin Luther King. Its implications were discernible far beyond the city; again the conscience of the country’s white middle class had been stirred, and elsewhere protesting Negroes were marching in Selma, Alabama; Albany, Georgia; Cambridge, Maryland; Raleigh and Greensboro, North Carolina; Nashville and Clinton, Tennessee; Shreveport, Louisiana; Jackson and Philadelphia, Mississippi; and, in the north, in Chicago. “The fires of frustration and discord,” the President said, “are burning in every city… where legal remedies are not at hand.” In a phrase which would be remembered, Ken O’Donnell predicted “a long, hot summer.” Before autumn ended fourteen thousand demonstrators would be in southern jails.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 146
