The New Journalism that The New Yorker disavowed was loud, a yelp and a howl, a bellow and a grunt. It didn’t stare so much as it leered. You can see and hear something very different in the best and quietest moments of these American scenes. “Our last glimpse of President Kennedy was in Miami,” Lillian Ross wrote, the week after the assassination. Hundreds of people went out to the Miami airport, hoping to meet the President. That number, Ross wrote, included, “a pretty young Negro woman, who was herding a small group of Negro children,” her fourth-grade class. A girl named Barbara Laidler wore a green ribbon in her hair.
We noticed that Mrs. Peterson and her fourth-graders were crowded against the wire fence, their hands outstretched, and we noticed that the President kept trying to pull away from the Secret Service men and head in their direction. A white man was holding Barbara up high to get a better look (her green hair ribbon was now untied and fluttering), so that she could give a responsible report to the rest of her class and share with them everything she saw that day.
The next day, Lillian Ross called Mrs. Peterson on the telephone, and Mrs. Peterson read to Ross the papers her students had been assigned to write. Little Barbara Laidler reported: “The President has reddish hair and had on a suit.” It was the last time she ever saw him.
Richard H. Rovere
NOVEMBER 3, 1962 (THE CUBA CRISIS)
OCTOBER 28
THE WHITE HOUSE has not, at this writing, received the latest Khrushchev note, but the world has, and to everyone here it appears that all of the essential requirements—as distinct from the formal demands—of American policy are about to be satisfied. If the Soviet technicians are in fact dismantling the medium- and intermediate-range missile installations and withdrawing their components, on-site inspection and verification can be arranged at a later date, and in all probability no harm would come of it if there never were any inspection. The United States had little difficulty in detecting the construction of the bases; it can surely verify their destruction—and, thanks to the conveniently slim and elongated contours of the Pearl of the Antilles, without the need for overflights. Most of the surveillance we have thus far conducted has required no violation of Cuban air space. Nuclear warheads are, of course, another matter, but nuclear warheads in a Cuba with no effective launching systems endanger only Cuba. The latest news released by the Pentagon suggests that, like the President, the Soviet technicians in Cuba have not as yet got Khrushchev’s message. They are still building, and there are dark hints that Moscow may be dissembling. This is hard to credit; enough has already happened in this extraordinary week to suggest that Khrushchev remains a true Leninist to the extent that it offends him very little to make strategic withdrawals when survival seems to require them, and that bourgeois notions of pride never put him off. “If you are not able to adapt yourself,” Lenin told his comrades after the humiliation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, “if you are not ready to crawl in the mud on your belly, you are not a revolutionist but a chatter-box.” Lenin, of course, recommended retreat only when it was necessary to preserve the opportunity for bringing up “fresh forces [and] renewing the attack.” Khrushchev’s crawl may be a prelude to a renewed attack, but it hardly seems likely to come in Cuba—or, indeed, in the Western Hemisphere.
Throughout the week, the principal anxiety in American diplomatic and military circles here was not that the Cuban crisis, whether it ended in an American invasion or a Soviet withdrawal, would be a prelude to an attack elsewhere but that it would be a dangerous distraction from what was regarded as the central crisis—Berlin. During the late summer and the early autumn, the administration kept insisting that the Soviets would deliver an ultimatum on Berlin this year, and that a final showdown could not be avoided. It interpreted the first Soviet maneuvers in Cuba as an effort to draw American attention away from Berlin, and possibly to provoke the United States into an invasion. The tendency in most Allied capitals and among a good many observers here was to feel that the Berlin crisis the administration was talking about was of local rather than of Soviet manufacture. On the surface, it was lent an air of reality only by Khrushchev’s statement in September that he would not “embarrass” the President by bringing the matter up before the Congressional elections. The British took this to be nothing more than a convenient procrastination. The French held, as usual, that Khrushchev was a windbag who would never dare make a move that would incur the displeasure of General de Gaulle. The West Germans said that they saw no particular evidence of Soviet impatience. Russian diplomats and correspondents here went about town asking Americans why they were stirring up trouble with all their talk of the imminence of a crisis. Was it to help the Democrats in the November elections? Was it because the American government feared that the American people were growing bored with Berlin? It was only when it became clear that Cuba was being converted into a base for Soviet weapons of a flagrantly and devastatingly offensive character that the administration’s sense of urgency about Berlin was taken with much seriousness; the haste in October to outflank our thermonuclear deterrent to the south seemed to explain Khrushchev’s curious reference to the elections in November. It appeared to be a classic instance of second-front strategy, and one that, if it had worked, might have rendered completely ineffective what we call our “second-strike capability”—that reserve of nuclear striking power which, according to the theory of deterrence, would restrain any sane commander from making nuclear war, because his own society would be destroyed even if he had, moments earlier, destroyed the enemy. By the middle of last week, there seemed nothing in the least preposterous about saying that the successful emplacement in Cuba of a large number of medium- and intermediate-range missiles would result in the unilateral disarmament of the United States at the hands of the Soviet Union. No other policy objective could be brought forward to account for the nature of the Soviet presence in Cuba. Had the Soviet objective been attained, it seemed clear, and had a Berlin ultimatum been issued, the choice of the West would have been between abandonment of Berlin and destruction.
There has not yet been time for anyone to address himself to the question of whether Khrushchev’s hasty withdrawal requires some new reading of his original motives. The text of the President’s message of last night has not yet been released. It may have contained an ultimatum that left Khrushchev no time for procrastination or maneuver. The speed with which he met the American terms, though, suggests either that he had miscalculated on an incredible scale by supposing it was possible to set up Cuban bases without American detection, or that he had never been up to anything more than a test of the President’s will and courage. If he was indeed conducting a probe, that, too, involved a huge miscalculation, for there could surely have been ways of learning what he wanted to know without unifying, as he did, the Organization of American States, without accepting for the first time the authority of the United Nations, without demonstrating to the satellites and to the neutrals he has sought to befriend how quickly he will run out on an ally, and without destroying the political value of his rocket-rattling. (Between August, 1957, the month in which the Soviets announced their first successful firing of “a super-long-distance intercontinental multi-stage ballistic missile,” and the end of 1961, there were twenty-three distinct occasions upon which Khrushchev employed the threat of his missile power as an instrument of his aggressive diplomacy. State Department disarmament experts, who keep records of this sort, did not this past week have complete figures for the first ten months of 1962, but they said that if Khrushchev’s known threats—made mainly to representatives of NATO countries, who were told that their continued association with the United States invited their destruction by Soviet weapons—were combined with those made since 1957 by his direct subordinates and by official publications of his government, the figure would be well over a hundred.) His losses seem to be staggering in their dimensions, and it is almost impossible to imagine how they might be offset by any seen or unseen gains. He has won high praise from Bertrand
Russell, and he has been complimented by the President for a “statesmanlike” act. He has the world’s gratitude for playing a large role in preserving the peace that he had threatened in the first place. These things cannot be begrudged him, but they butter no parsnips for a Communist politician. He has perhaps stored up a certain amount of credit with Western leaders, who may feel that they ought to follow the amiable customs of their craft and do Khrushchev some kind of favor that will make him look better with the people back home. If what he would like is Berlin, however, he will not get it, nor is he likely at any early date to persuade NATO to give up any considerable part of its installations in Turkey. He can probably get a summit meeting if he wants one, and he can expect not to be pressed too hard by the West for further concessions on his part.
· · ·
The week has provided a display of the ruthlessness of Soviet diplomacy and of what appears to be its gross miscalculation. It has also provided a display of its extraordinary flexibility and virtuosity. Since American diplomacy has succeeded, its critics will be few and their strictures mild. No one who watched developments here failed to be impressed by the forethought, precision, subtlety, and steady nerves of the President and those around him in preparing our bold and ultimately successful initiative. The week had hardly begun, though, when it became apparent that if much was required of us in the way of flexibility, we would not have much to give. Khrushchev was able to play for time in ways that would have been available to President Kennedy only if he had elected to run risks of internal dissension that might in the end have caused him to lose his control over events. Had the Soviet and American roles been reversed in the middle of the week, it is doubtful whether—no matter what prudential or tactical considerations recommended it—the President could have made a decision comparable to Khrushchev’s decision not to run the Caribbean blockade. The Soviet leaders are possessed by an ideology that is unyielding on all questions other than those of tactics and strategy, where, as Lenin’s words about crawling through the mud so clearly reveal, it is infinitely pragmatic. The American leaders are unideological and essentially pragmatic on nearly all questions other than those of tactics and strategy, where they tend to be hobbled by the demonologies and tribal memories of our society, as well as by its democratic morality. If the President had made miscalculations as basic as those made by Khrushchev, and if he had subsequently decided to pull back and save the peace of the world, he would, even if he escaped impeachment, have lost the better part of his Presidential authority. Khrushchev’s words and his actions can be at complete—and, from the world’s point of view, useful—variance; he can conceal the contradictions from his own people if he chooses to, or he can expect them to be acceptable to Leninist morality if his case for retreat is a strong one. Dealing with a free, informed, articulate, and highly concerned constituency, Mr. Kennedy cannot revert to the doctrine that consistency may be—on occasion, at least—a mean and dangerous virtue.
The next period is likely to show the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the American practice. It may very well be that a time has arrived for broad and advantageous settlements. The world has been frightened as it had never been frightened before, and the Soviet leaders may have been the most frightened men of all. A chance may exist, as the President has said, for a genuine détente and for important steps toward general disarmament. The President found it easy to get the country behind him when he seemed close to an assault on Cuba; he will find it far less easy to get it behind him if he chooses now to engage in negotiations with the Soviet Union. The mere mention, a few days back, of a summit meeting brought from Harry Truman the recollection that he had attended two of them and had learned that they weren’t worth a damn, and from the less experienced Everett Dirksen, the Minority Leader of the Senate, the opinion that every one he had ever heard of was a swindle. Khrushchev is no longer asking us to dismantle our Turkish base, but Walter Lippmann had suggested a few days before Khrushchev brought it up that this might be a way out of the crisis. Had Mr. Lippmann been right in thinking it a fair deal (he characterized the proposal as an exchange of a defenseless base in Cuba for a nearly obsolete one in Turkey), it would nevertheless have been one that the President could not possibly have been party to in the atmosphere that then prevailed. The atmosphere that seems likely to prevail now will be filled with pressures not to follow victory with more negotiations but to follow the present negotiation with more victories. These would be hard to produce.
· · ·
The President said in his address to the nation last Monday evening that his first knowledge of the new and dangerous developments in Cuba had been brought to him on Tuesday, October 16th, at nine in the morning. From then until last Sunday, he managed to carry on without betraying any sense of an impending ordeal. (The White House correspondents who accompanied him on the campaign trip that ended in Chicago on the morning after it began were not satisfied with Pierre Salinger’s story that the President had a head cold and one degree of fever. What they suspected was that he might have two or three degrees of fever.) On one occasion, though, he expressed an uncharacteristic sentiment in a characteristic way. In the afternoon of the day he received the first intelligence reports, he met with a group of newspaper and broadcasting people who were in Washington for some conferences organized by the State Department. At the conclusion of a short and rather routine talk on foreign policy, he said there came to his mind a poem by a Spaniard named Ortega that had been translated by Robert Graves. The text he recited was:
Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous Plaza full;
But only one is there who knows
And he’s the man who fights the bull.
Ortega is Domingo Ortega, a bullfighter. The poem appeared in the British monthly Encounter in December, 1961. Robert Graves quoted it as reflecting his feelings when he won the Oxford Chair of Poetry, a position he said might be called “a Siege Perilous.”
Daniel Lang
OCTOBER 10, 1964 (VISITING A MISSILE SILO)
THE ENTRANCE TO an ICBM silo—or, to give its official designation, launch-control center—is called an “entrapment area,” and it is accurately named, as I know from having stood inside one on a day I visited an underground Atlas. The entrapment area was a hollow cubicle of darkness, ten feet long, five feet wide, and eight feet high. The steel door through which I had entered it, with a military escort, had closed behind me. Before me was another steel door leading to the interior. In a corner of the ceiling was a closed-circuit television camera, through which the invisible commanding officer of the missile team within the silo peered at me and my escort as he challenged us, in a sepulchral voice. My companion, responding earnestly, identified us and stated our business; his name was Captain Richard W. Wetzel, and he was ordinarily a silo commander himself. Neither Wetzel’s voice nor presence, I found, did much to mitigate my sense of entrapment, and I tried to remember the landscape I had just blotted out for myself. I was a mile from the Canadian border, in a corner of upstate New York above Plattsburgh that was in the nuclear domain of Colonel Stewart, and the countryside there was sunny and verdant with maples and birches. Herds of Jerseys were grazing in a nearby pasture, the property of a dairy farmer who had chosen to sell the Air Force an acre of his land for this emplacement. Now, in the entrapment area, I recalled the sign at the gate leading into the militarized acre: “It is unlawful to enter this area without authority of the Base Commander….Area is patrolled by armed guards and vicious sentry dogs.”
“Fuel!” Wetzel told the television camera, giving the day’s password.
The door before us was pulled open, but there were two more steel doors to go—mammoth ones, weighing a half ton each. They were blastproof, and had been designed to protect the ICBM from earthquakes and near misses. Each door was opened only long enough to admit us, and then secured again. When we were past both of them, I found myself looking at a lounge and galley, whose stores, I was told, included a
ten days’ supply of emergency rations. (The silo, which had taken two years to build and cost ten million dollars, had its own water and power supply.) I followed Wetzel down a short flight of stairs to the silo’s headquarters room—an area, about thirty by forty feet, that put me in mind of a hospital operating theatre, possibly because fluorescent lamps glared brilliantly against its pastel walls. The room was crammed with instrumentation, the most prominent piece of equipment being a large console covered with twinkling green, red, and amber lights. Through windows I could see two small rooms, one containing double-decker beds and the other a library of technical manuals stamped “secret.” The silo’s commanding officer was in the headquarters room as I entered. He was sitting in an easy chair watching television, a revolver strapped at his side. The image on the screen before him was that of his own ICBM warhead, and he was viewing it in order to make sure that it wasn’t afire or being tampered with. “Channel One,” he said, taking a last look at the picture before he rose to greet Wetzel and me. He introduced himself as Major Robert Carr. The officers stood side by side for a moment, two nice-looking, cheerful men in their thirties, Carr blond and Wetzel brown-haired. The working uniforms worn by Carr and his men, several of whom were on duty in the headquarters room, added to the hospital atmosphere. They were impeccable white coveralls, designed to show up any stains made by hazardous chemicals. “An ICBM silo is a spotless place,” Carr remarked to me.
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