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On this day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the American people and announced that the Soviet Union had, for some time, been constructing missile installations in Cuba. The United States, Kennedy said, would respond by imposing a blockade on the island nation. Reading this Times article earlier today, I found myself struck by two not very profound thoughts.
First, good journalism — the above piece was written by the incomparable Anthony Lewis — is a powerful thing. The article is filled with sharp, declarative sentences, conjuring a mood of the deepest anxiety. See, for example, these two paragraphs:
In a speech of extraordinary gravity, he [Kennedy] told the American people that the Soviet Union, contrary to promises, was building offensive missiles and bomber bases in Cuba. He said the bases could handle missiles carrying nuclear warheads up to 2,000 miles.
Thus a critical moment in the cold war was at hand tonight. The President had decided on a direct confrontation with–and challenge to–the power of the Soviet Union.
Second, I began wondering if October 22, 1962 was the most terrifying day in American history. Lewis relayed that Kennedy, in his radio address, had said: “the launching of a nuclear missile from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union against the United States.” “It would be met,” the President had warned, “by retaliation against the Soviet Union.” Kennedy had then “called on Premier Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles from Cuba and so ‘move the world back from the abyss of destruction.'”
The world remained perched at the brink of that abyss for another week (for additional source material go here, here, and here). Which, I suppose, prompts a third not very profound thought. The nation is now mired in two failed wars, faces an economic crisis that may rival the Great Depression, and is about to stage an election that feels like it could be make or break. Still, things could be worse.
26 comments
October 22, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Vance
War of 1812 perhaps?
This day, though, was the high point of the same fear I grew up with (being a bit older than the rest of you lot), so it’s vivid to me in the way a mere burning of Washington is not.
October 22, 2008 at 10:22 pm
ari
I figure the nation was pretty much easy-come, easy-go in 1814. By 1962, though, people were counting on social security and stuff. Also, I ducked and covered as a boy, Vance; I may be older than you think.
October 22, 2008 at 11:15 pm
grackle
Probably being a bit older than the lot of you, (although I am not certain about KB) I think of you all as extremely nice young people, but even so I admit that the gravity of that week did not make much impression on me at the time, in as much as I was in the throes of my own invincible-youth-period and the world did not much impress me with the many dangers I have since come to recognize.
October 22, 2008 at 11:26 pm
ari
That’s a pretty long-winded way of asking me to get off your lawn, grackle.
October 22, 2008 at 11:27 pm
urbino
I’m really surprised he’s got that much wind.
October 23, 2008 at 1:38 am
andrew
War of 1812 perhaps?
<time-space pedantry>Because of the speed of communications at the time, I doubt news of the burning of DC reached the whole country on the same day.</time-space pedantry>
October 23, 2008 at 3:59 am
Jason B
Because of the speed of communications at the time, I doubt news of the burning of DC reached the whole country on the same day.
I can just see it now . . . in a classroom in Pennsylvania.
Student: My uncle’s visiting from Virginia, and he says that last month the Canadians burned down Washington D.C.
Schoolmarm: Don’t panic, children. Just calmly get under your desks. This will be over soon and then we can get back to doing something with slates.
October 23, 2008 at 6:28 am
Ahistoricality
The nation is now mired in two failed wars, faces an economic crisis that may rival the Great Depression, and is about to stage an election that feels like it could be make or break. Still, things could be worse.
I think it would be worth distinguishing between “terrifying” — which the Cuban missile crisis certainly was, to a nearly unprecedented and unmatched degree — and “worrying”, which the current situation, like much of the Cold War, really fits better.
October 23, 2008 at 6:51 am
PorJ
“terror” is a very subjective emotion; there might have been others, (like Curtis LeMay – ?) excited by the prospect of finally going to war with the Russians. Such bellicosity led to Goldwater and the Daisy Ad and the idea that there are those Americans who did not seriously think about the concept of nuclear annihilation. Kennedy’s posturing – or raising the stakes, or whatever – might also be conceived of in terms of the classic Monroe Doctrine – some Americans were probably proud of the stance (rather than terrified) because they saw us taking a proactive rather than reactive stance (and it also helped that it was Cuba, with the Bay of Pigs and all. I wonder if the Cubans in Miami were terrified or gratified – I have no idea, just speculating)?
It reminds of me a conversation I had with a colleague the other day about the opinion of the USA in Europe. He argues GW Bush has pushed it to new lows in his lifetime; I argue that he doesn’t remember 1,000,000 Germans marching against Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s plan to put missiles on the Continent. Ronald Reagan was *despised* across Europe – the satirical cartoons, etc. (in England, “Spitting Image” became a hit on TV just making fun of him every week, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood made millions on an anti-Reagan screed “Two Tribes,” etc. I don’t see anywhere near that level of outright hatred of an American president today – Bush is cursed and reviled, but I don’t see the marches and popular culture attacks on him).
All this is to say: historical memory is tricky, isn’t it Ari? And its even trickier when you try to evaluate emotion v. reason in historical context.
October 23, 2008 at 8:26 am
Josh Carrollhach
Castro told Robert McNamara years later that not only did he have nuclear missiles aimed at the US but that he would have unquestionably launched them if and invasion of Cuba were imminent. Until that moment, McNamara wasn’t sure if Castro had been bluffing all along. Castro figured that if Cuba (meaning his control of Cuba) was gone then the rest of the world might as well come along for the ride.
I chill to think what Nixon would have done, especially considering his personal animosity toward Khrushchev.
October 23, 2008 at 8:28 am
eric
PorJ, I think the difference between the 1980s and now is pretty substantial. Suppose that then, Brits hated Reagan: but that didn’t translate so much into a hatred of the American people. I’m not persuaded they hate Americans now so much as pity us for our lousy educations.
More, the British then and now find themselves in similar situations—hatred of Reagan was hatred of Thatcher pushed outward, but strangely, their fellow Britons kept electing Thatcher; same for Blair more recently. It’s anger at their fellow countrymen as much as it is anger at us.
Finally, this is true more broadly: the British hate us (and hate may to be the right word, but anyway) because they know they are awfully close to being us, much closer than their fellow Europeans, with their language and clothes and television and diet and financial regulations (whee!) rather like ours in so many ways.
October 23, 2008 at 10:43 am
PorJ
Eric, I think you are onto something there about the psychodynamics between USA and UK. This brilliant 1986 The The song (“Heartland”) drips with contempt for both the USA and GB (“This country that’s sick, sad and confused”) and clearly represents a certain stream of thought in the UK then – and now.
October 23, 2008 at 10:54 am
PorJ
Until that moment, McNamara wasn’t sure if Castro had been bluffing all along.
What makes you – or McNamara- so sure Castro wasn’t bluffing in that moment? He didn’t control the missiles, right? There were Russian crews handling everything – including, I’m sure, any firing mechanism. This makes little sense to me.
October 23, 2008 at 11:25 am
JPool
From the cultural history point of view, the distinctive thing about the Cuban Missile Crisis was the ambient sense of national terror. I grew in the 1980s keenly aware that reputable scholars had given me about even odds of making it to adulthood without a nuclear holocaust, but most of my contemporaries not so much. Objectively the growth of semi-automated launch systems and the massive proliferation of warheads almost certainly made the 1980s a more dangerous time, but I don’t think most people experienced it that way.
October 23, 2008 at 12:04 pm
kid bitzer
any argument that makes this the scariest day in american history–e.g. that it was the nearest that we approached to a nuclear exchange with the soviet union, which via m.a.d. doctrine would have automatically escalated to full launches of every megaton that both sides had–surely makes it the scariest day in the history of the world.
we woulda all been dead, all around the world. maybe some people in australia would have survived, maybe not. though as jpool says, the total megatonnage available in the ’80s woulda made us several times over dead, deader than dead.
so, yeah: scary.
October 23, 2008 at 12:05 pm
kid bitzer
oh, and grackle:
get off my lawn.
October 23, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Colin
The February 1979 invasion of Vietnam by China was a pretty bad moment, in part because it seemed like a plausible step toward a China-USSR nuclear war. Worried me at the time. And while I couldn’t quite take seriously the alarm of E.P. Thompson (“Exterminism”) and others in the early 1980s about a slide toward annihilation, a lot of folks did.
October 23, 2008 at 12:37 pm
blueollie
About Castro’s nukes: my understanding that the Soviet tactical nuclear weapons were operational but under local Soviet control. The Soviet military commander would have used them against the US invasion force.
General LeMay said that our pilots would have taken these out; I am not so sure.
Source: the book “One Hell of a Gamble”; I don’t remember the author:
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali
(thanks google!)
October 23, 2008 at 12:41 pm
student
re Castro– he didn’t control any nuclear missiles, they were completely under the control of the Soviet military, which then was a highly disciplined force.
What Castro told McNamara was that if (repeat if) he had controlled the missiles he would have used them under the circumstances described (U.S. invasion). The crisis was bad enough, but it’s better to keep the story straight.
October 23, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Student
Another scary feature of the crisis was that U.S. intelligence didn’t even know the full extent of the Soviet nuclear presence in Cuba. While the CIA etc. knew the locations of the missiles, the tactical nuclear weapons were elusive. So if there had been a U.S. invasion, a horrible situation could have developed very quickly. There’s a fascinating article about this by David Coleman published in “Journal of Cold War Studies” a year or so ago.
October 23, 2008 at 6:24 pm
grackle
That’s a pretty long-winded way of asking me to get off your lawn, grackle.
But, but… its only envy of your youth and natural authority. You’re welcome on my lawn and could I borrow your edge trimmer?
get off my lawn. Obeisance is my middle name, sir.
The bomb shelter fad preceded the Cuban missle stand-down by a number of years, so the atmosphere of fear had been palpable for a while. On the other hand, Wall St. didn’t tank (did it?)so whatever fear there was wasn’t a generalized panic. I’ve long thought the 60’s counter culture milieu was a response to the sequence of children being raised by WWII GI returnees who often brought a military sense of hierarchy into their families plus the long cold war and then the hot Southeast Asian war, i.e. enough was enough, there should be a better way, even though the I Ching hexagram for the period might well have been Youthful Folly.
October 23, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Western Dave
PorJ,
At least according to my mother, you could feel both terror and proud. My mother was a very unemotional person but her one and only panic attack in her life took place during the crisis when she became absolutely convinced the bombs were going to drop while she was on the LIE and she wasn’t going to make it home to her three year old so they could die together. But she also remembers this as the beginning of shifting towards becoming a McGovern democrat after voting for Nixon in 1960.
October 23, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Vance
grackle, here are Dow Jones charts for the ’40s-’50s and the ’60s-’70s. There’s a dip in ’58, but the trench in 1962 is worse (and 1974 is worse still).
October 23, 2008 at 10:19 pm
grackle
Thank you, Vance. It apparently fell 7.81% in May and 4.96% in September, rising 1.86% in October and 10.09% in November – doesn’t seem to be directly related.
November 5, 2008 at 7:23 pm
marc
I don’t know why but that’s not scary oh yeah because I did not read the whole thing so.thank you Vance what thank you for what oops
AND IF YOU READ THIS IT WILL CHANGE
YOU MIND THAT IT IS NOT SCARY!!!!!!!!!
November 5, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Vance
Uh, you’re welcome?