Showdown over Cuba

Letter No 741, October 28 1962

Today was one of those New York days that are almost as crystalline in January as they are in June or October. Like many millions of other people, I put the clock back last evening to justify staying up later than usual. A couple of friends came in, the man a member of the United Nations secretariat, and between bouts of personal talk we tuned in the bulletins every half-hour in the hope (which seemed to be draining away) that the United States would not feel it essential to use force to destroy the Russian missile bases in Cuba. More photographs were coming in to the Pentagon and being rushed to the White House, and they showed that way down below, Russian technicians and their Cuban help had been working overtime on Friday and Saturday to finish the bases and mount the missiles and confront the United States with a dreadful accomplished fact, which the president in the long, long week behind us had laboured to thwart.

Then we heard that Mr Adlai Stevenson, US Ambassador to the United Nations, had told the delegates of 13 nations (from Nato and Latin America mostly) that unless work on the missile bases was voluntarily stopped, the United States would take military action to eliminate them in exactly 48 hours.

I ought to point out that Mr Stevenson was the man who, in April of last year, went before the Security Council of the United Nations and defended with passionate sincerity the good faith of the United States; who honestly ridiculed the Soviet charge that the invasion of Cuba (which was then in its earliest stages) had been planned and assisted by the United States.

Mr Stevenson had no public way open to him to recover his self-respect. For he had made his honest defence of American motives before he was informed that the abortive invasion was in fact an American show. Mr Valerian Zorin, the Soviet chief delegate, brought this up, with relish, on Thursday evening, when once again Mr Stevenson brought easels and photographic blow-ups into the Security Council to force the answer to the question Mr Stevenson had hammered at Mr Zorin, and which Mr Zorin airily waved away. That question, in Mr Stevenson's words, was: "Let me ask you one simple question. Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no?" Mr Stevenson is a man of great dignity and patience, but Mr Zorin's face began to crack, somewhere between a smirk and a sigh, and in that split-second Mr Stevenson leaned forward and rasped out, "Don't wait for the interpretation. Yes or no?" Mr Zorin replied that he was not in an American courtroom and had no wish to answer a prosecutor's question. "You'll get your answer," he said, without deigning to look at the now crouching figure of Stevenson, "don't worry".

It was at that moment that Mr Stevenson leaned even further forward and said a sentence that will surely, if only from its repetition in film clips, pass into the lexicon of famous American phrases like "Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes" and "You may fire when ready, Mr Gridley." "I am prepared," Mr Stevenson rasped out, "to wait for an answer till hell freezes over, if that's your decision. And I'm also prepared to present the evidence in this room." Which he promptly did.

Mr Zorin, at the time, was simply obedient to his instructions. "Falsity," he shouted, "is what the United States has in its hands, false evidence, forgeries." Between then and now, Mr Khrushchev himself has given the lie to Mr Zorin's lie; only this morning the Soviet leader said to the president: "The weapons you describe as offensive are grim weapons. You and I both know that they are."

When the history of this, the longest week, comes to be written, I think that the decision to entrust an ambassador (and this ambassador) with the final warning will be seen to be a masterstroke of diplomacy and goodwill. Below the surface of even the most world-shaking events, the actors remember old grudges. The role Mr Stevenson was asked to play (or by default was allowed to play) in the Bay of Pigs disaster was humiliating to him and damaging to the honesty of the Kennedy administration in its first showdown with communism in this hemisphere. But in the second, the much more momentous showdown, since it was not between a giant and the other giant's puppet but between the titans themselves, it was crucial that nobody should infer a clash of wills in the Kennedy cabinet.

When we went to bed last night, we had this small and honourable satisfaction to set against the immensity of the risk, the trembling of the fingers on the nuclear buttons. When we woke up this morning the glad tidings came pealing in, breaking into Mozart and Gilbert & Sullivan and solemn sermons and rollicking hymns up in Harlem: the news that Mr Khrushchev had accepted unconditionally every point of Mr Kennedy's demand for the dismantling of the Cuban missile bases under UN supervision.

An hour ago, a neighbour of mine, who is a hi-fi buff and mighty proud of an amplifier that practically fills the building, telephoned me and asked me to listen to the raging sound of his gramophone. He was playing, Oh, What a Beautiful Morning! It was corny, but it was spontaneous and good, and I looked out over the riffling waves of the reservoir in Central Park; a bird rose from the water and was airborne and soared off to the ocean. I should like to say it was a dove. It was, however, a seagull whose clean swinging flight I shall remember till the day I die.