With the world now closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, The Herald looks back at how that international crisis was covered 55 years ago.
CUBA remained in the news but as yet the world was unaware of the discovery of offensive Soviet nuclear weapons on the island that were capable of reaching the American mainland.
The US press had been intrigued by rumours of a coup or crisis in Cuba. The previous week, a Cuban exile group, Alpha 66, had staged a raid on the Cuban coast and killed a number of Russians.
And a reported sinking of a Cuban patrol boat by exiles in the Bahamas had coincided with news of a Soviet protest to the US Embassy in Moscow over the impounding of a cargo of Cuban sugar in Puerto Rico.
The events of October 17 were reported thus by the Glasgow Herald under the headline ‘US Criticism of Cuba: Case Put Before UN’:
The United States alleged today that Russian troops and military equipment in Cuba had been requested by the Cuban government to protect itself from the Cuban people.
The head of the US delegation to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, made this charge in a document circulated to all UN. members, replying formally to a speech by President Osvaldo Dorticos Torrado of Cuba in the General Assembly on October 8.
Mr Stevenson did not reply in the assembly because, he said, a reply to a Head of State would be a violation of UN traditions.
“How many times in history has the fear of the people’s wrath driven tyrants to sell their nation to more powerful tyrants” Mr Stevenson asked. “Do the Cuban leaders dare face their people without these alien protectors?”
President Kennedy had been infuriated by an attack on his foreign policy by his predecessor in the White House, General Eisenhower, who had spoken of JFK’s “dreary foreign record of the past 21 months, a record too sad to talk about.”
Cuba was also proving an attractive issue for Republicans gearing up for November’s midterm elections. The Republican Party, The Herald reported, has officially identified Cuba as the leading issue in the campaign for the Congressional elections. It now seems clear that foreign policy will become increasingly a matter for partisan controversy in the next three weeks in spite of Mr Kennedy’s attempts to limit the range of this debate.
The President has carefully refrained from replying in kind to predecessor General Eisenhower’s root-and-branch condemnation of the conduct of foreign policy by the Kennedy administration.
Mr Kennedy brushed aside Mr Eisenhower’s criticisms with the quiet rejoinder that former presidents were always eager to defend their record of leadership with some vehemence, and appropriate discounts must therefore be made for violence of language against political opponents
Thus far, however, Mr Kennedy’s magnanimity had been matched by no corresponding restraint on the part of the Republicans, who believed they could win votes from the Cuban issue.
They increased the campaign of criticism which they had been directing for some days against the administration.
Kennedy and his senior advisors were understandably pre-occupied by the discovery of Soviet missiles. On October 17 American military units began moving en masse to the south eastern US; and intelligence photos gathered from another flight showed the presence of additional missile sites on Cuba and between 16 and 32 missiles.
President Kennedy himself attended a service at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington in order to observe the National Day of Prayer.
Afterwards, he had lunch with Crown Prince Hasan of Libya, and then made a political visit to Connecticut to support Democratic congressional candidates.
October 17 was also notable for more than 40 US warships heading for the Puerto Rican island of Vieques to stage a practice invasion of Cuba.
Michael Dobbs’s bestselling book on the missile crisis, One Minute to Midnight, says the five US Joint Chiefs, sceptical of the ongoing and top-secret Operation Mongoose, and seeing “no prospect of early success” in stirring up an anti-Castro uprising on Cuba, had been urging an invasion of the island for months.
Months earlier, they had warned Mr Kennedy that the US could not tolerate the permanent existence of a communist government in the Western hemisphere and that if Castro remained in power, other Latin American countries might fall under Communist domination.
Dobbs says: “Pentagon planners had dubbed the manoeuvres Operation ORTSAC, Castro spelled backward. Once the task force got to Vieques, the Marines would storm ashore, depose an imaginary dictator, and secure the island for democracy.
“If all went well, the entire operation would last no more than two weeks.”
But this was hurricane season in that part of the world. Hurricane Ella was making its presence felt, compelling the task force not only to switch course in order to avoid its worst effects but also to delay plans for an amphibious landing by 4,000 Marines.
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