WITH President Trump and Kim Jong-un’s fierce rhetoric and brinkmanship stirring memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the world came close to nuclear war, The Herald is looking back at how that international crisis was covered 55 years ago.
AT 5pm Washington time on October 18, President Kennedy welcomed the Soviet’s Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, to a pre-arranged meeting at the White House.
Berlin and Cuba were both raised during the two-hour encounter in the Oval Office, but one key issue was not discussed at all.
Gromyko had promised to be frank but he did not address the presence of Soviet missiles on Cuba.
He was unaware that Mr Kennedy already knew of their existence but had also chosen not to discuss them.
Mr Gromyko, reading from a long statement, said that, for quite some time, there had been an unabated anti-Cuban campaign in the US, apparently backed by the Kennedy administration.
Now the US wished to institute a blockade against trade with Cuba. There had also been some talk of organised piracy under the aegis of the US.
All of this, he warned, could only lead to great misfortunes for mankind.
Mr Gromyko asserted the Soviet position on Cuba. The Soviet Government stood for peaceful co-existence and opposed interference by one state in the internal affairs of another. What did the US want to do with Cuba, he asked. And what could Cuba do to the US?
Compare the two countries’ human and material resources and you would see that the US was a giant and Cuba a mere baby, Mr Gromyko said.
Mr Kennedy, he added, was surely familiar with a speech made by the Cuban president at the UN general assembly, at which he had said Cubans only wanted to make their home and country secure.
Soviet assistance to Cuba was intended to add to the island’s defensive capabilities, to help develop its agriculture, Mr Gromyko insisted.
Mr Kennedy knew Mr Gromyko was lying about the purely defensive capabilities, but he kept his counsel.
The US, he said, had tried to push the Cuba issue aside but that the Soviets had made a serious mistake on July by starting to supply arms to Cuba without informing him.
The US itself had no intention of invading Cuba – the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961 had been a mistake – but the Soviets’ intervention had complicated matters and created grave danger.
Thus far, the wider world was still unaware of what was really happening on Cuba. A number of American newspapers, however, were already reporting a substantial US military build-up in the south-eastern states. Reporters had also noticed an increase in the number of comings and goings of top government officials.
At 9.15pm, with Mr Gromyko attending a State Department dinner, Mr Kennedy met the ExCom, the top-secret Executive Committee of the National Security Council, at which three options were presented: a blockade, a full air strike, or a limited air strike.
Mr Kennedy did not express an open preference for any of them but a number of his advisers thought he might be favouring a blockade.
The Glasgow Herald’s report for October 18 said merely that the president was still considering the final details of a plan to quarantine shipping to Cuba. Before long, matters would be taking a turn for the worst.
l Sources: JFK Presidential Library and Museum; James M. Lindsay blog post, October 18, 2012, Council of Foreign Relations website, www.cfr.org
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