THE Herald continues its look back at the paper’s day-by-day coverage of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, 55 years ago this month.
“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?”
Adlai Stevenson, US Ambassador to the United Nations, paused, waggled a cautionary forefinger at Valerian Zorin and urged him: “Don’t wait for the translation. Yes or no?” He took off his glasses and waited for the Russian ambassador’s translated reply. Across America, some 55 million TV viewers - President Kennedy amongst them - watched with keen interest.
Zorin said: “I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and therefore I do not wish to answer a question that is put to me in the fashion in which a prosecutor does.” A reply to the question would follow in due course, he said.
Stevenson would not be deflected. “I’m prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over, if that’s your decision,” he said. He told Zorin that he was “in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no.”
Stevenson reinforced his point when several blown-up photographs of the Cuba missiles, taken by U-2 spy planes, were placed on an easel, publicly embarrassing the Soviets.
Stevenson had set out his country’s urgent concerns at the outset over “the build-up of nuclear striking power in Cuba.” He said America welcomed the fact that the Soviets had avoided direct confrontation in the quarantine zone off Cuba and that Nikita Khrushchev had signalled that the Soviet Union would take no reckless decisions over the crisis. But Washington, he said, was most anxious to reach a peaceful resolution.
“I never knew Adlai had it in him,” President Kennedy, watching the tense exchange on TV at the White House, told his senior advisers. Aware that some of the Cuban missiles were operational, Kennedy would reply later that day to a letter from Khrushchev and urge him to alter the course of events.
The Glasgow Herald said U Thant, the UN’s acting-secretary general, was talking to the US, the Soviets and Cubans in an effort to find a peaceful solution. Khrushchev had agreed to suspend arms shipments to Cuba for two or three weeks if the blockade was halted. “No reporter in Washington has heard a Head of any foreign State since the end of the Second World War denounced by responsible officials the way Mr Khrushchev has been denounced this week,” the paper said of conversations, private and confidential, with members of the Kennedy administration.
Sources: YouTube; JFK Presidential Library; John F Kennedy, by Robert Dallek.
TOMORROW: Time running out for peaceful solution
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