Think back to those halcyon days of 1962: the New York Mets had made their appearance on the baseball landscape, I had recently started high school and Halloween was just around the corner.
But if it was scary moments for which you craved that October, there was no need to go for spooky costumes and ghost stories: Scary was right there, in-your-face fear in the real world.
For it was during those last two weeks of October 1962 that the U.S. and Russia went toe-to- toe in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As you of that generation no doubt, recall a U.S. spy plane had confirmed the presence of medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles stationed at the Caribbean island, courtesy of Russia.
And the Pentagon had drawn up charts showing that folks in Miami – along with other U.S. cities – would be wiped out when those missiles were launched, despite Castro’s reported very real concerns about American retaliation.
The Kennedy administration – following the shooting down of a U.S.U-2 spy plane in 1960, failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and the U.S.-imposed Cuban embargo in February 1962 – opted for a Navy blockade of the island to stop the shipment of further missiles from Russia as both countries debated the issue before the U.N.
The Russian leader Khrushchev was worried about missiles aimed at Russia that the U.S. had deployed in Turkey and Italy in 1961 and he figured that having his own missiles in Cuba would counter that threat by imposing one of his own.
Khrushchev believed he could bully the young, inexperienced American president into submission. (Sound familiar? Note the eerie echoes of today’s Putin vs. Obama tussles.)
As Kennedy pondered what to do next, several of his military advisers, like Gen. Curtis LeMay – who may have been the inspiration for the fictional General Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) – in the ’64 Stanley Kramer film, “Dr. Strangelove” – were urging him to bomb Communist Cuba to smithereens.
Remember, just a few years prior, we were being told that we could be caught up in a nuclear gap – we had already been beaten, it seemed, in the space race – and I remember – vaguely – participating in school bomb drills, cowering under my classroom desk in anticipation of a devastating nuclear strike. Nuclear “fallout” shelters were all the rage.
All of that was the backdrop for this new crisis – which, as you recall – was finally settled by an agreement that Russia would remove its nuclear weapons from Cuba in exchange for the U.S. pulling out its weapons from Europe.
The U.S. Navy blockade of Cuba, however, remained in effect through late November ’62, as has the embargo until the recently concluded agreement to re-establish a U.S. embassy in Havana and a partial lifting of the trade block.
Yes, those were exciting times when two world leaders took center stage, looked each other in the eye and settled their quarrel – not with guns (or missiles) blazing – but with a peace pact.
If only we could replicate that formula in Syria and elsewhere today. The world would certainly be better off for it, if we could only find a way.
