Thursday, September 22, 2011
Page 7
PERSPECTIVES (Column)
2011 Minus 1961 Equals 50. OK, Got It Now.
By ROGER M. GRACE
Yesterday’s column contained a boner—a lollapalooza.
An item hastily tacked onto the end refers to the revelation by Walter Winchell 40 years ago that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba.
About an hour after the issue was printed on Tuesday night, it hit me that Winchell’s “scoop,” which appeared on Sept. 21, 1961, goes back 50 years.
No, no, it couldn’t be that long ago, I immediately assured myself, unwilling to accept that it had been half a century since the days I would come home from high school, pick up the Herald Examiner from our driveway, bring it inside and dive right for WW’s “collym.”
Yet, counting out the decades on my fingers—’61-’71, ’71-’81, etc.—dispelled my hope that I hadn’t blundered. [A correction has been made in the online version.]
Here’s what Winchell revealed, in his syndicated column published in newspapers throughout the nation on Sept. 21, or dates close to that:
“The White House has been informed by Intelligence that Cuba has short range missiles that can be flung about 1000 miles. They are Soviet installed and located nearly 100 miles from Havana.”
Twenty years ago, when I was able to calculates dates better, I reflected on that column item of 30 years before:
Last Saturday marked precisely 30 years since the happening of a rather significant—yet now forgotten—event. The American people were apprised by Walter Winchell of the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Yet, for the next year—despite repeated assertions by Winchell and by U.S. Sen. Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican, that the missiles were in place—President John Kennedy kept proclaiming: “There are no missiles in Cubar.”
Two weeks before the 1962 November elections, Kennedy suddenly found out that there were, by gosh, missiles in “Cubar.” We now had a national crisis—and, in the wake of a crisis, one clings, for sake of security, to what is familiar. Democrat incumbents across the nation were reelected, notwithstanding growing disenchantment with the Democratic Kennedy administration—or “oddministration” as Winchell aptly dubbed it.
It’s heartening to see that even liberal historians are now catching on to how little substance there was to that fluffy-haired, womanizing, politically unscrupulous head of state.
Let note be taken that from Sept. 21, 1961 up until the time the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was finally acknowledged by Kennedy at a politically opportune time, it was journalist Walter Winchell who was telling it straight to “Mr. and Mrs. United States,” while the president lied.
Some historians have concluded that missiles were, indeed, present in Cuba far earlier than Kennedy’s Oct. 22, 1962, televised announcement that missiles had been sighted and Cuba was being blockaded.
•In the 1996 book, “On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace,” Donald Kagan observes that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev “had every reason to believe that Kennedy knew much of what was happening in Cuba, since the Chairman knew that the claims of Keating and others were true.” Kagan remarks:
“If a mere Senator knew of the missiles, how could the President be ignorant?”
•The Oct. 8, 1992 book, “The Missiles of October: The Declassified Story of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” by Robert Smith Thompson, asserts that Kennedy knew of the presence of the missiles by March of 1962.
•Robert D. Schulzinger, in “A Companion to American Foreign Relations,” published in 2006, takes the position that Kennedy really didn’t know of the existence of the missiles, saying:
“When Fidel Castro began complaining to Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 that the United States was trying to overthrow his government by assassination or invasion, the Soviet Union began sending weapons and military personnel to protect its Cuban ally....The buildup included medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) capable of raining down nuclear warheads on American cities, ILB-28 bombers, and Soviet troops.
“Because no offensive weapons had been sighted in Cuba and because Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had guaranteed that there were none, the Kennedy administration responded to rumors of an arms buildup by publicly announcing that there were no offensive weapons in Cuba and that none would be tolerated. Dobrynin was in fact deceiving the Kennedy administration.”
If so, Kennedy was not lying—but was incredibly foolish to have relied on the word of the Soviet ambassador.
In any event, the Bay of Pigs debacle and the delayed awareness or acknowledgement of the missile buildup in Cuba were low points in a failed administration.
Copyright 2011, Metropolitan News Company