in private just be passed off as equivalent to the Turkish ones — and he intended, when he went to the UN in New York in November, to make a grand public announcement. This was completely to misunderstand Kennedy. There was an election in the offing, and the Republicans made a great fuss about the arrival of Soviet troops — at which Khrushchev ordered more missiles, including tactical ones, to be sent to Cuba (7 September). The Americans called up 150,000 troops, in part for Berlin purposes, and prepared for an invasion of the island. Kennedy told the visiting Algerian president, Ben Bella, that he could accept a Caribbean Yugoslavia, but not more, and stepped up his response, setting up a group named ‘Excom’ under his main lieutenants, including General Maxwell Taylor. There were ideas of simple invasion, to dispose of Castro, but the technicians warned that not all missiles would be wiped out by an initial strike and on 18 October it became clear that the position was worse than had been suspected — even the American ICBM sites were under threat. That evening Gromyko called; and he greatly angered the Americans by lying outright that there were no offensive weapons on Cuba. They did not say anything, and he sent a reassuring telegram back, such that Khrushchev did not take fright, as he might have done.
October the 20th was the decisive day, when Excom agreed that there should be a blockade around Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from delivering any more missiles, and on 21 October Kennedy saw the British ambassador and revealed his thinking — air strikes would have alarmed the allies; a blockade, technically called ‘quarantine’ because the legality of a blockade was dubious, was to be imposed. Next day Kennedy revealed to the public, on television, that missiles were on Cuba and announced his response: ‘quarantine’. His behaviour, now, was sound enough because the difficulties were formidable, given that substantial parts of Western opinion were against him: what was so wrong about Cuba, given Turkey, and why risk all-out war over this? The Politburo was at first relieved on the 23rd that there would at least be no invasion of the island, and agreed to stop some of the ships; but a few others, to complete the missile preparations, would proceed on course. That day, Soviet forces were put on alert. Khrushchev sent a message that he would not respect the blockade. At the same time, American forces were also put on alert (24 October) with many nuclear-armed bombers permanently in the air. Would the USSR try to force the blockade? October the 25th and 26th marked the height of the crisis. Khrushchev realized that Kennedy was entirely serious, that he would invade Cuba, and was not bluffing. A letter was then composed — the Soviet missiles would be withdrawn, in return for an American pledge not to invade. A further letter was sent on the 27th, and seemed in part to revoke the concessions, this time read out over the radio — a condition was added, that American missiles should be withdrawn from Turkey. Khrushchev had claimed that if these missiles were indeed withdrawn, then it would be a Soviet victory. That evening, Robert Kennedy indicated that they might indeed be withdrawn, but not at once and not in public, since other allies might feel let down. On the 28th, a deal was done and revealed at 9 a.m. on the radio — no American invasion, and withdrawal in due course of Jupiters from Turkey; Soviet withdrawal of missiles from Cuba. The United Nations would inspect. Castro himself was enraged (he broke a mirror), especially at the last proposal, and refused; the American commitment was therefore never made formal, but at least a new code of conduct grew up around these potentially disastrous confrontations. Mikoyan was sent to calm down Castro and discussions as to nuclear disarmament — or control — went ahead. But the episode had vastly alarmed Khrushchev’s associates: so much for his ‘peaceful coexistence’. Plotting began, to be rid of him. In 1964 he was duly overthrown. He was replaced by safe pairs of hands: no more adventures. Kennedy, by contrast, was assassinated on 22 November 1963, the end of the post-war period, but the start of a very troubled period in the history of the United States.
12. America in Vietnam
In strange symmetry with his enemy Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy became an icon, film attached. He had been — at least given the infuriating late-fifties cult of Youth — the best-looking President ever, and, like Che, he had had a tragic, mysterious fate. When he was assassinated in 1963, the date — 22 November — became one of the very few that have sunk into the mass memory. The funeral was a very solemn and tragic affair, as the widow, herself a strikingly good-looking woman, veiled in black, held her three-year-old boy’s hand, as with his slightly older sister she walked towards the funeral service in the cathedral. The little boy touched the world as he saluted his father’s coffin. It is, again, an image that has never quite left the world’s retina.
It was a most extraordinary murder, in its way a descant upon the American dream, in the sense that a ‘loner’, Lee Harvey Oswald, product of a (very) broken home, failed volunteer for the military and the CIA and the KGB, acquired a gun, thanks to America’s lawlessness in that regard (he got it by mail order), and, his brain full of confusion, thought of murder. Kennedy rode in an open car through Dallas, Texas. Oswald fired, and killed. He was then himself caught, and was shot by a man with Mafia connections who himself was dying of cancer. There was easily stuff here for an Oliver Stone film, and for contorted conspiracy theories: even the considerable British historian Hugh Trevor Roper set himself up as an expert in ballistics to endorse one of these, as, towards the end of his life, he endorsed a preposterous forgery, ‘The Hitler Diaries’ (he had an addiction to betting on horses, generally unsuccessfully, perpetually needed money, and, in an otherwise distinguished career, made absurd blunders). Few people in the commentating classes could see, as did I. F. Stone, that Kennedy had been ‘an optical illusion’, and the outpouring of histrionic grief that followed upon his death was not equalled until the death of Princess Diana, grasping and manipulative, a third of a century later. But the neon enlightenment cast shadows. The strangest concerned his own family. The corrupt old father, Joseph, had a stroke in 1961 which confined him, fully conscious, to a wheelchair, and he lived for another twenty years. One daughter with depression had a lobotomy that went wrong and made her a vegetable (she too lived on and on). His oldest son had been killed in the war, two others were murdered, and another daughter, Marchioness of Hartington, was killed in a plane crash with her lover, Earl Fitzwilliam. The last son, Edward Kennedy, was lucky to avoid a charge of manslaughter; and the generation further on has also suffered. John F. Kennedy’s own son, the poor little boy of 1963, was killed while semi-trainedly flying an aircraft, carrying his wife (whose family then sued the Kennedys). It was the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge who as ever spoke for common sense with an inspired essay in the
Johnson was a politician from Texas who, like the fabled Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, understood how to play Democratic Party games: between them, they had concocted Kennedy’s sliver of a majority in 1960. But Johnson was Texas-machine, on a vast scale, and he had been Roosevelt’s manager; he wanted to go into history as a new version of the great man. Kennedy had already referred to the ‘New Frontier’. What this would mean in practice was a sixties version of the Roosevelt New Deal in the thirties. The federal government would override the separate states and use the Supreme Court to bypass Congress in pursuit of general emancipation; it would spend money, even if that meant bending the constitutional rules, as Roosevelt had done. As things turned out, the deficits that then came up put a huge strain on the world’s financial system, which collapsed in August 1971. This led first to a fourfold and then an eightfold rise in oil prices, with baleful consequences all round. Kennedy began this.
The background was a great shift in American politics. The parties began — in part — to reverse their natures without changing their names. The Republicans were generally speaking Protestant in origin, their leadership East Coast and well off; now, some Republican parts of America, the north-east and its counterparts — migrant territory, such as Illinois — in the Midwest were gradually turning Democrat. The Democratic Party, historically, was a very odd alliance of Northern Catholics and Southern Baptists, whose chief concern was the rights of their generally backward states. Now, the Democrats of the South tended, more and more, to ally with Republicans on many vital matters such as states’ rights — meaning, in this case, racial segregation, and a general fear of the overriding power of the Supreme Court to change states’ ways. The Democrats, though still formally holding southern fiefdoms for some time to come, thus tended towards left-liberalism, and they adopted the Kennedy image, whereas the Republicans, though also divided, acquired what would later be called a conservative wing. In 1964 its candidate was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, who was made to seem almost ridiculously right-wing though he was no stupid bigot, and was personally a kinder and more upright man than Johnson (in Phoenix, Arizona, he had been good at stamping out corruption and had had a brave career in the air force, over the Himalayas, for instance). Still, he had only managed to win the nomination because the other candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, scored black marks for divorcing his wife of thirty-one years, and Goldwater
