THE TRAP IN CUBA

...For if we are unwilling to tolerate a Soviet-defended country ninety miles from our shores, how can we go on insisting on our right to arm allies like Turkey, Norway, and Iran which are not ninety miles from the Soviet Union, but border on that country...

...But if there were a deeper and more devious purpose, it could only have been the one we have just tried to develop—to trap the United States into a military adventure in Cuba which would enable the Soviet Union to strengthen, perhaps decisively, her military, political, and moral positions everywhere else in the world...

...It declared—and this is the provision cited by the hotbloods—that "any interposition" by a European power in the Western Hemisphere would be "the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States...

...For the Monroe Doctrine not only warned Europe to keep its hands off this hemisphere, it went on to assure Europe that we would not meddle in its affairs...

...Our policy in regard to Europe," proclaimed President Monroe, "is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers...

...The press, incidentlly, with only an occasional exception, has shamelessly suppressed mention of this second cardinal policy of the Monroe Doctrine...

...or of other significant offensive capability either in Cuban hands or under Soviet direction and guidance...

...Kennedy steadfastly refused to succumb to the panic that gripped men of little minds and less information...

...But few of the orators and pundits bother to explain what the Monroe Doctrine is, and none cares to inform the people that the Doctrine has been greatly modified if not abrogated by the United States itself over the years...

...It was largely the work of his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams...

...They may have counted, also, on the extraordinary pressure that would be placed on President Kennedy by campaign cries of "soft on Communism" if he refused to blockade or destroy Castro's Cuba...

...A week later, in another report to the nation, the President said: "I will repeat the conclusion that I reported last week, that these new [Soviet] thipments [to Cuba] do not constitute a serious threat to any other part of this hemisphere...

...It doesn't seem unreasonable to suspect that the Soviets counted on the warlike response of characters like Senators Goldwater, Keating, Thurmond, Dirksen, and Tower, and many American newspaper editors and radio and television newscasters when they baited their trap in the hope of provoking U.S...

...of military bases provided to Russia...

...We would make it far easier for Khrushchev & Company to move against Berlin by enabling them to claim that our aggressive action against Cuba made it imperative for them to act in self-defense to wipe out a Western base deep inside the Soviet camp...

...We have no way of knowing, of course, what motivated the Soviets to ship massive supplies of economic and military aid to Castro's Cuba...

...It is this present modification of the Monroe Doctrine, and by no means the original concept, which must guide U.S...

...intervention...

...Are those who invoke the Monroe Doctrine prepared to abandon Berlin, withdraw from NATO, evacuate our bases in Europe, and recognize and "cultivate friendly relations" with the de facto Communist government of East Germany...

...These words have just as much validity as those which established our hegemony over the Western Hemisphere...

...to cultivate friendly relations with it . . ." And President Monroe's ghost-writer, John Quincy Adams, added: "It is our duty to remain the peaceful and silent, though sorrowful, spectators of the European scene...

...We initiated and signed treaties with our southern neighbors which all but annulled the "papa knows best" concept of the Monroe Doctrine...

...But the President, possessed of all the available information regarding Cuba and mindful of Cuba's role in the total world picture, has refused to be tricked by the Kremlin's trap or stampeded by Congressional oratory and news media hysteria...

...And yet this straightforward estimate of the situation, based on all the official intelligence at hand, was buried in countless newspapers which preferred to feature the incendiary reports picked up in rumor-ridden Miami by the warhawks in Congress...

...He recognized, he said, that "rash talk is cheap, particularly on the part of those who do not have the responsibility," but "loose talk" about military intervention, he warned, could play into Communist hands by giving "a thin color of legitimacy to the Communist pretense that such a threat exists...

...Kennedy soberly assessed the situation in these clear-cut terms: "There is no evidence of any organized combat force in Cuba from any Soviet bloc country...

...For this he deserves great credit...

...For consider what might happen if the United States embarked on armed intervention in Cuba: % We would infuriate most of the rest of Latin America, effectively destroy the Alliance for Progress, and thus end the hope of achieving a peaceful, democratic revolution in the hemisphere—precisely what the Kremlin wants...

...The Soviet Union's arming of Cuba, albeit with defensive weapons only, has been denounced as irresponsible brinksmanship...

...In a recent issue, for example, Time magazine devoted five full pages to glorifying the Doctrine as the basis of its demand for "direct action to oust Castro," but it did not so much as hint that there is more to the Monroe Doctrine than American assertion of a hands-off policy for Europe in this hemisphere...

...guardianship of the Western Hemisphere survived for nearly a century as basic American policy, but as the little nations of Latin America grew up and came to resent what they regarded as Yankee imperialism, we greatly modified the original Doctrine...

...But it is conceivable that the Kremlin's conduct represents much more than that—that perhaps it has skillfully baited a trap into which the United States might move in Cuba while the Soviet Union decisively strengthened its position around the rest of the world...

...The President has stated his Administration's position with great clarity and candor: One—Soviet shipment of munitions and men to Castro's Cuba does not constitute a threat to the security of the United States or the Western Hemisphere...

...What could be clearer...

...And so it is...

...President Kennedy seems keenly conscious of the existence of the trap...

...bases that now encircle the Soviet bloc...

...Thus, a series of international agreements, climaxed by the adoption of the Charter of the Organization of American States at Bogata in 1948, converted the Monroe Doctrine from a unilateral policy fixed and enforced by the United States to a hemisphere policy proclaimed and policed jointly by all the republics of North, South, and Central America...

...to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us...

...Two—The United States "will do whatever must be done" if the Communist build-up in Cuba at any time menaces our security, but— Three—Unilateral military intervention by the United States "cannot currently be either required or justified...

...President Monroe proclaimed the Doctrine that was to bear his name in a message to Congress in 1823...

...of the presence of offensive ground-to-ground missiles...

...Speaking to the country after studying all the information available to him as President and Commander-in-Chief, Mr...

...None of this, of course, renounces the right of the United States to protect itself against a direct threat to its national security, but these facts make a shambles of the argument advanced by those who would plunge this country into war to preserve the dogmas of a 139-year-old Doctrine that we have long since amended...

...To raise the question is to expose the fraud and hypocrisy of those who clamor for military action to "preserve the sacred principles of the Monroe Doctrine...

...But there are firebrands in both political parties who are attempting to drown out his counsel of coolness and caution...

...President Kennedy appealed to the American people, over the hysterical clamor of hot-heads, to "keep both their nerve and their heads...

...he has emphasized the need to consider Cuba in terms of hemisphere and global considerations...

...But even as over-aged legislators and editors were whooping it up for war or, at the very least, a "do something-do anything" policy toward Cuba, Mr...

...The dominant theme in most of the superheated oratory and editorials is the insistence that the sacred principles of the Monroe Doctrine must be preserved against Communist transgression...

...f We would forfeit our leadership among the peoples of many of the under-developed countries of Asia and Africa who, however great their rejection of Communism as a way of life, feel we have no right to invade a tiny island whose equally underprivileged people represent no threat to our own security...

...f We would greatly strengthen the Communist case against the U.S...

...It is quite possible that there was no more sinister purpose than to prop up a junior ally's sagging economy so she would not continue to look like so feeble an example of Communism in action, and to make it possible for her to defend herself against invasion by the United States...

...Perhaps even more significant is the fact that those who invoke the Monroe Doctrine take great pains to omit all mention of its second basic provision, one we ourselves have violated repeatedly when it suited our purposes...

...This unilateral assertion of U.S...

...And there are politicians in both parties whose principal purpose is to exploit the fears and frustrations of the American people by risking war simply for votes in this fall's elections...

...policy if our treaty commitments are to mean anything at all...