HISTORY WILL NOT ABSOLVE US
History Will Not Absolve Us The Soviet Union's establishment of a nuclear striking-force on the island of Cuba was an act of criminal irresponsibility. If the evidence is as conclusive as we have...
...Negotiation of a neutralized, demilitarized status for Cuba—just as the United States and the Soviet Union accepted for Austria—with Cuba, protected by the United Nations, free to retain or reform her government and free to trade and find ideological inspiration where she prefers...
...Surely prevention of a nuclear holocaust is worth a summit...
...We have behaved, on occasion, as though we were omnipotent and could enforce a double-standard on the world, under which we regarded ourselves as free to ring the Soviet Union with military bases which we say are "defensive" and "precautionary" while regarding comparable Soviet moves as "offensive" and "provocative...
...President Kennedy told us on the evening of Monday, October 22, that a full week earlier, at 9 a.m., Tuesday, October 16, he had acquired "the first preliminary hard information" of the Soviet build-up...
...This was false, as the President said, but why didn't Mr...
...We simply don't know, because he has not see fit to tell us, why he exercised such extraordinary—and what seems to us self-defeating—restraint on this occasion...
...The latter reassured Mr...
...Although we are people born of revolution, we are stridently impatient with other people's revolutions in this age of revolution...
...Soviet guilt is clear, but the judgment of history will not absolve the United States from blame...
...Premier Khrushchev knew that President Kennedy would be compelled to regard a Soviet build-up of an offensive nuclear capability in Cuba as a menace to our security requiring American intervention...
...We were right to brand the Soviet build-up of offensive capability in Cuba as an intolerable threat to our security, but, given the time-table of developments, there were lawful steps we might have taken before embarking on the warlike course of blockade...
...Mr...
...The Progressive does not impute any sinister motive to the President...
...The President acknowledged that "worldwide nuclear war" might be at stake...
...The consequence of this policy of bitter intransigence has been to harden what was at first Cuba's tentative, tenuous dependence on the Soviet Union until it has become a firm military alliance and economic partnership...
...Considering the gravity of the issue, why had he not sought an immediate confrontation with Khrushchev...
...Kennedy sought to draw the line— one which the Kremlin seemed to accept—when he said September 13: "If at any time the Communist buildup in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way . . . then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies...
...What baffles and disturbs us even more is that two days after the President acquired his first hard information, he met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko at the White House...
...It is possible to evaluate the extraordinary recklessness of the Kremlin's conduct only when it is understood that: • Premier Khrushchev knew that President Kennedy had been holding the warhawks at bay here at home only by insisting, with wide public support, that we had no moral or legal right to intervene so long as Russia's military assistance to Cuba was purely defensive...
...If the evidence is as conclusive as we have been told it is and if the supporting photographs are as grimly persuasive as they seem to be, there can be little doubt that these long-range weapons of sudden mass destruction constitute, as President Kennedy asserted, "an explicit threat to the peace of the Americas...
...What we do know is that this curious failure to confront the Soviet spokesman with the facts represented a collapse of diplomatic intercourse at precisely the moment it was most needed and might have been most effective in preventing a hardening of the crisis...
...The Soviet-Cuban embrace may have come anyway, but certainly we encouraged the courtship and hastened the marriage...
...f Termination of the United States blockade, and with it or soon afterwards, an agreement to abandon our nuclear base in Turkey, which shares a frontier with the Soviet Union— under U. N. supervision...
...As we were writing on October 26, U Thant, the indomitable Secretary-General of the United Nations, was struggling to save the peace, and Khrushchev seemed to be responding...
...This was a week before he went to the country and the world with that information and his decision to "quarantine...
...Here, we believe, are the staples of an honorable agreement that both sides could live with without loss of face and without fear of collision over Cuba...
...Here, too, are the guide-lines for negotiations which could be carried over into other tension areas to build a more durable peace...
...Why didn't he use that full week to confront the Soviets at the United Nations, or to present his case to the Organization of American States, instead of waiting to do both after he had proclaimed his blockade...
...And even as they embarked on their perilous game, the Soviet leaders engaged in diplomatic duplicity by assuring the United States repeatedly that their purpose in Cuba was solely defensive...
...Kennedy confront the Soviet Foreign Minister with the evidence of a rapid Soviet build-up which, he told the nation, "was already in my hands...
...A pledge by the United States that Cuba, deprived of an offensive capability, will not be invaded...
...Although the differences between "defensive" and "offensive" weapons are lost in a semantic jungle, Mr...
...Nor has United States behavior in the present crisis been exemplary...
...As a rich and complacent nation bent on preserving the status quo, we recoil from revolutionary excesses, especially those which imperil the lush profits and special privileges of American investors abroad...
...Khrushchev and his associates knew all this, for it was a matter of public record reaffirmed on several occasions, and still they gambled with the peace of the world...
...Kennedy that Soviet assistance to Cuba "pursued solely the purpose of contributing to the defense capability of Cuba...
...Far from it, in our judgment...
...The Cubans have tried repeatedly to negotiate their differences with us, but we have said that the issues of Cuba were not negotiable, although on taking office, President Kennedy affirmed that "we should never negotiate from fear, but we should never fear to negotiate...
...As of that time, the ingredients of agreement on the immediate issue seemed to us to be: f Cessation of Soviet shipments of weapons of offensive capability to Castro's Cuba and the dismantling of all existing bases with such capacity— under U. N. supervision...
...Our attitude toward a revolutionary world in general and revolutionary Cuba in particular is in significant degree responsible for the current crisis...
...As for Cuba specifically, we have sought to isolate her diplomatically, starve her economically, and subvert her lawful government by encouraging revolt and financing rebels in exile...
Vol. 26 • November 1962 • No. 11
