The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [352]
With Khrushchev’s greatest architectural achievement spread across the German city, the Soviet dictator would not push so hard over Berlin while the festering discontent was sealed up inside. Kennedy could not admit that the solution satisfied him, since doing so would contradict his rhetoric and perhaps inspire Khrushchev to take even more dramatic measures. As it was, Kennedy used the Berlin Wall again and again as a shameful example of Marxist failures, poking a finger in the eye of the Russian bear.
Kennedy had not been indulging in a hyperbolic exercise when he told the American people how much heavier his burdens were than he had ever imagined. One evening that summer he was talking in the Oval Office with Hugh Sidey of Time. Kennedy was in a morbid mood that had always been foreign to his being; now he was a dark Cassandra musing on the human tragedy. “Ever since the crossbow when man had developed new weapons and stockpiled them, somebody has come along and used them,” he said. “I don’t know how we escape it with nuclear weapons.” That was his theme that summer. Another evening Bobby told Sidey that he had been seated next to his brother in his bedroom that August when the president began to cry. Decades later, when Sidey reflected on what Bobby had told him, it seemed to him that the attorney general had meant that the president’s eyes were wet with tears, not that he had been sobbing. What was so extraordinary was that Bobby had never seen his brother like that before. “It doesn’t matter about you and me and adults so much, Bobby,” he said. “We’ve lived some good years. What is so horrible is to think of the children who have never had a chance who would be killed in such a war.”
Kennedy might have had teary eyes, but this haunting, newfound concern with nuclear death had been set off in large part by the president himself and his newfound obsession with civil defense. In September, Life had a special issue whose cover featured a model dressed in a fallout suit. The administration knew this “fallout suit” protected only against dust, not against true nuclear fallout. A record called “The Complacent Americans,” purporting to give the official civil defense survival instructions, begins after the bombs have just fallen: “The H-Bomb! The H-Bomb! The H-Bomb! Flash of brightness. A tremendous roar…. And I, the complacent American, thinking that no one would ever dare attack an American city. And I told my friends that nuclear war would never happen … but it did. I always thought I was a good American—patriotic and civic minded. But I was wrong. I failed myself and my country.” In churches, ministers debated whether it was Christian to shoot down a slothful citizen trying to push himself and his family into his neighbor’s fallout shelter. Other ministers were appalled at the whole idea of a nation hunkering down in private shelters. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., the Right Reverend Angus Dun, said, “The every-family-for-itself approach to fallout shelter construction is immoral, unjust, and contrary to the national interest.”
The administration worked on developing a pamphlet about fallout shelters. Fifty to sixty million copies would be printed, enough so that most American families would receive one. The initial draft was full of indomitable American optimism. Those Americans with the gumption, foresight, and patriotism to build their own bomb shelters would