The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [421]
“Wait, Mr. President,” Russell said. “The nettle is going to sting anyway.”
“That’s correct. I just think at least we start here, then we go where we go. And I’ll tell you that every opportunity is full.”
Kennedy stopped. The time for his nationally televised address was near. “I better go and make this speech,” he said.
Kennedy sat down at his desk shortly before 7:00 P.M.. to give as dramatic a speech as any American president had ever given. Always before when a president made an important address to the American people, they had had some hint of what was to be said, be it the sight of the unemployed wandering the streets or news reports of ships sunk and planes smoldering at Pearl Harbor. But across the nation, people had little idea why the president had usurped airtime on this Monday evening.
Kennedy did not seek to soothe the nation but spoke with words that would create apprehension in even the stoutest of hearts. Kennedy laid out the threat: the Soviet ballistic missiles sailing toward Cuba were capable of “striking most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere, ranging as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru.”
As Kennedy addressed the American people, it was the image of Munich that stood starkly before him, in an era before nuclear weapons. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” Kennedy said. “Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.”
In Sorensen’s words lay some of the tensions and arguments of the Ex Comm deliberations condensed into a few passages. “Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which both our patience and our will will be tested, months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.” In his inaugural address Kennedy had not promised ease and blissful peace but challenge, and he delivered on that pledge a hundredfold this evening. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world.”
When Kennedy finished, many of the residents of the great cities of America feared that death stalked them, and they looked up at the silent skies with foreboding.
Kennedy’s restless, searching mind reached out, seeking contradictions, new imponderables, trying to will himself into Khrushchev’s mind. He had set up a naval blockade around Cuba and vowed to stop further shipment of military goods to the island. But the Soviets already had a vast nuclear arsenal in Cuba, and if he were Khrushchev, he would have ships carrying more weapons turn around. It could be ships carrying baby food and humanitarian supplies that the Americans would attempt to stop on the high seas.
Kennedy described with painful vividness what could happen if the U.S. Navy stopped a ship, even one, full of nothing but baby food. “They’re gonna keep going,” he said. “And we’re gonna try to shoot the rudder off or the boiler. And then we’re going to try to board it. And they’re going to fire guns, machine guns. And we’re going to have one hell of a time trying to get aboard that thing and getting control of it, because they’re pretty tough, and I suppose they may have soldiers or marines aboard their ships…. We may have to sink it rather than just take it.”
When Kennedy was not worried about