The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [86]
THE SECOND TIME I noticed that adults are not entirely to be trusted was also the first time I was genuinely made fearful by events in the wider world. It was in the autumn of 1962, just before my eleventh birthday, when I was home alone watching television and the program was interrupted for a special announcement from the White House. President Kennedy came on looking grave and tired and indicated that things were not going terribly well with regard to the Cuban missile crisis—something about which at that point I knew practically nothing.
The background, if you need it, is that America had discovered that the Russians were preparing (or so we thought) to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, just ninety miles from American soil. Never mind that we had plenty of missiles aimed at Russia from similar distances in Europe. We were not used to being threatened in our own hemisphere and weren’t going to stand for it now. Kennedy ordered Khrushchev to cease building launchpads in Cuba or else.
The presidential address I saw was telling us that we were now at the “or else” part of the scenario. I remember this as clearly as anything, largely because Kennedy looked worried and gray, not a look you wish to see in a president when you are ten years old. We had installed a naval blockade around Cuba to express our displeasure and Kennedy announced now that a Soviet ship was on its way to challenge it. He said that he had given the order that if the Soviet ship tried to pass through the blockade, American destroyers were to fire in front of its bow as a warning. If it still proceeded, they were to sink it. Such an act would, of course, be the start of World War III. Even I could see that. This was the first time that my blood ever ran cold.
It was evident from Kennedy’s tone that all this was pretty imminent. So I went and ate the last piece of a Toddle House chocolate pie that had been promised to my sister, then hung around on the back porch, wishing to be the first to tell my parents the news that we were all about to die. When they arrived home they told me not to worry, that everything would be all right, and they were right of course as always. We didn’t die—though I came closer than anybody when my sister discovered that I had eaten her piece of pie.
In fact, we all came closer to dying than we realized. According to the memoirs of Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time suggested—indeed, eagerly urged—that we drop a couple of nuclear bombs on Cuba to show our earnest and to let the Soviets know that they had better not even think about putting nuclear weapons in our backyard. President Kennedy, according to McNamara, came very close to authorizing such a strike.
Twenty-nine years later, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we learned that the CIA’s evidence about Cuba was completely wrong (now there’s a surprise) and that the Soviets in fact already had about 170 nuclear missiles positioned on Cuban soil, all trained on us of course, and all of which would have been launched in immediate retaliation for an American attack. Imagine an America with 170 of its largest cities—which, just for the record, would include Des Moines—wiped out. And of course it wouldn’t have stopped there. That’s how close we all came to dying.
I haven’t trusted grown-ups for a single moment since.
Chapter 12
OUT AND ABOUT
JACKSON, MICH. (AP)—A teenaged girl and her 12-year-old brother were accused by police Saturday of trying to kill their parents by pouring gasoline on their bed and setting it alight while they were sleeping. The children told police their parents were “too strict and were always nagging.” Mr. and Mrs. Sterling Baker were burned over 50 percent of their bodies and were listed in fair condition in a hospital.
—Des Moines Tribune, June 13, 1959
EVERY SUMMER, when school had been out for a while and your parents had had