“Our relationship has never been worse than it is now.”

Donald Trump turned 16 in June, 1962, a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis in October. He was a junior in high school.

 I was not quite 13 and in the eighth grade, and I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as the Crisis in Berlin and several other things that made our relationship with the Soviet Union more than a bit fraught at the time. I even remember when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in 1960. 

But, even if I didn't, it was on the tests New York State students had to take, even the ones in military school.

I would feel foolish saying that our relationship with the Russians is worse now that it was then.

Nobody who was in junior high or older could possibly believe such a thing, unless he tried very, very hard. Or was astonishingly ignorant.

Perhaps the people who were shouting for Obama to release his academic records should demand to have a look at the report card of a man who doesn't know there once was a Cuban Missile Crisis, or any of a number of other dangerous, brink-defying events back then.

Because we sure had plenty of them.

It was in all the newspapers, and Gib Crockett didn't have room to draw everything. In Southeast Asia, the French and Viet Minh were going at each other and Laos was trying to remain neutral, while over here, Cuba was being armed by their friends in the Soviet Union, and in Europe there was a crisis in Berlin, where the wall was a year old and the Soviets wanted the Allies out. Down south, Argentina had just had a coup and, in our own backyard, Oxford, Mississippi was in the midst of integrating Ole Miss, with Gov. Ross Barnett facing legal action for having impeded the process, and George Wallace ready to step up for his turn at obstructing justice in Alabama.

Which still doesn't bring in the Congo or Algeria nor does it include the fact that it had been a year and a half since the Bay of Pigs invasion, but we were still negotiating to free more than 1,000 men captured in the misadventure, which Bill Mauldin suggests was a source of amusement for Castro.

Berlin was seeing people scale the Wall and be shot, or tunnel under it, while the tension in that divided city, as Bill Crawford suggested, was building to a serious state, with Khruschev and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Gromyko, ratcheting things up, testing America's young president.

There was talk of a summit, and JFK met with Gromyko in a preliminary conversation. Khruschev was ready, Herblock said, reckoning back to the UN tantrum in 1960.

And Mauldin recalled a different tantrum, from 1959, when, on a visit to California, he was barred from Disneyland for security reasons. “And I say, I would very much like to go and see Disneyland. But then, we cannot guarantee your security, they say. Then what must I do? Commit suicide? What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me?” 

None of which references things like China and India getting into a shooting war, in which Nehru was forced to replace Indian Defense Minister Krishna Menon.

Or Castro reaching out to Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of Algeria, newly independent after a protracted guerrilla war against France. (France was having a bad decade. They lost Indochina as well.)

And, as Rube Goldberg noted, the fear of Castro's example inspiring trouble throughout Latin America was seen as a clear and present danger.

Meanwhile, though we worried about Communist takeovers in our hemisphere, Eisenhower had also sent the first US troops to Vietnam and the process was being ramped up under Kennedy. Bill Mauldin was not impressed.

But when President Kennedy summoned all hands to Washington and scheduled a prime-time address to the nation, papers quickly sprang into action with maps and explainers about the medium-range Soviet missiles that air surveillance had discovered. Besides aerial photographs of the missile sites, they provided maps showing the range of Cuban missiles.

Kennedy threw a naval blockade around the island and needed only to stop a few ships before it was taken seriously, whereupon some Russian ships withdrew rather than press the issue.

It was clear, as Herblock noted, that Kennedy, however much he'd had his nose bloodied at the Bay of Pigs, was neither going to back down nor negotiate a way in which the missiles might remain.

And that included turning a deaf ear to Castro's insistence that Guantanamo be a trading chip in whatever agreement might be reached.

(This Mauldin panel has turned up in some "best of" collections and commentaries on the Crisis.)

Bill Crawford observed that Kennedy's firm response was putting Khruschev on the spot.

And, though elections were less than a month away, attention had turned to a fundamental question in a country that was not particular divided at the moment.

And Khruschev blinked.

And Kennedy ran off with the win.

Castro's dream of being a big man in the Western Hemisphere faded

And Mauldin gave him one last kick in the pants.

However -- and this is a critically important coda to the Missile Crisis -- Mauldin also observed that solving that problem was not the end of the entire matter, and that, regardless of how some President might view things a half century later, it didn't mean that our relationship with Russia was now hunky-dory.

Perhaps that pliable, uneducated president should take a lesson about what the Russians do with puppets that are no longer amusing.

Someone said the President's staff had given him 100 pages of briefing notes before his summit with Putin, to which my response is, "Well, there's your problem right there."

Shit, I wouldn't have read 100 pages of briefing notes, and I know how.

Next time, sing him a little song. 

 

Comments

[Sean Martin]

Wll, you know... kids today... always think they have it worse than anyone else...

Thing about Cheeto, tho, is that all the neck-wrenching whipsnaps of his just seem to underscore that the guy simply is not mentally all there. I realize there's great symbolism in having someone like that as president of the US, but still...

[Anon A Mus]

Given the comics you promote, I can see you lamenting how Stalin and Mao and Castro "lost" their political battles.

[Mike Peterson]

I wouldn't have signed my name to that ridiculous nonsense either.