Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...live-or-die decisions when the chips are down." As cliches mount, the reader half expects the next phone call to be answered by old Scab Cooley. But instead it is McGeorge Bundy who hears a CIAman's cryptic, spy-befuddling report of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. "Those things we've been worrying about"; says the CIAman cleverly, "it looks as though we've really got something." There is even room to mention a minor Russian official in Washington named Georgi Bolshakov, who is duped by his own bosses so that he can pass along...
Bartlett and Alsop say that in the days between the discovery of the missile bases and the Kennedy announcement of a blockade, Ex-Comm was split between "hawks" and "doves"-those who wanted to invade Cuba or bomb out the missile bases, and those who urged caution. The "most hawklike of the hawks," they write, was Dean Acheson. One of the doves was normally belligerent Bobby Kennedy, who, said the Post, thought that "an air attack against Cuba would be a Pearl Harbor in reverse, and contrary to all American traditions...
...Emphatically approved the blockade on further arms shipments to Cuba" three days before the Kennedy announcement, and "opposed, equally emphatically, an invasion of Cuba at the risk of nuclear war until the peace-keeping machinery of the United Nations had been used...
Although the hawks were originally in the majority, according to the Post, opinions finally merged, and everybody joined Dean Rusk as a "dawk or a hove."* The group formed a "rolling consensus" built around McNamara's plan of "maintaining options" by blockading Cuba, leaving the door open for invasion or bombing if the blockade failed to get rid of the missiles. Who was the only person who did not roll with the consensus? Why, Adlai Stevenson, of course...
...bases, but merely predicted correctly that Khrushchev might bring up the matter. Stevenson's suggested response: to tell Khrushchev that the matter of foreign bases was already on the agenda of disarmament talks, but that those talks could not even begin until the weapons were out of Cuba. Says a White House aide and former hawk: "Anyone who did not think about the bases as possible points that would be raised in any negotiations after the blockade would have been nutty...