Читать книгу Free People, Free Markets - George Melloan - Страница 12
ОглавлениеGrimes retired in 1958 after a heart attack, and Royster became editor. In March 1959, Roy discoursed on the Journal’s philosophy in an interview with business writer John Brooks for an article in Harper’s: “Basically we are for minimum government. We believe that the primary reason for government is to provide police power—to keep me from knocking you over the head. In foreign affairs, we don’t think the United States can run the world, or even the Western world.”
In his memoir, “My Own, My Country’s Time,” Royster wrote, “I think of myself as a radical, for there is much I would like to change in both society and politics. I have no desire to return to the nineteenth century romanticized as the pinnacle of an enlightened age. Yet I do believe our heritage from the past contains many values worth preserving as we approach the end of the 20th century.”
Royster further revealed his personal philosophy in what he called a “Forewarning” rather than a foreword, to a 1967 collection of his writings titled “A Pride of Prejudices” (Alfred A. Knopf): “I have been called a ‘conservative’ and something referred to as a ‘nineteenth century liberal.’ Both labels are, I think, inaccurate. Anyway, if conservative means, as it often seems to nowadays an opposition to change for opposition’s sake or a disposition to return the country to some imagined halcyon past, I beg to be excused. This is more an awareness that the past is as romanticized in history as youth is in memory than any want of awareness about the imbecilities of the present. My prejudice is that we might often better things by changing them.
“There is much to be said for the nineteenth century, but who, really, would want to take the world back to it? Besides the latter part of it marked a reversion among the intellectuals to the medieval philosophy of the all-wise king and his ministers who should manage all the people’s affairs in proper fashion. That century’s seminal thinkers, let us not forget, included the Fabian socialists and Karl Marx, all of whom were self-styled liberals. . . .
“I am often pessimistic about the immediate future, waxing indignant sometimes when our long heritage is abused or past lessons ignored. Who can avoid pessimism, looking at the state of the world and the behavior of the people in it? About the long future, however, I am stubbornly optimistic. Although mankind does forget old lessons to its pain, just as young people do those of their fathers, it always relearns them. It is comforting to remember that the Dark Ages only lasted five hundred years.”
That last line, with its amusing irony, was pure Royster.
The Journal editorial writers were not enthusiastic about Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election campaign, but they also had doubts about John F. Kennedy, even though both Royster and Joseph Evans, his chief editorial writer, knew and liked JFK from their prewar days in Washington. They were afraid that JFK was too much under the influence of neo-Keynesians like John Kenneth Galbraith and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Nixon at that point didn’t seem to have neo-Keynesian deficit spending tendencies. That would come later after he, in 1968, actually won the prize he failed to get in 1960, the U.S. presidency.
On January 20, 1960, shortly before his inauguration as president, JFK invited Royster to lunch at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. The presidential floor of the hotel was so chaotic, Royster reported, that it only belatedly dawned that someone was supposed to order lunch. JFK scolded Royster for an editorial criticizing the president-elect’s announcement that he would appoint his brother Robert as attorney general. But he also asked Royster to help him allay fears in the business community that he was fiscally irresponsible.
He also was worried about the situation in Indochina. He had hoped for a resolution of the crisis while his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was still in office. Whatever decision was made on U.S. involvement or withdrawal would be unpleasant, he told Royster, and added, “I don’t have the confidence of the people the way Eisenhower does.”
And so it went, Royster wrote, “on Cuba, on the farm problem, on domestic economics, on the foreign balance of payments. He appeared to be a young man suddenly appalled at the complexities of the job he had won, and yet so engaging in his uncertainties as to stir instinctive sympathies.”
The new president would certainly have welcomed Royster’s sympathy as a series of crises beset him shortly after he took office. Sometimes he got it; sometimes he didn’t. Certainly he didn’t when he blundered into the Bay of Pigs crisis only three months into his presidency. Beginning before JFK took office, the CIA had been training a small army made up mostly of refugees from the Castro revolution, to invade Cuba and install a U.S.-friendly government. The invasion was badly managed. Castro knew it was coming and easily repelled it, capturing the survivors. The Journal was scathing in its criticism:
“With the apparent collapse of the Cuban invasion, the U.S. finds itself in a sorry mess. The only sure thing is that our troubles with Communist Cuba are not over. About the only hope is that we might learn something from the debacle and proceed accordingly.
“This country is reviled around the world for participating in an invasion in which it did not in fact participate and which all too plainly it did not control. But we suspect that the deeper feeling, especially in the capitals of international Communism, is one of astonishment at U.S. weakness—its failure to deal with this threat on its own doorstep.
“This reaction will compound our difficulties with the Communists everywhere. Meantime the Communists in Cuba emerge stronger than ever, harder for anyone to topple, better able to peddle their Red revolution elsewhere in Latin America.”
How true that was. The Bay of Pigs fiasco persuaded the bumptious Soviet dictator, Nikita Khrushchev, that the new American president was not only young but inexperienced and weak and thus could be counted on to give way when subjected to further tests.
The first test would come the following August when the Soviet-backed East Germans set about building a high, barbed wire–topped concrete wall sealing off the Soviet zone of Berlin from the British, French and American sectors. These zones, plus a similar partition of Germany itself, had been agreed to by FDR, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the 1944 “Big Three” conference in the Soviet Black Sea resort called Yalta. Or at least that seemed to be the deal. After FDR’s death in April 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, seemed to have little knowledge of what deals FDR had made. But at any rate, the former capital of Germany, Berlin, was now deep within Soviet-controlled and -fortified borders of what came to be called East Germany with access from the West only through agreed-upon narrow corridors. And now, with the building of the wall, East Berlin would also be inaccessible, except under conditions tightly controlled by the Soviets.
This was in a sense an aggressive act, as there had been no agreement under the Yalta pact or any other negotiation that East Berlin could be fortified. But its true purpose was not aggression. Rather, the Communist regime in East Germany was concerned about the number of German workers fleeing to the West to gain jobs and opportunities not available in the moribund, party-directed, centrally planned economy that had been established, under Soviet compulsion, in the East. The wall wasn’t direct aggression, but it was a case of Khrushchev thumbing his nose at the new American president and suggesting something more sinister: that Russia might at some point try to eject the Americans, British and French from Berlin altogether.
The Journal’s commentary on the erection of the Berlin Wall included a long, thoughtful piece titled “Berlin: Background of a Crisis,” written by John F. “Jack” Bridge, who had a short time earlier switched to the editorial page staff from his former job running the Journal’s front page. Referring to the partition plan, originally designed by a committee headed by British Socialist Clement Attlee and agreed to at Yalta with very little debate or discussion, Bridge quoted something Harry Truman had written: “This shows conclusively that heads of state should be very careful about horseback agreements, because there is no way of foretelling the final result.” Bridge thought that the statesmen of 1961 would do well to ponder that thought.
Berlin, with its small western enclave surrounded by Soviet-controlled territory, would remain a Soviet hostage throughout the Cold War. Its tenuous circumstances would play a role in the strategic calculations involved in the Cold War’s most dangerous face-off, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fidel Castro, after seizing control of the Cuban government in 1958, had sought Soviet protection, which the Soviets willingly but slyly provided. In 1962, word began to filter out of Cuba that the Soviets were installing launching sites for medium-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to a large number of U.S. cities. At first, it seemed to Khrushchev that he had been right, that the Americans were “too liberal” to block his daring gambit.
But as confirmation of what the Soviets were up to became clearer, JFK and his aides realized they had a major problem on their hands. Fear of the Soviet missiles was spreading across the United States. In a televised speech to the nation on October 22, 1962, JFK announced that he was “quarantining Cuba” and demanding that the Russians withdraw their missiles. That bold challenge alerted the nation that we might be on the verge of a nuclear war. It created a bull market in bomb shelters.
I was a rewrite man on the Page One desk when, on the morning of October 23, Royster ambled over to our area and asked in his North Carolina drawl, “Waal, are we all going to get blown up?” None of us clever wordsmiths had a flip answer for that question. We were too scared. The next day, the Journal had a long editorial, following up on the short vote of support Royster had given Kennedy on deadline the night before. It was reminiscent of the “we will do our duty” editorial Grimes had written after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941.
Royster wrote: “The President has now committed the nation to the proposition that we will not permit the Cuban island to be turned into a threat to the safety of our country and of the Western Hemisphere. On that proposition the whole nation is prepared to support the president at whatever risks, now or hereafter. There should be no mistake about that.
“It is precisely for this reason that it would be unfortunate to have the President’s decision beclouded by doubts as to his judgment, suspicion as to his motives or uncertainty as to his resolution to carry through with the other decisions this decision may demand.
“Yet there is no denying that such clouds exist and that the President must work diligently to dispel them.”
Having given the president support in this moment of extreme danger when the American navy was already stopping ships on the Atlantic to search for arms bound for Cuba and a shooting war with Russia might break out any time, Royster discussed the long delay that had occurred before the administration had brought the missile crisis to a head. He wrote that we could pass that over but for the fact that the naval blockade was not the end but the beginning of the hazards and its outcome was uncertain. We didn’t know if the Russians would counter with some move on Berlin, for example.
“When any nation embarks upon a course so hazardous, it must have the trust not only in its destiny but in those who lead it . . .
“What the President has now done is, we believe, well done. But we have no illusions about what it entails. So in what comes hereafter he is going to need the full confidence of the country, and it is imperative that the country have full confidence in the President. Assuring that is a task in which he must not fail.”
Whether Kennedy in the heat of a crisis read the Journal editorial is not known. He had become increasingly annoyed at Journal editorials as he passed into his second year in office, and he probably would not have liked the implication that he was slow to react to the missile crisis. But in the event, he did not fail. When Khrushchev realized that the United States was mobilizing its massive air and sea power in preparation for an attack, he backed down and agreed to pull the missiles out of Cuba in return for a U.S. guarantee that it would not invade Cuba short of a major provocation. The United States also agreed to pull some obsolescent missiles out of Turkey, a part of the deal not publicized at the time. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it: “We were eyeball to eyeball and someone blinked.”
By the end of the month, Royster was able to write that the Cuban Missile Crisis seemed to be ending in a “significant victory for the U.S. and President Kennedy in particular.” The editorial went on to say that when the United States was willing to deploy its power, it could put the enemy on the defensive and even on the run.
But there was a lesson for peace as well: “Some people around the world did a good deal of hand-wringing at the forceful American policy on Cuba and the Kremlin; anything, including surrender, it seemed to them, was preferable to the high risk of war. But the truth is that the Soviet missile installations were a threat to peace and only by our risking war could peace be preserved.”
JFK had indeed won a major battle, but the Cold War was by no means over. And, there are some plausible interpretations of his assassination just over a year later that suggest that his success in embarrassing Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev might have cost him his life. No one will ever know for sure what motivated the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, but his Soviet and Cuban connections will always give credence to the theory that his death was a consequence of a Soviet desire to extract vengeance for its missile crisis defeat. The KGB was capable of any imaginable atrocity.
