I am writing this on October 22, the fifty-third anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, the day when President John F. Kennedy made a speech to the nation announcing that the US had detected Soviet missile bases being constructed in Cuba – and demanding that they be removed. A US naval ‘quarantine’ was imposed on the island, and the world held its breath as World War III hung in the balance.
Watching Kennedy’s televised speech brings back memories, none of them good. In those days, ‘duck and cover’ air raid drills were part of our routine at school, although at my school in suburban Yorktown Heights they eventually resorted to simply sounding the rather frightening air raid alarm and trooping us all out onto the playground – presumably so we could all die in the open air.
The specter of nuclear war was an integral part of my childhood: the science fiction stories I read and watched on television were obsessed with the subject, projecting visions of nuclear devastation and the mutant world that would emerge from the rubble. Who can forget Zsa Zsa Gabor in ‘Queen of Outer Space,’ when she drops her mask to reveal a face hideously distorted by nuclear radiation? Us kids used to play a game, ‘let’s pretend there’s been an atomic war’: as we hiked through the abundant woodlands that then surrounded Yorktown Heights, we would come across the remnants of abandoned shacks, only their concrete foundations evident through the undergrowth of weeds: ‘Oh look,’ we would cry, ‘they must’ve been quite advanced, these earthlings! But why did they destroy their civilization?’
Why, indeed.
For weeks after Kennedy’s speech we were scared out of our wits, convinced that our childish games were about to become reality. Air raid drills in school assumed a somber air. Little did we know that President Kennedy, while not quite lying through his perfect teeth, was speaking disingenuously when he said:
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on October 23, 2015.
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