Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
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