When people think of the civil rights movement, they often think of Selma or Montgomery, Ala., Atlanta or Memphis.
Maybe they should think of Grundy County, Tenn.
After all, it was at the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County that early civil rights strategy was mapped out. At Highlander, white and black activists — including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks — met in the 1950s to talk about how they might change the South. It was at Highlander that many civil rights leaders trained
Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Greek and Roman history were saturated with violence, blood, and gore. People who naively believe that past times, particularly in antiquity, were simpler or more meaningful would benefit from reading Plutarch’s Lives before making such a statement regarding values.
The Greek author Plutarch was primarily a philosopher concerned with the branch of ethics. This epic anthology of essays reads more like historical biography, though. Each chapter tells the life story of a Greek or Roman general or politician, with the Persian Artaxerxes being the sole exception. These biographies are paired in an unaltered succession of Greeks and then Romans in that respective order throughout the whole collection. At the end of each pairing, a short comparison of the two regarding their strengths and weaknesses provides an evaluation to explicate which of the two proved to be more virtuous. As a work of ethical philosophy, Lives does not stand on its own very well. This is mostly because the evaluations are short and sketchy while rarely every coming to any strong conclusions while the biographical histories are bulky and overloaded with detail. The ethical comparisons are the weakest parts of the book,
So be it. Lives may not be a profound ethical treatise but as a source of history it proves to be a rich and rewarding read. At the beginning we are treated to writings about the early days of Athens and Sparta alongside the foundations of Rome. This includes the classic story of the Rape Of the Sabine Women. The first third of the book mostly details battles, wars, and minor military skirmishes with the central theme being about the generals who led these melees. This first part of the book is exciting at first but quickly becomes redundant in its descriptiveness; there are only so many battles that armies can fight on foot and horseback, using swords, shield, and arrows before they all start sounding the same. Aside from classical warfare strategies, many of which resemble plays in modern team sports, scattered bits of interesting trivia do emerge. For instance, it becomes easy to see why the eagle was adapted as a symbol of Roman military superiority since their warriors would line up with a left wing and a right wing to swoop down on their enemies, just like a bird of prey. Plutarch also heaps praise on the head of one Greek general who invented the iron helmet because wearing such a heavy headpiece would cause a combatant’s sword to break when striking the head of their opponent. This sounds like a good idea on the surface but the modern reader has to consider the wisdom of wearing a twenty pound piece of metal on their head in the sweltering Mediterranean climate. Being smacked with a sword while wearing an iron helmet could not have felt pleasant either. This was centuries before aspirin and acetaminophen were invented too. Warfare in those days could not have been much fun and from the looks of it, that was the primary occupation for men in those days.
Further into the book, the historical themes begin to vary. As the Greek and Roman Empires expand outwards, the lifestyles and personalities of their leaders get described in greater detail. The most familiar names like Cicero, Cato the Younger, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Antony are the literary high points of the Lives. Alexander of Macedon does more than inherit Greece from his father, Philip, who conquered the territory; he also marches across Persia and India, expanding the eastern border of the Greek Empire. Alexander’s conquest of India is curious. There were a few small battles here and there, some diplomacy and negotiations every now and then, but mostly he rode around with a fleet of boats, entering village after village to declare each one his own territory. You just have to wonder how seriously his new subjects took him after he left and never came back again.
One of the great elements of Plutarch’s writings is the way he points out multiple perspectives on individuals and events. Along the way, he mentions conflicting details as written in different source materials, but this element of shifting perspectives is really driven home in the telling and re-telling of the life of Julius Caesar. The story of his turn from senatorial consul to dictator, along with the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire, is examined from the points of view of Pompey, Cicero, Antony, Brutus, and Cato the Younger, among others, each in their respective biographies. Thereby we see how he could have been taken as a hero of the people or as a power-hungry tyrant depending on who you ask. The idea that news is always biased is not a contemporary notion as Plutarch demonstrated this principle here, possibly also keeping the doors open to moral relativism for future generations since the ethics of Caesar’s assassination are ambiguous from the standpoint of those involved in the plot.
Yet another interesting aspect of Plutarch is his chronological overview of the Greek and Roman Empires. This was not his intention in writing the Lives but the historical patterns emerge nonetheless. If you are inclined to think of the two ancient superpowers in terms of stages succeeding one another, you get a different picture from the way the biographies are paired and contrasted. It would be more accurate to say that Greece and Rome ran along parallel paths until the Greeks were absorbed into Macedonia and then began expanding outwards. As they began to decline, Rome ascended and the two merged into one another. Plutarch himself was a product of this historical process being an Athenian who moved to Rome and based his writings on research he did from books kept in that dominant city of the Italian peninsula. By the end of this book, the Greek and Roman armies are so intertwined, it is difficult to tell them apart. An interesting pattern emerges in Rome too. As the Romans expand westwards into Gaul and Spain, then eastwards across Turkey, called Asia in these histories, and further into Parthia, Armenia, and Syria, the city of Rome begins to implode with lots of civil disturbances, assassinations, and violence between factions competing for power. The idea that Rome fell as a result of barbarian invasions does not stand up so strongly when it becomes obvious that localized, civil strife did a lot to weaken the republic from the inside before the Goths or Vandals showed up on the scene long after Plutarch died.
Despite its relevancy to historical narratives, Plutarch’s Lives, with its glut of information, may not always be an easy read for modern audiences. While he attempts to write biographies of each personage, this writing is not biographical in the way we understand it in today’s world. This was written long before psychology was conceived of as a means of interpretation so what we get are examinations of character traits and behaviors, mostly looked at through a lens of moral judgment. While there are a few comments on subjective motivations here and there, hinting at what we would consider an inner life by today’s standards, the people of this book act as if they are pushed and pulled by instincts and impulses while the finer elements of their psychology are projected outwards into the machinations of the gods, some of which are revealed to them by auguries and divination. As we now know, such fortune telling is far from an exact science. It makes for interesting poetics though. The writing is often long-winded too but this could be a fault of the translator’s.
Plutarch’s Lives is a tough and masculine book, permeated with violence from beginning to end. Every pages details warfare on both land and sea, along with governmental overthrows, torture, punishment, assassinations, and suicides. Most of the descriptions are not quite as graphic as what Homer wrote in The Iliad, but Plutarch does have his vivid moments of sadistic fascination. You can easily get the impression that the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean did little more than fight and kill each other, but it would be unwise to overstate that idea since the Greeks and Romans contributed so much to the evolution modern culture, the humanities, engineering, and politics that we should not forget the enormous debt we owe to them for these advancements, made when people had so much less than what we have now. Overall, Plutarch is not for the general or casual reader, nor for the faint of heart, but his Lives are a real treasure for those with an honest curiosity about the ancient world.
Plutarch. Lives, translated by John Dryden. The Modern Library, New York.
“Ahh, greetings my friend. We are all interested in the future because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”
Well, there’s no arguing with that – one of the few statements from legendary psychic Criswell that had any level of accuracy. Yet despite – or possibly because of – his outlandish claims for extraordinary future events that failed to come to pass, Criswell was a popular celebrity for many years, a mainstay of television and popular culture. Admittedly, it would seem that as many of his public appearances were on shows where he was treated as a figure of fun rather than a genuine fortune teller, but still...
According to Cherry, a character in Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, people are either “souls” or “spirits”. The souls are those that are powerful enough to run America and the spirits are merely everybody else, the ordinary people who don’t. The people who are worst off are the souls who fell and became spirits because they are able to remember what it meant to have influence. This is the main thrust of this novel. Almost all of the main characters are people who pursued the American Dream, maybe got a taste of it, and then fell into obscurity.
Stephen Rojack is the main character, an ex-congressman, a talk show host, a college professor, a decorated war hero, and a man who once was on a first name basis with John F. Kennedy. His life starts to go to hell when he realizes he doesn’t fit in with the upper crust of American society and everything then gets worse when he kills his wife then tries to make it look like a suicide.
As the novel opens he is having a conversation with the moon. The moon tells him to kill himself but he doesn’t and goes after his wife Deborah instead. The moon serves different purposes throughout the novel. First, it is a reference to the moon goddess and the muse of poetic inspiration, a literary tradition that goes as far back into history as the written word itself. The contrast between the moon’s elevated position in the sky and the symbolism of falling run through the whole story. At a primal level, the moon is also associated with witchcraft and magic; references to the occult permeate the narrative. The moon also indicates Rojack’s mental instability, hence the word “lunatic”. His delusional belief in the powers of magic ambiguously demonstrate the possibility that Rojack can not face reality, possibly due to mental illness. The moon talks to him and tells him what to do, acting as his conscience and guide but the question pf whether he is sane or not, a psychotic man hearing voices, is a constant theme, a question that only gets answered in the epilogue. Finally, the moon moves the story along as a literary device the same way that the witches function as a chorus in Macbeth. Mailer semiotically invokes literary tradition but the character of Rojack also represents the end point of this traditional line of symbolism; he is a man who wants to leave his past behind and start his life over again.
Rojack’s wife, Deborah, plays a prominent role at the start of the novel. She is a wealthy, well-connected, high society woman. She has a social life that is both active and secretive as she and Rojack are separated. Not only is he of lower social class than her but she also belittles him, plays with him, and emasculates him with insults and cruel put downs. When he goes to visit her in her apartment, she demands a divorce so he strangles her and tries to make it look like a suicide by throwing her out the window. Notice the symbolism of falling.
While this murder is the main event of the story, what happens next plays a symbolic role in showing where Rojack’s life is heading next. Rojack seduces the German maid Ruta. While having sex with her, he alternates between penetrating her vagina and anus. This takes on significance as his own inner conflict between good and evil. When he is in her vagina, the sensation is described as Heaven and when he is in her ass it is described as being in Hell. He is faced with the choice of ejaculating in her vagina and getting her pregnant, this option of following the path of good, but ejaculating in her ass means choosing evil and following the path of Satan. Rojack chooses evil and therefore lies about his wife’s death to the police, reusing to admit that he murdered her, despite the obvious evidence against him.
Stephen Rojack later goes to a secretive after-hours bar to meet up with Cherry, a mafia princess and mediocre nightclub vocalist. Despite her less-than-stellar singing abilities, she proves to be a strong woman. She bosses the mafiosos in the bar around and it is clear that she holds power over them. She takes Rojack back to her apartment for sex but through their dialogue, the crux of their life situation is revealed. Cherry is romantically involved with an up and coming African-American singer and Harlem gang leader named Shago Martin but she wants to get rid of him. In fact, she wants to leave her whole past behind. She is tired of the mafia and craves an ordinary existence without all the violence. Rojack, showing no remorse, admits that he killed Deborah because he also feels empty and wanted to leave his old life behind. Both of them have become yet two more people who are lost in the world. They quickly fall in love and start making plans for the future. You have to wonder if they are just drunk and caught up in the heat of the moment or if they are serious but naive in regards to their circumstances,
A lot more gets revealed when Cherry’s boyfriend, Shago Martin shows up to confront Rojack. Shago comes at him with a knife but tensions ease and Rojack listens as the singer explains his point of view. He once had ambitions to be a prominent Civil Rights activist, going on Freedom Ride demonstrations in the South but upon returning to Harlem, jealous people accused him of being interested in publicity only after his picture appeared on the front page of the newspapers. Nonetheless, he continued trying to climb out of the ghetto by pursuing his career as a jazz singer. Shago actually hated Rojack’s wife, Deborah, because he once sang at a charity event and she was so patronizing to him, insulting him for being Black that he, ironically, wanted to see her dead. Both Rojack and Cherry listen to his story attentively and with some sympathy, but Shago again insists on fighting Rojack. The altercation ends with Shago being thrown down the stairs. Again, notice the symbolism of falling.
But it is not Shago’s fault that he descends so brutally down the stairs. He is thrown down by a white man. This is Mailer’s acknowledgment that the white power structure is holding the Black people down. The fist fight between Rojack and Shago is further emblematic of the statement Mailer makes about violence. The two men, while being angry and confrontational with each other, also display some mutual admiration for each other. This respect is not enough for them to resolve their conflict in an intelligent way though, so they resort to violence instead. If you read carefully, Rojack’s act of violence is ultimately a failure. If W.E.B. DuBois had read this novel, he might say that their fight resulted from a mutual incomprehension because Black and white people don’t know how to get along. That isn’t inherently bad, as he would have it; it just means that they haven’t learned enough about each other to have a constructive dialogue.
In regards to this fight as a variety of failure, at first Rojack feels triumphant for having won but this sensation is a short-term, fleeting stimulation. What happens next is that Cherry loses respect for him. She wants to leave her mafia life behind but at that point Rojack just looks like another violent mobster to her. The long term effects also have deadly consequences for Cherry later in the novel and Rojack loses her forever. Mailer is pointing out the futility of using violence as a means of solving problems.
The fight with Shago Martin is not the only act of violence that fails to solve problems. Returning to Rojack’s murder of his wife, he seems elated at first but as the novel goes on, he finds that no one believes his story about her suicide. Since the incident was reported in the news, everyone he meets brings up the subject, honestly telling him that they believe he murdered her. Rojack is the O.J. Simpson of the 1960s. He wants to escape from his past but people keep reminding him of it over and over and over again. To make matters worse, the negative publicity costs him his teaching job and his TV show gets cancelled, ironically replaces by a music show hosted by Shago Martin. The murder of Deborah has caused his life to collapse. Again, the act of violence leads to failure for Rojack, not success.
While on the subject of symbols, it must be pointed out that falling plays a key role in unpacking the meaning of this novel. Falling is what most of the characters have in common. As the novel opens, Rojack is vomiting off a balcony, onto the parapet below, an image that foreshadows the path everyone he encounters is on. The suicidal Rojack prepares to jump from that same balcony but changes his mind and instead throws Deborah out her window. Then Shago Martin gets thrown down the stairs. Finally Rojack flirts with death by walking along a tenth story balcony railing in the rain, risking a final, mortal fall. This falling symbolism is an echo of Satan’s fall from Heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Remember that Rojack chose the path of evil when he sodomized Ruta. But Rojack had begun his fall before that. He fell out of favor with his wife and became an outsider in the privileged social life he strove to be part of. Her murder started an avalanche that took him further downwards, straight into hell. His subjective thoughts are permeated with images of loneliness and despair and he wanders in a fog of bad smells and fetid odors that he can’t escape from. As Rojack moves around New York City, his life just keeps getting worse.
Deborah is also a fallen character. When Rojack married her she was glamorous, charming, and pretty. By the time he kills her, she is a mean-spirited, overweight alcoholic. After the murder, he finds himself entangled in a web involving big corporate business, the mafia, and the CIA. He learns that Deborah was extremely promiscuous, working as a spy and having sex with men in exchange for intelligence. She was a low level agent, not taken seriously by others, and there is an implication that spies were feeding her false information so they could use her for sex. The more we learn about Deborah, the more her glamorous image is tarnished. Her darkest secret is revealed when Rojack meets with her powerful father at the end.
Shago Martin also falls while he is climbing. Not only does Rojack throw him down the stairs, but Cherry also dumps him after he insists she have an abortion. His desire to be a political activist got cut short because of the members in his community, while being a prominent gang leader in Harlem who gets beat up by a middle-aged white man can not be anything but humiliation. This is even worse because Rojack’s wife insulted him when he sang at her charity ball.
Cherry is also a character on the decline. Her ambition was to escape from a small-town life of poverty by getting cozy with the mafia. While she gained a high degree of respectability in that crowd, she still ended up being a small time lounge singer, more respected because of her beauty than her talents. Her dream of escaping the gangster life leads her into a relationship with a man who had just murdered his wife.
All of these characters are people who strove after fame, wealth, power, privilege, and everything that we think of as The American Dream. None of them made it there. Some of them came close but then fell. Rojack and Deborah were souls, as Cherry would say, who fell and became spirits like everybody else. Cherry and Shago wanted to to become souls but never made it. They never reached The American Dream and instead were living the titular An American Dream. The shift from the definite article “the” to the indefinite article “an” signifies a lot. The American Dream is a singular, sovereign goal while an American dream is just one dream out of a multitude of dreams. It is random, anonymous, and ordinary. Like the Deborah’s large number of sexual partners, Rojack declines to being just another ordinary partner in bed; he became a dream rather than The Dream. The characters in this novel are all living this ordinary dream; they all became nothing more than the masses of plain people, wandering like lost ghosts through the American landscape, chasing after something they don’t know how to get. Mailer is saying The American Dream is nothing but an empty illusion that fades away more and more the closer you get to it.
In the end, though, Rojack does achieve freedom. He gets away with murder but to be free of the consequences and the memories, he has to leave the America, supposedly the freest country in the world, and escape to Guatemala. He chose to follow the path of evil. He achieves freedom by running away from responsibility. It is a hollow victory. The American Dream for him has been reduced to nothing but a part of his past he wants to leave behind.
In this novel, Norman Mailer juggles some important themes but it is a mixture of powerful and flawed writing. The subjective inner monologue of Stephen Rojack does a lot to carry the story. In a lot of ways, this inner voice expresses the whole significance of the book, more so than the events and plot twists but the stream-of-consciousness style varied widely from being brilliant to being vague. But the characters are well-drawn and indicate social issues that were fiercely debated at the time of its writing. Unfortunately, this also makes the novel a little dated. When Rojack brings Cherry to orgasm, Mailer is acknowledging a feminist issue that was on the table in its day. The meaning of this will probably go right over the heads of younger readers, but people who are knowledgeable about that time will recognize that the female orgasm was considered an important current issue in popular culture back then. In our times, after standards and mindsets have changed, it just unfairly comes off as sounding crude. The biggest problem with this novel, though, is that Mailer does not take it far enough. It is about a desperate man in the grips of despair but the narrative is too detached to really drive this point home effectively. Mailer was too stoic, too unemotional, too cold, and too macho to be able to plumb the depths of misery in this story so Rojack does not strike the reader as strongly as he should.
It is hard to imagine An American Dream being remembered as a classic novel. The themes and style are out of touch with the direction our society is heading in now. But it does have some elements that still make it worth reading. One question remains: why did Norman Mailer write this? In real life he stabbed his wife during a psychotic breakdown and spent a couple years in a psychiatric hospital. Fortunately, she survived. Mailer, however, lived in this shadow of this crime while struggling with mental illness for the rest of his life. Did Mailer write this in an attempt to come to terms with his own violence? On the surface, the answer appears to be no. Rojack shows no remorse. But Mailer also portrays Rojack as an antihero, an unhappy loser, living with symptoms of schizophrenia and psychosis. If you read this novel carefully, he almost sounds as if he is offering a quiet apology but this apology is too subtle for your average reader to see at first glance. Then again, maybe this theory is all wrong. Norman Mailer is dead and we can never ask him now.One thing is certain though, An American Dream is a critique of American masculinity and its problematic nature.
Mailer, Norman. An American Dream. Vintage International/Random House Inc., New York: 1997.
The American military’s nuclear weapons program was progressing rapidly. Officials were wondering what to do with their stockpile of obsolete missiles. It was at the end of the 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the American president, and the Cold War was about to take a new turn. The American military already had nuclear warheads in West Germany, Italy, and Japan, aimed and ready to fire at the USSR. One more base would make their nuclear supremacy more complete. Their obsolete missiles were offered to Turkey along with NATO membership. For the world’s most secular and modern Islamic nation, this offer was a welcome invitation to take a step up in respectability. The Turks accepted the offer with pride. The missiles were installed along the north coast, aimed at Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, ready to strike the Eurasian superpower within less than thirty minutes at any given time.
Meanwhile in the Caribbean Sea, Fidel Castro was sailing a leaky boat called Granma through a hurricane, from the shore of Mexico to the southern coast of Cuba. Along with Che Guevara and a small crew of ragged guerillas, they arrived and overthrew the American-sponsored dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista with widespread support from the rural peasantry, underfed, undernourished, and under-educated by the capitalist pigs who ran their country. Initially the non-alligned Castro had no political ideology; he only sought power. He solicited support from both America and the Soviet Union and the Soviets offered to keep him in power permanently while the Americans pushed him to hold elections and preserve Cuba’s democracy. Castro chose to take sides with the former and Cuba became a communist dictatorship.
Due to longstanding treaty obligations, the American military was forbidden under international law to invade Cuba; instead they set up a clandestine operation under the newly sworn-in president John F. Kennedy. Exiled Cuban troops in southern Florida were recruited and trained for the Bay of Pigs, an exile invasion meant to overthrow the Castro regime and reclaim Cuba as an ally of the USA. The invasion was a miserable failure. Adding fuel to this fire was another clandestine conspiracy called Operation Mongoose. Headed by the president’s younger brother Robert Kennedy, acting in concert with the CLIA, the plan was to either assassinate Fidel Castro or start a rebellion against him. When looking at their schemes, one might conclude that the scriptwriter for The Three Stooges was orchestrating the events. These actions involved hiring mafia hitmen, sneaking chemicals into Castro’s drinking water that would make his beard fall off, passing him exploding cigars, and spiking his drink with LSD before a speech so that he would ramble on nonsensically in public. After Castro had given a nine hour, fully improvised speech at the United Nations while attendees either fell asleep or left the hall, you might wonder why they thought such a sabotage operation would be necessary or even effective. . The strangest plan in Operation Mongoose consisted of having airplanes drop leaflets all over Cuba announcing, in Spanish, the second coming of Jesus Christ.
In any case, the serious-minded Fidel Castro did not like these shenanigans. He wanted to get on with the business of building Cuba up as a modern, prosperous, and independent nation.
Overseas in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev saw this situation as an opportunity to make the USSR more powerful on the world stage. America was winning the nuclear arms race with better weaponry in greater quantity, much of which was loaded and ready to fire on the Russians within a moment’s notice. The imbalance of power was unmistakable. He hatched a plot to secretly deploy Soviet nuclear missiles to Cuba. This would even things out between the two fledgling empires in their respective hemispheres.. It would also give the communists a foothold from which they could spread further into Latin America. Khrushchev also had ambitions for incorporating West Berlin into East Berlin, joining the city once again, extending the Soviet reach into Europe; their missiles in the Caribbean could be a good bargaining chip in this endeavor. At first, Castro hesitated to accept Khrushchev’s offer; the last thing he wanted was a nuclear war with America. But as the CIA continued to try wrecking Cuba’s economy, he gave in to the pressure and soon a fleet of Soviet submarines was making its way across the Atlantic Ocean.
When the submarines reached their Caribbean harbors, Cuban revolutionaries and Soviet soldiers worked together unloading the freight. At first the Soviet grunts were surprised to see brown skinned Latinos and Afro-Caribbeans speaking Spanish; in an effort to maintain absolute secrecy, the Soviet commanders told them they were being mobilized in the Arctic circle. They also did not know what they were transporting until they began to unpack the cargo. There they found nuclear warheads and equipment for building missile launchers.
Aerial photography from U-2 spy planes flying over the island captured images of unusual activity. Storage bunkers, looking like airplane hangars, were being built in palm groves meant to conceal what they contained. These were brought to the attention of John F. Kennedy who was not overly concerned until a spy on the ground in Cuba reported seeing trucks driving through the rural, muddy towns in the middle of the night. Their beds were unusually long and covered with military grade canvas. The objects being transported were too long to be logs and were, in fact, so long that the drivers had to maneuver inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, to navigate the narrow roads between buldings. The weight of the trucks were enough to get the wheels stuck in mud and considerable effort had to be made to get them up the steep hillsides.
After more U-2 spy plane missions and close inspection of the photographic findings, the CIA concluded that nuclear missiles were being installed in Cuba. What the photos revealed were a buildup of surface-to-surface and surface-to-air rockets with nuclear warheads in the process of assembly, mostly in Pinar del Rio. The crudely built launching systems were powerful enough to send missiles as far as Miami and Washington D.C.
On October 20, John F. Kennedy called a meeting with EXCOMM, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Present were Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and CIA director John McCone among others. They discussed plans including: doing nothing, diplomacy, air strikes, invasion, and a naval blockade. After some deliberation, the men of EXCOMM were mostly in favor of invading Cuba but the longer-term outcome was not so good. Aside from having the capability of a retaliatory nuclear strike on American soil, the Soviets also had the capability of dropping nuclear bombs on US allies in Europe and Asia. If China got involved, the outcome could be even worse. A nuclear war would, at best, kill off one-third of the world’s population and, at worst, lead to Mutually Assured Destruction, a situation that would rended the entire planet uninhabitable by humans. EXCOMM decided they had better move with more caution. In the end, they decided an initial blockade was the best option with diplomacy as being a back-up plan.
The American government was quickly offered assistance, both practical and logistical, from other nations in the region, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago all offered naval vessels and assistance with intelligence if needed. America moved a navy ship to the border where the Caribbean Sea becomes the Atlantic Ocean. Military bases all across the American continent were put on high alert in case of attack or invasion. ICBM’s were prepped and aimed at Cuba. Anti-missile defense systems were set to blow-up any incoming nuclear bombs. Air force squadrons were mobilized to the Southeast. Overseas military bases were gotten ready for retaliatory attacks against the Soviet Union in case of a strike in the USA or any of its NATO allies.
On the afternoon of October 22, President Kennedy went on television and announced to the world that Cuba had a stockpile of nuclear weapons that were capable of reaching American soil. He announced his strategy of quarantining Cuba to prevent any further buildup of war materials, also assuring that supplies of food and medicine would be allowed through. He ended the speech on an ominous note by stating that America was ready to fight back militarily against either Cuba or the Soviet Union if any threats were made. The response from governments around the world was largely favorable to the USA but China said they were ready and willing to enter combat if a war were to break out. From the Vatican, Pope John Paul XXIII pleaded for peace and a solution to the problem through negotiation.
Nikita Khrushchev reacted to Kennedy’s speech with calm. After advising the whole world not to panic, he did, however, deliver a telegram to Kennedy, accusing America of aggression, stating that the blockade was an act of war. He explained that Cuba’s missiles were for defensive purposes only and warned that nothing bad would happen if America just stayed away. Khrushchev’s words were deliberately vague, so Kennedy and his cabinet were not sure how to take his statement at first.
On October 25, an unflagged tanker was spotted heading towards Cuba. Officials concluded it was likely from either Romania or the USSR. After chasing and stopping it, the American navy let it go through, concluding that it contained nothing of military significance.
The next morning, when EXCOMM met with Kennedy, they pressured him to either launch air strikes against Cuba or launch an invasion. The Soviets had shown no signs of backing down at this point. The hawks were getting too eager for war and Kennedy, along with Vice-President Johnson and his brother Bobby, were going over to the dove side. Kennedy had secretly sent an ABC journalist named John Scali to meet with a Russian agent named Aleksandr Fomin. They liaised in a hotel coffee shop late at night and floated the possibility of the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American promise not to invade the island nation.
Fidel Castro believed an air raid against Cuba was imminent. During a spontaneous rally in Havana, he made a speech telling his people that war was about to begin. He assured them that Soviet missiles were ready to be used when the attack came. When the uniformed Soviet soldiers were paraded through the streets, Cubans sang, danced, and chanted, praising them as liberators, heroes, and an army of messiahs brought there to fight off the American imperialists. With bottles of potent rum and vodka, the party went on all night. Shots of liquor were exchanged while language lessons in Spanish and Russian were traded and a whole breed of Slavic-Caribbean mulattoes were conceived in the early hours of the humid morning.
Events reached their maximum peak on October 27. Over the radio, Khrushchev addressed his nation, announcing that he was offering to withdraw the nuclear missiles from Cuba if America withdrew theirs from Turkey. The Turks were livid, swearing they would never give up their bombs, and the Americans were shocked since this went against the secret negotiations that were made just days before.
While the Americans were scrambling to decide how to react to this turn, a new Soviet tanker was spotted crossing the Atlantic. The military did not even know about the fleet of submarines that were heading in the same direction. Even worse, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Cuban military with the order having been given by Raul Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and commander of the Cuban armed forces. The American pilot died in the crash.
In response, the Americans announced they would soon be launching an all-out bombardment of Cuba in an air raid and a full-scale invasion by sea. The Castro brothers escalated their threat to bomb America. Soviet diplomats immediately contacted the American government. Russian generals immediately contacted their agents in Cuba. Khrushchev decided Fidel Castro was too hot-headed and tempestuous to have any control over Soviet weaponry, so he mandated that only Soviet officers were allowed to have any access at all to the missile launching technology. After passing this information on to the Americans, Kennedy agreed to a temporary halt of any military activities. The invasion was called off for as long as the Soviets agreed not to open fire on America. Later that day, the commanding officer of the Soviet tanker heading towards the Caribbean Sea got scared, disobeyed direct orders, turned the ship around, and went back in the direction of the USSR.
President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev then made direct contact with each other. Negotiations were quick. The USSR would withdraw all their missiles from Cuba. America would withdraw their missiles from Italy and Turkey along with a publicly declared promise not the invade Cuba and leave them free to conduct their internal governmental affairs without any interference from the US government. The Italians were more than happy to comply while the Turks felt cheated. They were, however, allowed to remain a member state of NATO.
Everybody was more or less happy, except maybe the Cubans. Fidel Castro woke up and turned on his radio to listen to the news being broadcast from Miami. When he heard about the deal negotiated between Khrushchev and Kennedy, he flew into a rage and punched the mirror in his bedroom; his screams could be heard at a long distance. The Soviets had snubbed him. Without even consulting him, they conducted diplomacy with the enemy behind his back and never even contacted him to give him the latest developments. Relations between Cuba and the USSR grew frigid from then on.
A couple days later, an American warship using sonar detectors located an approaching submarine. It was a Soviet U-boat carrying a nuclear torpedo. The crew had been submerged for too long and the submarine was running out of oxygen. When the American navy commanded them to surface, they had no choice other than committing collective suicide. When they reached the top of the ocean, they were greeted with American guns pointed right at them. If the Americans had fired, the Soviets would have launched the torpedo, an obvious act of aggression. US-Soviet negotiations would have been worthless then and World War III, along with a nuclear holocaust would have begun. The Soviet submariners made haste to surrender and nothing happened. Later that evening, the Americans invited the Soviets on board their ship for dinner and a party. The Russian sailors declined but they gathered on top of their U-boat while the American military band played jazz for them to hear. Friendly greetings and toasts of hard liquor were shared across the waters before the Soviets went back home.
Nikita Khrushchev was stripped of his position by the Russian Politburo two years after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Soviet officials decided it made him look weak, even when the whole world felt relieved with the retraction of the threat of nuclear war. Relations between the American and Soviet governments remained lukewarm but cordial in the aftermath. The now-famous Red Phones were set up so that leaders of both nations could contact one another directly, though insiders say they were mostly used to have casual conversations about sports and the weather rather than politics. Relations between America and Cuba have continued to stagnate, even though Cuba no longer poses a threat to anybody anywhere.
The Cold War had heated up then cooled off again, taking a strange turn after America and Russia agreed not to bomb each other. Both sides continued to escalate the arms race, working hard to build the biggest possible nuclear arsenal in an absurd attempt at deterrence. Considering that both countries ended up with enough nuclear bombs to destroy the entire world a hundred times over, possibly even more than that, one has to wonder about the sanity and rationality of the leaders at the tops of the world’s most powerful nations. They seem to be no different than cavemen arguing over who has the biggest club but with far deadlier consequences.
In the end, only one of the three national leaders in the Cuban Missile Crisis outlived the Cold War. Fidel Castro stepped down in 2006 and handed the presidency of Cuba over to his brother Raul; he died of old age ten years later. In the last years of hus life he still insisted on wearing his military uniform at all times of the day, even when eating his breakfast.
