A Warm November Day

It was a warm Friday afternoon, especially for November, in Washington, D.C.  Our sixth grade class was engaged in copying spelling words or some such busy work.  It was silent in the room except for the hum of the fluorescent lights.  The blinds were drawn to cut the glare from the sunshine.  Many of my classmates had their heads on their desks, fighting sleep.  I couldn’t wait to go home, get rid of my starched white shirt and neck tie and run down to the neighborhood playground and see if anyone was there for a pick-up basketball game.

The principal at my school, St. Ann School in Arlington, Virginia, was Sister Joseph Marie (or “JM” as we called her).  We all lived in mortal fear of her.   We were never summoned to her office because we had done something really good.  She never came to the classroom.   We were all shocked out of our reverie when the door exploded open and JM stormed in like her habit was on fire.  Her face was crimson and her hands were trembling.  She glared at us.  She thrust her hands on her hips to try to calm herself.  She was stooped over and looked suddenly very old.  What in God’s holy name had we done to incur this wrath?

She collected herself finally and in a cracking voice announced: “Your President has been shot and you better pray!”

That was it.  She twirled around and stomped towards the next classroom.  Our homeroom teacher was a younger nun. (Exact nun ages are hard to guess.)  She calmly told us to take out our rosaries and we recited the requisite “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys”.  Lacking any other direction, we lapsed into an even more intense silence.  My eyes focused on dust that was floating in the air and highlighted by the afternoon sun while questions bounced around inside my brain:  “Who? Why? How bad?”  Dismissal time came and we walked silently, singe file, into the coat room.  Contrary to every other day in the coat room, there was no chatter or banter.  I looked at my best friend Danny and our eyes locked.  He then rabbit punched me in the shoulder, wheeled around and returned to his seat.  I grabbed my jacket and lunch box and returned to my seat as well, trying to ignore the throb in my deltoid.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic president.  He was young and therefore in direct contrast to the men he had followed.  He had a beautiful wife and little kids.  He was an idealist.  We all idolized him.  My Republican parents bought a new television (which was extremely out of character) to watch his inauguration.  My older sister had volunteered for his campaign.  JFK was bigger than life.  We felt like we knew him.  We trusted him.  We felt safe with him in the White House.  (It had only been a year since he called the Commie’s bluff in Cuba and made Khrushchev back down, after all.)  He audaciously promised Americans would walk on the moon by the end of the decade and, for some crazy reason, we all believed him. 

I walked briskly home, noticing that there was very little traffic.  The brilliant sunlight brought out the vivid reds and yellows in the crinkly leaves on the sidewalks.  When I got home, the house was empty.  My Mom didn’t work or drive and I don’t really remember where she was.  I had a house key and let myself in.  I ran for the TV in time to see Walter Cronkite take off his clunky black glasses and, fighting back tears, announce that John Kennedy had just died. 

We lived the rest of that day and night in a numb cloud.  My mother came home shortly thereafter and my Dad drove home early from work in downtown D.C.  We hardly spoke.  I don’t remember what we ate for dinner, but being Friday, it was probably frozen Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks. The meal was eaten off of unstable aluminum TV tray tables as we were assaulted with images of a frantic Jackie Kennedy scrambling on the back of the black Lincoln limousine for a fragment of her husband’s skull, a somber Lyndon Johnson taking the Oath of Office on Air Force One and anguished mourners on the streets of cities around the world.  Most of our food went uneaten.

Saturday was an even more spectacular weather day as was Sunday.  We went to Mass which should have helped but didn’t.  Back at home I finally had had enough funereal television viewing and needed to go shoot some baskets, run around the block, do anything but sit stunned in front of the TV.  I stood up in our small family room, stretched, and was about to depart when they announced that Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin, was to be transferred to another jail.  While watching that, a man named Jack Ruby emerged from a cluster of bystanders and fatally shot Oswald at point blank range on live television.  At that point I was sure that the world had gone officially mad.

I had similar feelings over the ensuing years.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and rioters nearly destroyed my city.  Bobby Kennedy was killed while running for President, ending the hope of a quick resolution of the Viet Nam war.  The war itself escalated and too many of my contemporaries were killed or wounded.  Images of dead and maimed teenagers in the jungles of Southeast Asia emanated from the same television screen which had shown me Jackie Kennedy in her pink coat stained with her husband’s blood. The nation was then deceived and nearly destroyed by Richard Nixon and his cronies as the drama painfully unfolded, again, on national television. 

Even the cumulative shock of all of those events pales, however, compared to the warm November day that my president was shot.

Book Review: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Author: Tim Weiner

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Date Published: June, 2007 (Hardcover Edition)

Pages: 848 (Trade Paper Edition, including notes)

This book begins with a quote from 17^th century French literary figure Jean Racine: “There are no secrets that time does not reveal.”  It appears that time, the Freedom of Information Act and author Tim Weiner have revealed many of the most closely kept secrets of CIA.  They also have shattered any myth of competence and exposed the many weaknesses of and abuses of power by CIA in its sixty year history.  Tim Weiner is a respected investigative journalist, having written about American intelligence for “The New York Times” for over twenty years and received a Pulitzer Prize for his work on secret national security programs.

The book is divided by presidential administration, beginning with the founding of CIA under Harry Truman.  The title of the book is derived from a quote by Dwight Eisenhower and summarizes his assessment of the intelligence community’s performance during his administration and what he was leaving for the incoming President, John F. Kennedy.

The purpose for founding CIA was to provide accurate information to the President regarding our enemies as well as allies so that the President and cabinet could then make intelligent foreign policy decisions.  The battle early on was between “information gatherers” and “covert operators”.  Eventually the covert ops advocates took charge, mainly under the influence of the first Director, Allen Dulles.  Covert operations eventually expanded to include fomenting revolution (Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia and more), assassinations and domestic spying.

Two of the more shocking and frightening parts of the book are the accounts of CIA’s involvement in the assassination of President Diem of South Vietnam under the direction of John and Robert Kennedy as well as the multiple CIA attempts on the life of Fidel Castro.  The book implies that the subsequent assassination of JFK was direct retaliation by Cuba.  CIA knew of contacts between Lee Harvey Oswald and the Cuban embassy in Mexico City in the weeks leading up to November 22, 1963.  Some of this information was withheld from the Warren Commission and many on that Commission were skeptical of their conclusions (including a young representative, Gerald Ford, who was keeping CIA briefed on all of the proceedings).

The second shocking revelation is the outright lies that many Presidents have told the Congress as well as the American people about CIA activities.  These include Dwight Eisenhower lying about U2 spy plane missions over the Soviet Union and Ronald Regan stating unequivocally in his State of the Union message that the United States never supplied arms to Iran when CIA had, in fact, done just that with the full awareness of the Chief Executive. 

Parts of the book read like a Laurel and Hardy comedy.  One example is the U.S. Army aiding and supplying President Sukarno of Indonesia as he fought a coup attempt from his own military which was sponsored by and supplied by CIA.  A second example is the attempts at putting agents on the ground in North Korea during the Korean War.  Every agent dropped into the North was immediately captured and either killed or turned into a double agent within twenty four hours of being deployed. 

The recent intelligence failures regarding Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden and Iraq are all well documented and are the final “mind bogglers” in this narrative.  Although there was a Presidential caveat to eliminate Bin Laden during the Clinton administration, CIA missed opportunity after opportunity because (at least in Mr. Weiner’s opinion) of George Tenet’s reticence.  The fiasco of the cruise missile which was launched to take out a munitions cache in Bosnia and instead destroyed the Chinese embassy was based on faulty CIA intelligence.  The now infamous “unequivocal proof” of the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was based on CIA data from one very unreliable source and came second hand from Germany.  That “intelligence” was also years old when it was given to the White House and used as justification for the invasion of Iraq.  All of the pundits who decry George W. Bush’s domestic surveillance and abuse of personal rights and liberties should understand that this type of thing has been going on since the inception of CIA.  CIA was used for domestic spying in the 50s against suspected communists, in the 60s and 70s against civil rights advocates and the anti-war movement and now against suspected terrorists.

This book is a thorough (605 pages plus 175 pages of notes and footnotes) discussion and explanation of American foreign policy over the last sixty years.  If you haven’t read a newspaper in decades or believe that everything that America does in the world is right and just and motivated by good intentions, this book will shock and infuriate you.  If you are cynical about our representative government and believe that power corrupts, this book will do nothing but support that view.  If you are the least bit paranoid, you probably should not read this book at all.  Let’s hope that future presidents have either read this book or have it next on their “must read” list so that they don’t fall into the same traps and temptations as their predecessors.

Book Review: One Minute to Midnight

(Blogger Note:  As many of you know, I write a monthly book review for "LamLIGHT" - the newsletter of the Lynchburg Academy of Medicine.  This review was published earlier this summer.  I will post my new reviews as they are released in LamLight and, occasionally, one of my favorites from the past.)

One Minute to Midnight

By Michael Dobbs

The death of Osama Bin Laden was met with many emotions and prompted much rhetoric in the press.  One of the commentaries which I found quite compelling was one by a talking head on CNN who spoke of “the children of 9/11.”  He was not referring to the children of victims of that tragic day’s attacks, but the children who have grown up under the specter of terrorism.  He wondered how growing up in an “unsafe and unpredictable world” would affect these kids as adults.  That got me thinking back to my childhood and the specter of nuclear annihilation which my generation grew up with.  I was ten years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis and I lived and went to school 3.8 miles from the Pentagon.  We had a Civil Defense air raid siren on the corner of our playground.  We were made to bring bottled water and canned goods to school in case we were trapped.  We practiced getting under our desks during a nuclear strike.  Who were we kidding?   We knew we were toast.  I have recollections of John Kennedy appearing on TV that fateful Sunday to inform the American people that the U.S. had discovered Russian   missiles on the island of Cuba.  I remember the Naval embargo and watching the TV with bated breath as Soviet ships approached the embargo line in the Caribbean.  Then my recollections get a bit fuzzy, but I remember that it seemed like it was quickly all over:  the Russians backed off, Kennedy had prevailed and the world was sort of safe again.  That was not exactly the case.

     Michael Dobbs has written what is probably the definitive book about the Cuban missile crisis.  He uses recently declassified American and Soviet documents and photos.  He also interviewed many of the key players (American, Soviet and Cuban) who were part of the Russian weapons deployment, the United States’ response and the Cubans who were ostensibly the pawns in this whole nuclear showdown chess match.  He has written a minute by minute narrative of every detail of the crisis which reads with more spell binding, fear inspiring, trembe inducing terror than any Ludlum, Clancy or Le Carre novel. 

     The opening of the book recreates the political atmosphere which created the crisis.  America was feeling technologically inferior to the Russians and the common thinking (albeit false) was that the US lagged the Russians badly in the production of nuclear weapons.  This supposed “missile gap” was, in fact one of the major issues which got John Kennedy elected in the first place.  The US had also been embarrassed by the loss of a U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union and Dwight Eisenhower’s obfuscation of the plane’s mission (he claimed it was on a weather data collection flight over Turkey, when in fact, the Russians proved it was taking photos of military installations while flying over the Soviet Union).  Castro, not long in power and paranoid of an American led counter-revolution, was in fear of a more organized Bay of Pigs style invasion of his island country.  The Soviet Union felt besieged by NATO (i.e., American) nuclear weapons deployed in Europe.  This led to the unlikely alliance of Castro and Nikita Kruschev and the placement of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba.

     What the US was unaware of then and until recently, was that the Soviets also had battlefield or “tactical” nuclear weapons in Cuba which would have easily annihilated an American invasion force.  The US was also unaware of the number of Soviet troops in Cuba and the fact that there were longer range missiles there which could have easily reached New York, Washington and many other Southeastern American cities.  There were, indeed, preparations in place (code named “Operation Mongoose,” organized by the CIA and under the control of Robert Kennedy) for an invasion of Cuba.  The American leadership was also under the impression that there were no nuclear warheads in Cuba yet, but this, again, has been proven to be false.

The American people had no idea of the division of opinion in the upper levels of government regarding how to respond to this Soviet nuclear threat in our own back yard.  The author makes it painfully clear that there were many who advocated a “first strike” approach with a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.  Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the commander of the Strategic Air Command and future Vice Presidential candidate with George Wallace (1968), when asked what he would do about the Cubans, replied “Fry ‘em.”   (Incidentally, LeMay was the inspiration for the crazed Air Force General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie “Dr. Strangelove.”)   Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and others felt that Kruschev could not be trusted and that an aggressive first strike was the only acceptable response.  Fortunately, or we all would not be alive to learn about this, cooler heads prevailed.  The Naval blockade was implemented after much debate, and, after much wringing of hands, Bobby Kennedy met with the Soviet ambassador late on “Black Saturday”, October 27, 1962, the day which nuclear war seemed imminent.  He proposed the exchange of aging American weapons in Turkey and a promise of no American invasion of Cuba for the removal of the nuclear weapons from Cuba.

     While debate was raging in Washington, Castro became furious that the Soviets were backing down from their commitment to defend his island from America.  He demanded a Soviet first strike on the United States, anticipating an imminent invasion (which was, in fact, scheduled for the following Tuesday if talks broke off between the Americans and Soviets).  His willingness to die for his cause and take his island nation into nuclear holocaust with him is unbelievable. 

     The author also writes of many inadvertent events, any of which could have triggered a nuclear holocaust.  Another U2 wandered off of its flight path over the North Pole and mistakenly entered Russian airspace just as Kennedy and Kruschev were exchanging the beginnings of what became the ultimate compromise.  American ships dropped dummy depth charges on four Soviet submarines (armed with nuclear tipped torpedos) in the Caribbean to try to pinpoint their location.  These subs had lost communication with Moscow and they were uncertain as to whether they were actually at war or not.  One of the subs came incredibly close to firing its nuclear torpedoes which would have taken out an entire carrier group and, obviously, triggered a nuclear response.  Another U2 was shot down over Cuba, despite orders from Moscow to the contrary.  Any or all of these events could have triggered nuclear war. 

    This book is packed with facts and documented like an academic treatise.  It is suspenseful and terrifying at the same time.  It is an event which seems almost anecdotal nearly sixty years later, but had one small decision or event gone differently and the world as we know it would not exist. 

     So, this gets me back to my original question?   Do the “children of 9/11” have more uncertainty and lack of safety than previous generations?  I think not.  I think that, unfortunately, every generation has had its 9/11, its Cuban Missile Crisis, its Pearl Harbor, its near-Apocalyptic event.  This age of information may make us more aware of our dire straits, but they have always been there.  Awareness of these historical events is prudent, though, because as was stated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!  But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”