Editor’s note: This text first appeared in America on Nov. 16, 1962, headlined “After the Victory.”
On the late Masses on the Feast of Christ the King, the prayers of Catholics for peace, “with freedom and justice,” which the U. S. hierarchy had requested from Rome, carried overtones of joyous thanksgiving. For by that point it was widely known that Chairman Khrushchev had agreed to dismantle Soviet bases in Cuba and ship his missiles back to Russia. This gesture, subject to UN verification, seemingly removed the explanation for the crisis which, for nearly per week, gripped the eye of the world.
We are saying “seemingly” removed the danger since the Kennedy Administration, fresh from its latest experience with Soviet duplicity, is taking no possibilities of one other doublecross. As that is being written, the Navy and Air Force remain on the alert within the Caribbean. There might be, and needs to be, no leisure of U. S. vigilance until the removal of the Soviet threat has been fully confirmed.
Although we’re too near the event for full evaluation of the U. S. response to the Soviet challenge, it is evident that in a single respect, at the very least, the Cold War has taken a hopeful turn.
Although we’re too near the event for full evaluation of the U. S. response to the Soviet challenge, it is evident that in a single respect, at the very least, the Cold War has taken a hopeful turn. If the lads within the Kremlin, unlike the late Adolf Hitler, are coldly rational of their grab for world power, they at the moment are aware that the policy of atomic blackmail has its limits. Like people all over the place, Americans blanch on the considered a nuclear holocaust. Nevertheless, so firmly are they persuaded that there exist higher values than mere survival that there’s a point beyond which they can’t be pushed. They’d not moderately be Red than dead, as Moscow suspected they could be.
We cannot make sure, in fact, what it was that finally led Khrushchev, after several momentous days of blustering and face-saving indecision, to capitulate. But it surely might have been evidence, which grew because the crisis deepened, that the American people as an entire were standing solidly with their President, come what might. Except within the stock and commodity markets, which have their very own special laws, there have been remarkably few signs of panic. And if a tiny minority of Americans demonstrated against the quarantine of Cuba, an excellent larger minority felt that the President had not gone far enough. The Kremlin had good reason to conclude that, if it didn’t back down, it will have an actual shooting war on its hands.
On this sense, the Cuban crisis, which may perhaps have been provoked to check the mettle of our people, could be said to have been a turning point within the Cold War. Any longer, there might be less probability than formerly that the Soviet Union will, through miscalculation, precipitate a nuclear war.
The danger from the expansionist drive of world communism stays, in fact, as even the Indian government is now starting to understand. (It’s good Leninist tactics to take a backward step today with the intention to move two steps forward tomorrow.) The Kremlin has lost a daring gamble; it has not been deflected from its goals. The Administration understands this, as its measured response to its sensible diplomatic victory shows. But having successfully resorted to power once, the federal government won’t be inclined to underestimate its future uses. The goal stays peace—but not peace at any price. The lesson, we trust, won’t be lost on the so-called neutral nations within the UN.
