The West's Response

One quiet afternoon in London last week, the phone rang for U.S. Ambassador David K. E. Bruce. It was Washington on the line asking the envoy to meet a plane with an urgent packet for British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. When Ambassador Bruce got to the airport, he found 1) a courier with a parcel that turned out to contain aerial pictures of the Red missile sites in Cuba; and 2) former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, en route to Paris and Bonn as the President's special emissary to alert the rulers of France and West Germany to the Communist threat in the Caribbean.

Far from Clear. Next day, Ambassador Bruce took his parcel to the Prime Minister. With both photographs and a personal letter from Kennedy, it was not hard to convince Macmillan that a threat to the peace of the West was well advanced in the Caribbean. But the facts were far from clear to many Britons. At first, many considered the reported missile buildup in Cuba simply incredible; they argued that the Communists could not possibly be that audacious or careless. Most agreed with the Daily Mail the morning after the telecast from Washington: "President Kennedy may have been led more by popular emotion than by calm statesmanship. He has gone too far." What bothered seafaring Britons almost as much as the risk of nuclear holocaust was the blockade. "In Cuba," huffed the Daily Telegraph, "the Monroe Doctrine appears to conflict with another and still more venerable principle of American diplomacy--the freedom of the seas."

There were also the professional pacifists, 3,000 of whom surged in front of the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square until police wrestled them away. Noisiest of all the disarmers, 90-year-old Bertrand Russell was at his silliest all week long. He fired a protest cable to Kennedy: YOUR ACTION DESPERATE. THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL. NO CONCEIVABLE JUSTIFICATION. CIVILIZED MAN CONDEMNS IT. WE WILL NOT HAVE MASS MURDER. END THIS MADNESS. Kennedy replied coolly and more coherently: "I think your attention might well be directed to the burglars rather than to those who have caught the burglars."

Although a government spokesman carefully avoided endorsement of the blockade, he called the Russian weapons buildup in Cuba "a shock to the whole civilized world." Said Foreign Secretary Lord Home: "The Communists must not be allowed to filch away free territory from free men. But I've always insisted that so long as Communist policy is double-faced, our response must be doublehanded. It is our duty to search for areas of agreement." With this qualification, Britain was on the U.S. side.

A Little Pique. Across the Channel, meanwhile, Dean Acheson was outlining the problem to French President Charles de Gaulle. He talked for an hour in De Gaulle's tapestried office in Elysee Palace. "We understand your position," replied De Gaulle, "and we approve the measures you have taken in self-defense." With that, Acheson rode over to NATO's Paris headquarters to give the same explanation to the ambassadors of all the other 14 NATO nations. They listened gravely and without comment, except for an occasional grumble about the U.S. not consulting them in advance. Virtually all agreed that the decision to take drastic steps against Cuba was fully justified.

From Paris, Acheson moved on to Bonn, where crusty old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer at first suspected that Kennedy's noise about Cuba had more to do with the election than with the progress of the cold war with Russia, and he rather liked the idea; it was the kind of thing that the old man might have done himself. Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss took a different view, worriedly foresaw a cynical deal trading off bases between the U.S. and Russia, which would weaken his own long-range goal to obtain nuclear missiles for West Germany. With Strauss, Adenauer peered at the photographs of the Russian installations in Cuba. Actually, said some knowledgeable Bonn hands, der Alte wouldn't know a missile site from a swimming pool, but he was impressed. In the end. Adenauer gave Kennedy's action his full endorsement in a nationwide TV broadcast. In West Berlin, inured to crisis and calm except for housewives who rushed to stock up on food, Mayor Willy Brandt was delighted by Washington's toughness and described Kennedy's move as "earnest, courageous, determined and reasonable."

The West European most pained by the Cuban crisis was Italy's Premier Amintore Fanfani. whose political alliance with Pietro Nenni's Socialists is already strained by membership in NATO, which Nenni dislikes. To get involved in Cuba could be death to his center-left coalition regime; so Fanfani confined his comments on the U.S. action to such safe words as, "Italy judges as positive that, in a moment when loud alarms are sounded, the U.S. has requested the United Nations to intervene in order that the causes of this alarm might be eliminated."

Every European statesman shared Fan-fani's hope that NATO can stay completely out of the Cuban crisis. But NATO's commander, General Lauris Norstad, who retires from the post this week after six years, put all his units in a state of "awareness," a limited alert that will speed full-scale mobilization if it becomes necessary.

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