When I was a kid in the early 1960’s, most parents didn’t even think about supervising what children watched on TV. We kids turned it on and glued ourselves to the screen for hours, absorbing content to our heart’s desire. If you were a child at that time, you may remember Clutch Cargo, White Fang and Soupy Sales, Rocky, Bullwinkle and the nefarious Boris Badenov, a spy from…Pottsylvania!!!
Yet, there weren’t only cartoons and children’s shows. I also remember coming home from school and tuning in to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the logistical head of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution. It was held in Israel between April and August 1961 and broadcast around the world. I spent many hours alone viewing the proceedings and watching documentaries filmed at the time of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Those images are permanently burned in my brain.
So much TV! So much happening in the world! How could any child take it all in? My television-world was a hodgepodge where I’d switch from the Flintstones to the Jetsons to the Bay of Pigs. I can still see the humiliation on the men’s faces. Cuban exiles trained by the CIA, they’d been sent to liberate their island from Fidel Castro, communism, and Soviet influence. They failed, some escaped, some were killed, many were taken prisoner, their defeat and shame, an American failure displayed to the world. Our portable Zenith on its aluminum TV stand brought it all into the living room.
From there on in, in my TV world, things went from bad to worse. Via a national broadcast on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced the presence in Cuba of mid-range nuclear missiles with the capacity of travelling 1,000 miles through the air to attack and destroy Washington, D.C., Mexico City, or the Panama Canal.
“It shall be the policy of this nation,” the President declared, “to regard any missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
I was watching—the speech probably cut into my cartoon time—and I was worried. Still today, I can evoke that time with great clarity. In October and November 1962, until the resolution of the Cuba Missile Crisis with the withdrawal of nuclear warheads from the island, I left the house for school each morning wondering if I’d ever see my parents or sisters again. In the course of my TV viewing, I’d also seen footage of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Civil defense drills, sirens, yellow and black metal signs on buildings throughout the city indicating there was a fallout shelter inside. At school, a bell began clanging, the sign for us to hurry to the cloakroom, stoop down close together and cover out heads with our hands. All the fire alarms in the city sounded at the same time. Traffic came to a halt and, at major intersections, men wearing a special band around their arm (they represented, I believe, civil defense), made us wait in our cars till the sirens stopped.
I wanted a fallout shelter in our basement. I thought the coal bin would be the perfect spot and I spent sleepless nights designing one in my mind, making up lists of necessary supplies. Yet, I wondered, if a bomb dropped, what would be left once it was safe to go back outside. TV had already taught me the aftermath of the atomic bomb.
During a civil defense drill, sitting next to my father in his 1959 Ford Galaxie at the intersection of E. Norwegian and Wolf Streets, I asked him why there were fallout shelters in public buildings throughout town.
“That way, we can all die together.”
That’s all he said, nothing more. The sirens stopped and traffic started moving again.
Back in 1962, it was a missile “scare.” Communication between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was at no time cut off. Diplomatic channels were never closed and both sides made concessions, Khrushchev’s costing him his job when he was forced to step down in 1964.
Today things have changed. We live in a time of “shouting at,” with little “talking to,” which is why I believe that those who truly listen are the most precious people on Earth today.
On October 26, 1962, Khrushchev wrote the following to Kennedy:
“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.
Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”
Who is ready to speak or hear those words today?
About 1,000 miles separate the Paris region from the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Since the war in Ukraine began, there has been a rise in the sale and construction of fallout shelters throughout Europe, and people are stocking up on potassium iodide tablets just in case. I have a transistor radio and a supply of batteries.
In the streets of Paris, on the village green outside my window on this beautiful morning, people stroll, seemingly carefree. We’re all used to war going on somewhere, be it in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur or Yemen, and the tendency is to look the other way.
Yet, in a world where nuclear weapons are everywhere, there it sits, the threat of war, on our doorstep.
“A bon entendeur, salut,” as the French say. “A word to the wise is sufficient.” Otherwise, who knows what the TV screen, or reality, will bring into our living rooms.
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