A Place We Knew Well (31 page)

For a long moment, she searched his face. “Yes,” she said finally, smiling. “Music would be nice.”

Avery felt the flush, the warm spread of her agreement and of his profound gratitude—to her, to the doctors, to Whomever—for the fragile bloom of trust lighting up her eyes.

Subject: Your Class of '63 Questionnaire

Date: 11/3/2013 4:48:21 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Sent from the Internet (Details)

Dear Ms. McCarthy:

Emilio Alvarado, Class of '63 Bishop Moore High School, has forwarded your questionnaire and strongly encouraged me to participate. (Apparently your project—a Cuban Missile Crisis story set in College Park—was quite the talk of last week's 50th BMHS reunion.) To be clear, I'm also Class of '63 but from Edgewater High, the public high school up the street from Bishop Moore. But, as Emilio was quick to point out, your questions don't appear to be school-specific and, further, he insists, I'll get around to answering long before he will.

Full disclosure: The week of the Cuban Missile Crisis was also Homecoming Week at Edgewater High and Emilio was my date for the big dance. We went through a lot that week, some of it wonderful, some of it incredibly painful. I'm guessing he wants me to decide what should be told or withheld. And therein lies the difference between his life as a high-profile defense attorney and mine as a clinical psychologist.

You ask if, as a resident of the Orlando area, I had any inkling of the Crisis in advance of President Kennedy's televised speech on Monday night, October 22, 1962. Yes. My dad was ex-air-force (a WWII tail-gunner) whose business (the local Texaco station) was in the flight path of Orlando's SAC base. On Friday, he'd noticed a lot of unusual plane activity so, that Sunday, he and I drove over to McCoy to check things out. The runways were jam-packed with more bombers, fighters, and troop carriers than we could count. Plus, off to one side, there was an entire squadron of the super-secret U-2 spy planes that, it became obvious later, were providing the President with photographic proof of the missiles in Cuba. I remember my dad saying, “Something's up, Kitten—something big.” And, although he tried to hide it, I could tell he was shaken by what we'd seen.

You ask for any specific memories surrounding the President's speech. I remember that my mom took me out of school early that day to shop for homecoming dresses. We were on the escalator in the new Jordan Marsh store and suddenly everyone was talking about the President and some big announcement at seven o'clock. We rushed home to watch it with Dad.

I'd never seen the President's face so serious. And his first sentence was a stunner: “unmistakable evidence,” he said, of “missiles in Cuba” with “nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” He talked about the Soviets' “weapons of sudden mass destruction” “capable of striking Washington, DC, the Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Mexico City, and…” Whatever came after that, I couldn't say. My mind froze on the idea that, after the Capitol and the canal, the cape (our cape) was Target Number Three on the list, Number Two in the continental US! To a central Florida kid like me—who'd grown up marching out onto the playground at “T-minus-two-minutes and counting” to stand and scan for the silver rockets rising in the east; to cheer the trails of sun gold thrust, the fireworks flare of booster separation, and the arc of light, Tinker Bell bright, as our heroes soared off into space—the President's singling out of our cape, less than sixty miles away, felt like a bull's-eye on my very soul. I remember trying to joke with my parents afterward—“There goes homecoming!”—but they were both too horrified to laugh.

You wonder what changes, if any, we noticed the next day. Overnight, Highway 441, the state's main north-south artery (which ran in front of my father's station), was clogged with gray-green convoys. The railway (behind the station) rumbled with incredibly long trains of canvas-covered missiles, tanks, and armaments. The skies seemed alive with planes of every imaginable type. And both the Atlantic and the Gulf, we heard, were rimmed with warships. Honestly, it was terrifying.

For the rest of his life, my dad read every book and collected every statistic he could find on the Crisis. I was shocked to learn: Two-thirds of the rolling stock of railroads in the southeastern US were requisitioned by the President for the transportation of troops, vehicles, and ordnance to south Florida. The army alone moved more than 100,000 troops and 100,000 tons of equipment in less than 150 hours. The marines' strength was at 40,000; the navy, 30,000. The air force reserve added another 14,000 to those already jam-packed onto every available air base, causing one brass hat to comment, “Florida looked like the deck of an aircraft carrier….Every bit of cement in the state had an aircraft on it.”

Within that week, Dad found, there were more military personnel, more boots on the ground among us, than Truman sent into Korea. Florida, the pistol-shaped state, was cocked and ready to unload on Cuba an invasion force one and a half times that of the combined Allied forces at Normandy on D-Day. To put it mildly, we were civilians directly in the path of the largest, fastest mobilization of military might ever made on American soil. “To put it accurately,” Dad liked to say, “we were modern-day Jonahs in the belly of a fully breaching whale.”

What was the rest of that week like? Certainly, we all held our breath on Wednesday when the Soviets' ships were approaching the US Navy's “line of interdiction” at sea. One of my teachers called it “the most dangerous game of chicken ever played.” And, boy, were we relieved when the Soviet ships swerved and turned around! Many people thought the Crisis was over then. But of course the missiles were still in Cuba, and in Florida every arm of the American military remained at full DefCon 2 readiness for World War Three, the war we all knew would be the end of everything. On a personal note, however, it was still Homecoming Week—with dresses to be fitted, boutonnieres to order, the big bonfire, the parade, and, although the game was rained out, there was still the big dance and my first date with Emilio. Despite everything, maybe even because of everything, I was falling in love that week. I bounced like a pinball between sheer terror and pure bliss.

You ask when or how did I hear the news that the Crisis was over and how did it affect me? Tough question. That Sunday morning, after a week on top of several years of incredible stress, my mother had a “nervous breakdown.” That was the term back then, though today we'd probably call it a “psychic break” due to the post-traumatic stress of an unnecessary hysterectomy, not to mention some severe over-medication. My mother had been rushed in an ambulance to Florida Sanitarium and I was standing in the hospital lobby with Dad when we heard the news that Khrushchev was pulling the missiles out of Cuba. I can only remember thinking, “The world is saved. But my family is lost.”

Of course, if my dad was answering your survey, he'd be quick to point out that the Crisis was far from over on October 28. For Floridians, especially those of us living anywhere near the state's five Strategic Air Command bases, the military stand-down and “return to normal” took much longer. Those three tense weeks, October 23 through November 15, 1962, were the one and only time in US history that the nation's SAC bases stood at DefCon 2—round-the-clock defensive readiness for all-out nuclear war.

You ask if I had any personal opinions at the time about the way the Crisis was resolved. I didn't, but my father sure did. After the announcement that it was “over,” Dad insisted there was no way in hell that Khrushchev, that belligerent, shoe-thumping bully, had simply backed off. “Kennedy cut a deal,” he said. It would be twenty-seven years before Dad was proven right. I'll never forget his phone call in 1989 telling me that Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's special counsel and speechwriter, had finally copped to the secret deal Robert Kennedy cut with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin—America's Jupiter missiles out of Turkey in exchange for the Soviets' missiles out of Cuba—in the eleventh hour of the twelfth night of those Thirteen Days.

What do I perceive were the short- or long-term effects of the Crisis? Short-term, my mother's “breakdown” was devastating, for her and for us. But we weren't alone. I remember the staff telling us they were overwhelmed for months with psychiatric patients. I researched it later, in college, and found that the state's psychiatric hospitals and clinics experienced a 22% surge in patients needing help between late October '62 and January '63. By the way, another interesting surge occurred nine months after the Crisis. In late July and August, the state's live birth rate spiked a whopping 34%!

Over the years, my father, Emilio, and I had many discussions about the long-term effects of the Crisis, especially the myths that evolved to cover the hidden lie over the secret deal. As President Kennedy said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

And perhaps the biggest, most persistent, most damaging myth was that the Crisis resolved itself—because Kennedy and America hung tough, stood tall, went eyeball-to-eyeball with the enemy until the other fellow, mesmerized by America's resolve and mind-boggling military might, simply blinked and backed off.

This may be way more information than you want, but Dad was a big fan of historian Ned Lebow, who wrote that the mythical version of the Crisis promoted by the Kennedy brothers and many others—that Khrushchev blinked and backed off—had plenty of disastrous effects: the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race, accelerated by Soviet determination never again to be so humiliated by the United States. On the positive side, perhaps, was the global perception that Khrushchev had failed. The Chinese were particularly sensitive to Khrushchev's “loss of face” and Chinese-Soviet relations cooled. Dad agreed with Thomas Schelling, one of the nation's leading nuclear thinkers, who wrote that the Cuban Missile Crisis helped us avoid further direct confrontation with the Soviets, and it resolved the Berlin issue.

Also good, I suppose, was, after peering into the nuclear abyss, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev resolved to be more careful in the future. Almost immediately, they established the telephone hotline so both leaders could speak directly in a crisis. And in 1963, they initiated the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Of course, Emilio views it all a bit differently. You may be interested to know that he was a Pedro Pan, one of the 14,000+ Cuban children whose Catholic parents sent them to the US to escape Castro's Godless Communism. Like most Cuban Americans, Emilio sees President Kennedy's pledge to Khrushchev not to invade Cuba as a complete betrayal. It not only cemented Fidel's 50-year stranglehold on the island, it turned south Florida's powerful Cuban American voting bloc passionately anti-Kennedy, anti-Democrat, and pro-Republican.

You ask what, if any, personal changes came about as a result of the Crisis? Another tough question. That week changed everything for me. For starters, my mother's “breakdown” taught me things about myself I'd never known. I struggled, and got a lot of help from Emilio, over who I really was. We became high school and later college sweethearts. Eventually, the distance between med school in Gainesville and law school in Miami, and the differences in our opinions over the Vietnam War, proved too great. Although we each married others, we remain like family to each other. That week also changed both my parents; they struggled, too, for quite a while. Before that week, I was intent on a career in aeronautical engineering. Watching my mother's treatment and recovery, however, spurred my interest and eventual career in psychology with specialties in infertility and adoption issues. I'm also involved in a study exploring the link between early electroshock therapy and the later onset of Alzheimer's. We lost Dad in 2008. Thanks to Alzheimer's, my mother never knew of Dad's death and she no longer knows me, but she does entertain fellow residents at her facility with a once-a-week performance of operatic arias. Go figure.

I find your final question—have I experienced any echoes of the Crisis or of history repeating itself?—intriguing. Here's what I know…

Not long after September 11, 2001, I began to have Armageddon-like nightmares in which I was a teenager again at Edgewater High. It took me awhile to figure out that my subconscious had somehow melded the Cuban Missile Crisis of my youth with the attack on the Twin Towers. Nearly four decades apart, my response to 9/11—shock and outrage, anxiety and fear—sent me back to a place I knew well. But obviously, I wasn't the only one.

In 2002, forty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, like most Americans I watched in horror as, once again, a grim-faced American President appeared on national television to announce the discovery of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. (President Bush omitted President Kennedy's additional adjective—sudden.) Once again, a US diplomat—Secretary of State Colin Powell—went before the United Nations with extensive charts and photographs to have his “Adlai Stevenson moment.”

More chilling for me, however, was the memory of John Kennedy, having stood down the Joint Chiefs' clamor to invade Cuba and secretly negotiated the peace, explaining, “The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself.” Forty years later, President George W. Bush said simply, “I'm the decider,” and commenced the ten-year “regime-change” war in Iraq. For those of us old enough to remember the 1962 original, it was eerily similar rhetoric masking an unmistakably different intent and outcome.

Best of luck with your project, Ms. McCarthy. Again, I apologize if this is too much information, but your questions really got me thinking. I look forward to reading your finished book!

Sincerely,

Charlotte Avery, PhD, ABPP

Ponte Vedra, FL