Eighteenth in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962
Historical events do not occur in a vacuum. News reports on page 1 of the New York Times on May 10, 1962 remind us that fifty years ago the Kennedy administration was grappling with many other problems besides Castro’s Cuba.
Foreign Affairs
The Cold War remained the dominant theme in U.S. foreign relations. The lead article reported that the President had taken West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to task for openly criticizing “the Allied negotiating position” in talks with the Soviet Union about a peaceful solution to the thorny issue of Berlin. The Allies’ continuing presence in Berlin was, of course, one of the main ingredients in the brewing Cuban Missile Crisis. This article did not mention Cuba, however.
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A secondary story datelined Moscow reported that the Soviet government had immediately seized on reports of a “rift” between the United States and West Germany as an excuse to question the United States’ legitimacy as a lead negotiator for the Western Allies.
The struggle between communism and the capital democracies had spread to Southeast Asia. At a May 9 press conference, President Kennedy condemned the “pro-Communist Pathet Lao movement…for having broken the fragile peace in Laos.”
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Domestic Affairs: the Economy
During his news conference the President charged that opponents of his proposal to withhold “taxes on dividends and interest” had misinformed “many millions of people” about the details of his plan.
Kennedy also announced that the U.S. Government would henceforth take a limited role in settling labor disputes.
Domestic Affairs: Civil Rights
Two page 1 articles remind us what a long road lay before the the Civil Rights movement of 50 years ago.
One article reported that “The Administration and civil rights forces supporting its literacy bill went down to humiliating defeat in the Senate today.” The bill would have ended “discriminatory use of literacy tests by Southern voting registrars.” A three-column page 1 photograph showed six smiling “Southern Democrats,” including Sen. Richard B. Russell of Georgia, discussing their defeat of this bill
The second Civil Rights article reported that President Kennedy had labeled “ ‘reverse freedom rides’ of negroes from New Orleans…‘a rather cheap exercise’…and an ‘exercise in publicity’ that did not ‘merit very much comment.’ ”
The “reverse freedom rides” were the segregated South’s response to the original Freedom Riders. In 1961 Black and White civil rights activists rode interstate buses bound for the South to test Blacks’ right to sit where they wanted on buses and to use restroom facilities reserved for Whites. The 1961 Freedom Riders were met by extreme violence—another story to be pursued at another time.
In 1962, Southern white supremacy groups had begun offering to send “disaffected” Negroes to northern cities—“reverse freedom rides,” in other words. On 11 May 1962, the Times reported that “The Capital Citizens Council” of Little Rock “began today its long-promised shipment of dissatisfied Negroes to Hyannis Port, Mass., where President Kennedy has a summer home.”
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