The last step of brinkmanship

The BBC's veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke has covered many of the world's most dramatic events in more than 50 years of his Letters From America - including the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Forty years on, here is his original broadcast marking the end of the stand-off.

Like many millions of other people I put the clock back last evening in order to justify staying up later than usual.

It was interesting to say the least that this apparently ultimate warning, the very last step of brinkmanship, was given not by the president or the secretary of state or secretary of defence but by Ambassador Stevenson

A couple of friends came in - a man, a member of the United Nations secretariat - and between bouts of personal talk we tuned in the bulletins every half hour in the hope - which seemed, last midnight, to be draining away - that the United States would not feel it essential to have to use force to destroy the Russian missile bases.

More photographs were coming in to the Pentagon and being rushed to the White House.

And they showed that, way down below, the Russian technicians and their Cuban help had been working overtime on Friday and Saturday to finish the bases and mount the missiles and confront the United States with an accomplished dreadful fact which the president, in the long, long week behind us, had laboured to thwart.

The bulletins last night kept breaking into the rock 'n' roll and the melancholy vibraharps all through the night.

But there comes a point when anxiety must have a stop and the last two items we heard were that the president had turned down Mr Khrushchev's offer to trade his Cuban bases for our Turkish ones.

More numbing still, that Mr Adlai Stevenson, United States ambassador to the UN, had told the delegates of 13 nations, from Nato and Latin America mostly, that unless work on the missile bases was voluntarily stopped the United States would take military action to eliminate them in exactly 48 hours.

It was interesting to say the least that this apparently ultimate warning, the very last step of brinkmanship, was given not by the president or the secretary of state or secretary of defence but by Ambassador Stevenson - a man who, to paraphrase a famous complaint of Marshal Foch, is a man very well known but still Ambassador Stevenson - in other words a courier or servant of presidential policy, certainly not its maker - a fact that Mr Stevenson has sometimes found hard to accept, since only two years ago he seemed a grander figure than the Senator Kennedy who was about to become president.

Photographic evidence

I ought to point out that Mr Stevenson was the man who in April of last year went before the Security Council of the United Nations and defended with passionate sincerity the good faith of the United States, who honestly ridiculed the Soviet charge that the invasion of Cuba, which was then in its earliest stages, had been planned and assisted by the United States.

He brought in photographic exhibits of captured planes, whose markings showed that they were from Castro's airforce.

Unfortunately it came out later that similar markings had been faked on planes used in the invasion.

The weapons you describe as 'offensive' are grim weapons. You and I both know that they are

Nikita Khrushchev to John F Kennedy

In a word, the Kennedy administration had faked the planes and used Ambassador Stevenson as an honest dupe.

Mr Stevenson had a rough time of it then and afterwards from Mr Zorin, the Soviet chief delegate and Mr Stevenson had no public way open to him to recover his self respect, for he'd made his honest defence of American motives before he was informed that the abortive invasion was in fact an American show.

Mr Zorin brought this up with relish on Thursday evening when once again Mr Stevenson brought easels and photographic blowups into the Security Council and mounted them and described them in order to force the answer to the question Mr Stevenson had hammered at Mr Zorin and which Mr Zorin airily waved away.

That question in Mr Stevenson's words was: "Let me ask you one simple question - do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate-range missiles on sites in Cuba? Yes or no?"

Mr Stevenson is a man of great dignity and patience but Mr Zorin's face began to crack, somewhere between a smirk and a sigh.

And in that split second Mr Stevenson leaned forward and rasped out: "Don't wait for the interpretation - yes or no?"

Mr Zorin replied that he was not in an American courtroom and had no wish to answer a prosecutor's questions.

Sequence of events

"You'll get your answer," he said, without deigning to look at the now crouching figure of Mr Stevenson. "Don't worry," he said.

It was at that moment that Mr Stevenson leaned even further forward and said a sentence which will surely - if only from its reputation in film clips - pass into the lexicon of famous American phrases like "Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes" and "You may fire when ready, Mr Gridley."

"I am prepared," Mr Stevenson rasped out, "to wait for an answer till hell freezes over, if that's your decision.

"I'm also prepared to present the evidence in this room." Which he promptly did.

Now in all the long and tortuous sequence of events since the president cancelled his Midwest campaign tour on account of that strategic cold in the head, this seems to me, to coin a phrase, the moment of truth.

Below the surface of even the most world-shaking political events the actors remember old grudges

It was the moment which lots of thoughtful people on both sides of the Atlantic were waiting for.

It was the root question they wanted to pluck up and have answered.

Mr Zorin refused to look at the photographs, that everybody else was eyeing like eagles.

If I'd been talking to you two days ago I should have gone into the detail of those pictures and reported the reliable assurance of high altitude photographers, military and airforce reconnaissance men - and not only Americans - that a trained and disinterested eye was bound to see in them shot over San Cristobal and Guanajay, unmistakable missile sites and missile equipment and accessories that can be used for no other known military purpose.

Since, however, we're talking on Sunday evening there's no need to stress the point that the chances of these pictures being of cunning camouflage or clever movie sets are about one in a thousand. The military say the chances are very much less.

Crackling exchange

Mr Zorin, at the time, was simply obedient to his instructions.

"Falsity," he shouted, "is what the United States has in its hands - false evidence, forgeries."

Between then and now Mr Khrushchev himself has given the lie to Mr Zorin's lie.

Only this morning Mr Khrushchev said to the president: "The weapons you describe as 'offensive' are grim weapons. You and I both know that they are."

It's almost a parrot echo of Mr Stevenson's well bred snort at the end of Thursday's crackling exchange in the Security Council: "I hope we can stop this sparring. We know the facts and so do you, sir."

When we woke up this morning the glad tiding came peeling in, breaking into Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan and solemn sermons and rollicking hymns up in Harlem

You may have gathered from this tremendous scene, which will never be forgotten by those who saw it, that Mr Stevenson was the logical man to enunciate last night's warning, since he is the man who has carried the American case in the United Nations, the one place where the Soviet Union, the United States and Cuba are meeting face to face.

It is logical but it is not inevitable. All exchanges with foreign governments and even with Bertrand Russell have been handled by the president.

It was left to Mr Stevenson to give yesterday's warning to say that the first move would be an air strike because it was essential for the credibility of the United States before the rest of the world to show that this time Stevenson was in on the most secret information, that he knew, that he believed, and that this time he spoke with both knowledge and good faith.

Humiliating role

When the history of this, the longest week, comes to be written I think that the decision to entrust an ambassador and this ambassador with the final warning will be seen to be a master stroke of diplomacy and goodwill.

Below the surface of even the most world-shaking political events the actors remember old grudges.

The role that Mr Stevenson was asked to play - or by default was allowed to play - in the Bay of Pigs disaster was humiliating to him and damaging to the honesty of the Kennedy administration in its first showdown with Communism in this hemisphere.

But in the second, a much more momentous showdown, since it was not between a giant and the other giant's puppet but between the titans themselves, it was crucial that nobody should infer a clash of wills or knowledge inside the Kennedy cabinet.

When we went to bed last night we had this small and honourable satisfaction to set against the immensity of the risk, the trembling of the fingers on the nuclear buttons.

When we woke up this morning the glad tiding came peeling in, breaking into Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan and solemn sermons and rollicking hymns up in Harlem - the news that Mr Khrushchev had accepted unconditionally every point of Mr Kennedy's demand for the dismantling of the Cuban missile bases under UN supervision.

President strengthened

We had to wait four more hours by which time the Khrushchev text had been studied at the White House before, not much more than an hour ago, the president came through with his warm welcome for contribution to peace and his earnest hope that the governments of the world will now turn to the compelling necessity of ending the arms race.

This is not the time to review the last week, to mete out blame or recrimination or study the furious diplomacy of the last seven days as a possibly perilous precedent for a similar crisis over, say, Berlin.

I can only say that if the conditions are met President Kennedy will emerge in his own country incredibly strengthened as a president and leader.

An hour ago a neighbour of mine who is a hi-fi buff and mighty proud of an amplifier that practically fills the building, he telephoned me and asked me to listen to the raging sound of his gramophone.

He was playing "Oh what a beautiful morning" - it was corny but it was spontaneous and good.

And I looked out over the riffling waves of the reservoir in Central Park. A bird rose from the water and was airborne and soared off to the ocean.

I should like to say it was a dove. It was however a seagull whose clean, swinging flight I shall remember till the day I die.