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Give peace a chance.
‘YOU KNOW what’s been going
on in Berlin,’’ my father said to me. It was a night in the summer of
1961. I was an ROTC-obsessed student at Georgetown University. Dad was
a general on the Air Staff at the Pentagon, where he had worked late.
He had let his driver go home early, which meant that I could pick him
up in the Lincoln - a thrill. Now we were cruising across Washington
toward Generals’ Row at Bolling Air Base, where our next-door neighbor
was General Curtis LeMay. “Yes, sir,’’ I said. Berlin was the
flashpoint of a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United
States. Western sectors in the city were an escape hatch for East
Germans and others behind the Iron Curtain, thousands of whom fled to
the West every week. Nikita Khrushchev was desperate to stop that, and
threatened war. President Kennedy had just gone on television to
respond, “We shall not surrender.’’ He announced a high alert, with
bombers in the air, a new draft, fallout shelters. I could guess what
was going on inside the Pentagon. My
father said, “I may not come home one of these nights. . . . I’m going
to depend on you to take my place with Mom and the boys . . . get
everybody in the car . . . drive south.’’ Away from ground zero. I
sensed my father’s cold certainty that the catastrophic war was coming
- maybe soon. What I didn’t know was that LeMay and other top brass
were urging Kennedy to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against
Moscow. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable in any case -
so hit them now! That summer we still had a “first strike’’ advantage
that would be lost as Moscow’s arsenal grew. My father, I would later
learn, opposed LeMay. That night he showed me his fear of the coming
war, and asked me to do something about it. “Yes, sir,’’ I said again.
The rest of my life followed from that moment - even if differently
from Dad’s. I’ve written of it before. Kennedy
said no to the generals in 1961, laying the groundwork for his refusal
to order an attack over Cuba 14 months later. The Berlin crisis was
resolved that August when Khrushchev ordered the construction of the
Berlin Wall. The escapes stopped. Kennedy protested the wall, but
secretly considered it a godsend, avoiding war. Moscow soon achieved
nuclear parity with Washington, making any preemptive strike
impossible. Mutual assured destruction. But the national security
establishment, including generals and the “totalitarian school’’ of
Kremlinologists, continued to regard the Cold War standoff as permanent
high noon, hair trigger forever. That is why the mad accumulation of
nukes continued for another quarter-century. The core doctrine of
“realist’’ orthodoxy was that the Soviet Union could only be defeated
by war. Today is the 20th
anniversary of the event that proved the realists wrong. When joyous
citizens breached the Berlin Wall with rock music and dancing instead
of guns and tanks, the Cold War was over. Against every prediction, the
Soviet Union dismantled itself nonviolently. A number of factors made
that happen, including the multidecade restraint of military men like
my father, the internal collapse of the Soviet economy, and the
steadfast arms control regime, which began with Kennedy and Khrushchev,
and climaxed with Ronald Reagan’s embrace of Mikhail Gorbachev’s
astonishing proposals at Geneva and Reykjavik, Iceland. But
Gorbachev and Reagan were both responding to something else - the
pressures from below of grass-roots movements for peace on both sides
of the Iron Curtain. Unimagined by realists, unforeseen by the CIA, a
nonviolent democracy movement, beginning with Lech Walesa’s Solidarity
in Poland, and spreading through the satellite nations into Russia
itself, culminated in the refusal of communist soldiers to obey orders
to shoot demonstrators. In the West, a mass movement against nuclear
weapons, reflected even in Hollywood movies, coalesced around the
simple call for a “Freeze!’’ that was initiated by an MIT graduate
student named Randy Forsberg. Gorbachev
and Reagan deserve full credit for ending the nuclear standoff
nonviolently, but they could not have done it without the “naive’’
determination of their respective populations to reject war. Nov. 9,
1989, redefined realism to mean, Give peace a chance. The greatest date
of our lifetimes. James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.  |
| | Posted 11/10/2009 11:13 AM - 5 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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