I wonder if this author is talking about my father, too many coincidences. Like many expatriates, the Kaiser family became news junkies after arriving in Senegal in July 1961, although our news sources were few. While we could sometimes find the Voice of America on a short wave broadcast, we had no television of any kind, and depended on the American newspapers from Paris (which arrived a day late) and the international editions of Time and Newsweek. The news was grim during 1961, including the Berlin crisis and the erection of the wall and the Soviet resumption of nuclear tests, culminating in the detonation of a 50-megaton bomb. (I vividly remember a Newsweek cover showing what that bomb would have done had it landed in Battery Park in Manhattan.) But in 1962 President Kennedy began to hit his stride, and a series of dramatic stories found their way to us. In the spring he forced the steel companies to roll back an inflationary price increase. “It’s a revolution,” my father remarked, as he handed me the paper with the news. In September came the battle over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. And then, the next month, one Monday morning, my father called me into my parents’ bedroom to brief me on the President’s announcement that Soviet missiles had been discovered in Cuba. With events unfolding so rapidly, our lack of news was never more painful than it was then. We received film of the president’s address and watched it during the week, but it wasn’t until many years later that I realized how close we had come to war. But my father the following Sunday got word through the Embassy that Khrushchev had agreed to pull the missiles out. It was another triumph for the President. The most rueful moment of those two years came a couple of weeks later, the day after the midterm elections, when I, glued to the short wave, heard Richard Nixon’s press secretary read his concession in the California governor’s race. “Vice President Nixon will not be making a statement himself,” he said, and I turned off the radio and ran to give my parents the news. As it turned out, of course, Nixon did appear and gave some of the most famous remarks of his career, including, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 21:09:36 +0000
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