It was May 8, 1945, the day Nazi Germany surrendered, and my Swedish brother-in-law, Anders, was five years old and was walking through downtown Stockholm with his mother. Little Anders had never known a day of peace in his life. Sweden was neutral but entirely surrounded by Nazi power, never knowing which day the German Panzers might storm across the border from Nazi-occupied Norway and bring Sweden’s freedom to a nasty end.
The newsboys were out in force, waving copies of their special editions with the one word, the Swedish word for “peace,” in gigantic type. In Swedish “peace” is “fred,” and their cries of “Fred! Fred! Fred!” echoed across all of Stockholm. Anders tightened his grip on his mother’s hand and he asked her, “Ar fred farligt?” meaning “Is peace dangerous?”
When will it all end?
My father thought he’d experienced the end of war in 1918 with victory in World War I. I was super-sure we’d known the last of war back there in 1945, when Germany and Japan saw their dreams of world domination crumble. Then came Communism and the Korean War, followed by Vietnam. By the end of the Vietnam War nobody was talking any longer about the end of war. What with terrorism and religious war waiting in the wings, we’d grudgingly accepted the reality that war came embedded in mankind’s DNA.
We all know what evil drives megalomaniacs like Hitler. The ambitions of the strident and strutting Mussolinis offer no mystery. But what makes decent, educated, democratic leaders of great countries act in eyebrow-raising ways, ways that can help bring conflicts to an end or perhaps just as easily escalate them?
A dear friend of mine gave us an interesting answer. The late columnist Sidney Zion came up with a bigger scoop than he himself probably expected. Sidney worked for the New York Times back in the days when the venerated journalist James “Scotty” Reston was a Times editor and would gather his promising young columnists around his dinner table and talk about the pressing concerns of the world deep into the night. Since Sidney is no longer with us, I feel duty-bound to keep telling this story until my instinct tells me the deed is done.
During one such “salon” dinner, the conversation swung around to President John F. Kennedy’s two-day “summit” with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. This was a scant six months after Kennedy took office, and just weeks after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion and just months prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall.
Scotty told how he was sitting alone, reviewing papers in his room at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, when someone entered his room without knocking. Alarm turned into surprise when Scotty realized the “intruder” was none other than President John F. Kennedy, leader of the free world!
“May I pour myself a drink?” asked the president of the United States as he proceeded to do just that. “I did a terrible job for freedom today,” said President Kennedy. “Khrushchev made me look like a bumbling schoolboy. He really made me look bad.”
The two men sat there for quite a while in awkward silence. There was no way Reston could pretend there was nothing wrong with the president’s performance. Both men were well past the point of dealing in phony high-fives. “I’ve got to do something, Scotty. I can’t let it go down like this.”
Silence then recaptured the moment until, a few minutes later, Kennedy spoke again.
“I think I know what to do, Scotty,” said the U.S. president. “The Communists in the North are flexing their muscles. I think I know what to do.
“I think I’ll send 15,000 more ‘advisers’ to help the government of South Vietnam and to cheer them up!”
