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Who can we trust when a new crisis strikes?
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Sat down to breakfast one recent morning and turned on the TV. Not to any of the cable news channels I generally watch — I haven’t the stomach right now. Instead, I clicked through the cable movie selections. Anything to divert my thoughts, to help me get on with my day.
“Flipper,” “Dead Poets Society,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Mission: Impossible 2.” I’d seen them all and wasn’t in the mood to sit through any of them again.
I kept scrolling. While doing so, I mused about a phone call I’d received the day before from a close friend. He’s a Manhattan arts dealer who leads a comfortable life. “Trump’s election was an awful thing,” he said. “But” — here he assumed a hopeful tone — “I don’t think it will really affect you and me.” He meant our day-to-day lives.
I continued scrolling. And then, suddenly, I stopped. Stopped and was riveted. I’d come upon a film that, like the others, I’d seen before.
A thriller, in the sense that “Apollo 13” was a thriller — a historical adaptation in which the audience knows the outcome, but the actors, in the heat of the moment, do not.
The film was “Thirteen Days,” a clinical retelling of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the 13-day eyeball-to-eyeball standoff between John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev over ballistic missiles the Soviets had installed in Cuba. Their arsenal was within striking distance of roughly 80 million people throughout the southern US states and the Eastern Seaboard. It was the closest the two nations have come to nuclear war.
For those of us who lived through the event, “close” does not sufficiently describe it. Night after night, day after day, the news bulletins flew. A U.S. spy plane had pinpointed the missile sites. The Soviets denied all. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of all Cuba-bound ships. Khrushchev, who thought Kennedy weak, ordered his ships toward the blockade. US military leaders, who believed they could manipulate Kennedy, argued that he should attack.
Each day, the pressure grew. I remember as a schoolboy practicing air raid drills, in which a siren would sound and the teacher would direct each of us to crawl under our desk and place our hands over our head. As if that would protect us from a nuclear blast.
The Russian ships kept coming. Time was running out. In a roomful of advisers, some pressed the president for aggressive action. Kennedy resisted. Rather than attack, he chose a risky game of chicken, and in the end it was Khrushchev who blinked and removed his missiles from Cuba, who turned his ships around.
The film ended, but the tension I felt remained. My breakfast, half eaten, sat cold on the table. My wife left to run errands. I was alone.
I can’t recall the last time I thought about a superpower face-off. To be honest, even now it seems otherworldly.
But lately, my thoughts have wandered down dozens of dark corridors I thought had been walled off from worry: Attacks on the First Amendment. An unleashing of racism. Unvarnished bigotry.
Unease seeps everywhere. And with it, a question of who, if anyone, is in control.
Is Donald Trump? He is our president. We have no choice but to trust his judgment, to place our faith in him. We knew there would come a time during his administration when a crisis would arise. One always does.
Will he prove as cool-headed, as resistant to emotion and pressure, as Kennedy? Will he protect us? Will he keep us from spinning out of control?
Ron Berler is the author of Raising the Curve: A Year Inside One of America’s 45,000* Failing Public Schools. The views are his own. A version of this article originally appeared in the Virginian-Pilot.
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