Roughly 13 hundred miles inside the denied territory of the Soviet Union in Sverdlovsk (where the Bolshevik murdered Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918; the 10th largest Soviet city and a center of transportation, mining and heavy industry) the unthinkable happened: the U-2 Number 360 was downed. It was 1:53 Sunday morning in Washington; 8:53 in Moscow.
This is one of the highlights of my favorite book May-day: The U-2 Affair written by a skillful young writer, Michael R. Beschloss. It is 495 pages of the early Cold War years. Published by Perennial Library of the Harper & Row Publishers, New York.
I love to read and re-read this book because it is like backtracking on tiptoe two generations ago and peeking into one of the most significant events that happened between the East and West, which nearly pushed the world on the brink of a Third World War. It contains shocks and surprises of how leaders of the superpowers act in times of crisis where the balance of war and peace hangs by a thread and would readily break with a tiny ripple caused by a minute of indecisiveness or a haphazardly done decision.
Because for much of the world, the spring of 1960 seemed to hold a bright promise for improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Like how the songwriter of the hit Winds of Change may have remembered the remains of the U-2 prominently displayed at Gorky Park, I perceived many instances in the narrative of the book that we can relate to in these present times.
Like what the Americans discovered in the spring of 1960. The downing of the U-2 was the first time many Americans discovered that their government practiced espionage. It was also in May 1960 when many learned that their leaders did not always tell them the truth. I can’t help but remember Sir Winston Churchill who said that "Truth is so important that it must be completely surrounded by bodyguards of lies."
A gleaming example was that during World War II, the British had broken the Enigma coding scheme of the Germans. Through this knowledge, Sir Winston Churchill was informed that the German Luftwaffe or Air Force planned to bomb Coventry, an industrial town in Great Britain by the middle of November 1940. Churchill was faced with two prospects: One was to warn Coventry, arming it to fight the bombers and evacuate the civilians, but this would alert the Germans that their Enigma code was broken. Two, pretend that they didn’t know about the plan and keep the Germans thinking that Enigma was still unbroken.
It might be surprising to note that Churchill chose option two. And the appalling result: Many civilians were killed and their important factories, homes and cathedral were destroyed.
It has been said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But in the pages of this book, one would sense the fear of the American people during those years. The fear of the words "bomber gap," "missile gap," and thinking that the Soviets would make the first strike at their continent with all impunity with nothing to retaliate with but a hodge-podge of french fries, fried chickens and hamburgers.
Eisenhower primarily used the U-2 to gather the needed information to prove these fears wrong. He secretly did this in order to keep the defense spending down despite the many oppositions. His shrewdness did pay off – during his entire eight years of presidency, he was the first president to keep the inflation below one percent.
But perhaps, one of the most meaningful passage in the book about Eisenhower, and which I’m hoping against hope our present world leaders will be taking seriously, is his "Cross of Iron" speech which he delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953.
In this address, he evoked the price of an eternal arms race:
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... We pay for a single fighter plane with a half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
As what Adam Ulam, a historian of American-Soviet relations has observed, it is not the rivalry of the superpowers that poses the main threat to peace: "It is the irrational premises and impulses that underlie the policies of both which threaten the world with incalculable dangers." Only when there is a free exchange of information and ideas between the East and West can those premises and impulses begin to be swept away.
In the end, I came to admire both Khrushchev and Eisenhower for their efforts to achieve peace. The former was quite ambivalent about it, the latter was shrewd, but no other world leader could have wanted peace more than these two gentlemen did. For they had seen for themselves up close in the frontlines, the evils that war brings.
Today’s situation, where clouds of war are looming in the Palestines; closer to home between India and Pakistan, let us be comforted by these words of Our Lord, "And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet."
And towards the future, we can look forward to these words, the dream of the United Nations and which Isaiah prophesied, "And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."