LETTER: A journalist’s take on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 years later

To the Editor:

It was a year of change and contrasts. I was a senior in 1962 at Boston University’s School of Public Relations and Communications (SPRC). In a few months I would be graduating — hoping for a job in journalism. Boston was in the spotlight because of its association with President Kennedy and life at that time for a college student was quickly changing. There was a metamorphosis from the peaceful fifties to the uneasy turbulence of the ‘60s. No one was thinking Armageddon, but that was about to change. The Air Force, conducting secret surveillance flights over Cuba, discovered a battery of Soviet missiles aimed toward the United States. Ultimatums were flying around fast and furious by both the U.S. and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. It looked like we were heading down the path to thermonuclear war … and that was the reality.

As a journalism student and also as news director of BU’s radio station WBUR, I got to be involved in my first big story, but it was tempered by knowing that we were at the brink. I remember walking down Commonwealth Avenue and looking skyward toward the nearly completed 52-story Prudential Center and wondering if it soon would be tumbling to the ground. I was not unique in my angst. Classmates and I looked for escapes, and many of us went to the movies and saw the newly released Cinerama film “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.” We went twice.

But I realized I had a job to do and that we had to confront news events and deal with them. Our professor, H. Paul Jeffers, mobilized us, and soon we were on the air telling our listeners what little there was to know. We knew we were up against the big boys … WBZ Radio and the television networks … but we did have a 20,000-watt radio station that had the capability of reaching a lot of people. What would make our coverage unique — something that would be different from the wire copy spurting out endlessly on our teletype machine?

We knew that Castro was about to deliver a major foreign policy speech that might give a hint of what the Cuban dictator or the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were planning to do. This was in an era when satellite technology and live overseas radio transmission were in their infancy, but we wanted to make a difference and give listeners a unique perspective of what was happening. Our veteran radio engineer Jim Bonney had a great idea that we thought might work. Why not try to get a short wave radio signal of Castro’s speech and broadcast it live? Impossible — not for Jim. He went to the roof of 640 Commonwealth Ave., armed with coils of wire and an antenna. But there was a problem. Where would we get the radio?

Well, Radio Shack was just a couple of blocks down the street from SPRC. We cajoled, schmoozed and persuaded its manager to let Jim borrow a radio. The next barrier for Jim was not so easy, but he found the frequency and soon we had Radio Havana feeding into BU. But who speaks Spanish fluently? Again our collective journalism instincts kicked in. We found a language major who was willing to join our team and made sure that the local newspapers knew what we were doing.

That night, as the world bit its collective fingernails and wondered what bellicose comments would come from Cuba or Russia, our interpreter paid very close attention to what Castro was saying:

“They threaten us with being the target of nuclear attacks. They do not frighten us … and the consolation of knowing that the aggressors in a thermonuclear war, those who unleash a thermonuclear war, will be exterminated.”

I recall my words that night, “Oct. 22, 1963. Remember this day. It will go down in history.”

Lester Kretman

SPRC 1963

lkretman@bu.edu