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UNSUNG MEDIATOR: U Thant and the Cuban Missile Crisis

 

Security Council: forum for world opinion

Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no—don’t wait for the translation—yes or no?70
— Adlai Stevenson in the Security Council, October 25.

Throughout the conflict both the United States and the Soviet Union weighed their actions with careful consideration of their impact on international opinion. The Security Council was a key forum. The proceedings were televised live and watched by many worldwide, including Kennedy in the White House. Thant also influenced the superpower game in the Security Council at the climactic moment.

The Security Council meeting of October 25 was one of the most famous UN meetings ever held. Before it began at 4 p.m., President Kennedy spoke on the phone with Ambassador Stevenson outside the Security Council chambers to insist that his speech be of moderate tone.71 Stevenson preferred to give a fiery speech to lambaste the Soviets. But Kennedy did not approve. According to Stevenson’s adviser, Joseph Sisco, “Kennedy, himself, was very conscious that the focus was on U Thant at that moment,”72 and the United States was “waiting word from the Secretary General as to the Soviet reply as to whether it would back off.”73 So Stevenson’s words in the Security Council began relatively mildly—until Thant conveyed the news of Khrushchev’s positive reply to his first appeal. As Sisco later recalled, “we got word that the Russians had responded and they had responded favorably [to Thant’s first message] . . . And we got this through the Secretary General.”74 With this confirmation, Ambassador Stevenson was given the green light to press the Soviets hard for the rest of the meeting (Figure 3). He emphatically demanded that Soviet Ambassador Zorin declare to the world if the Soviet Union had missiles in Cuba or not. When Zorin refused, Stevenson made the bold and famous statement: “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over.”75

 

CMC Figure 3


Figure 3: US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson displays photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba at the UN Security Council meeting of October 25, 1962. Thant is seated third from the left at the horseshoe table with hand to chin. (UN Photo/MH).

 

 

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70. David L. Larson, ed., The Cuban Crisis of 1962: Selected Documents and Chronology (Boston, 1963), 138.

71. Interview with Joseph Sisco by James Sutterlin, October 18, 1990, 9–20, UN Oral History, Dag Hammarskjöld Library, United Nations, New York.

72. Ibid, 21.

73. Ibid, 18.

74. Ibid, 20.

75. Larson, ed., The Cuban Crisis of 1962, 138.