(2 of 2)
"The American position is one of indecision, if not fearfulness," said the Omaha World-Herald. "It is one thing to proceed carefully," wrote Robert Spivack in the Herald Tribune. "It is something else to proceed 'cautiously' while the enemy is proceeding boldly." Denver's Rocky Mountain News insisted that "something has got to be done about Cuba and it had better be soon." Arthur Krock proposed naval patrols, David Lawrence called for 1) a total blockade and 2) severance of diplomatic relations with Russia. Such actions, he conceded, "could lead to some fighting." The New York Daily News railed at presidential ignorance: "President Kennedy says he has no knowledge that Soviet Russia has recently sent some troops into Castro Cuba. Cuber, as the President sometimes calls it, is only 90 miles off Florider—oops. Florida. If the Kennedy Administration doesn't know what goes on in Cuba, one wonders how much, or how little, it knows about what's cooking in the rest of the world." Much of this criticism came from normally Republican and conservative papers, who had previously on occasion expressed admiration for the young President. But even Kennedy's close friend, Columnist Joseph Alsop, touring around Europe, was now disturbed by the symptoms of irresolution. Bristling at Khrushchev's ursine threats to visiting U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall ("It is no laughing matter when Khrushchev flatly informs a member of the U.S. Cabinet that he is going to take Berlin . . . and that the U.S. will do nothing about it in the end"), Alsop called for action. "Perhaps the time has come to get angry," he wrote. "Perhaps it would have been better to throw back in Premier Khrushchev's face the recent outrageous note about Cuba and Berlin as 'unacceptable and non-received.' "
This, of course, has not been done. And at Kennedy's press conference last week, the punch and incisiveness lay, not in the presidential answers, but in reporters' questions (see box).