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"You will have your answer in due course," Zorin said. "I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over," snapped Stevenson. For millions of Americans watching the performance on television, it was Stevenson at his best —a reasonable man who had finally lost patience with an outrageous opponent.
Fact-Fiction. But Bartlett and Alsop cast a far different, much harsher light on Stevenson's Cuban crisis behavior. Their Post piece has much in common with the Washington fact-fiction novels that are now clogging the bestseller lists. It purports to narrate the secret deliberations of "ExComm"—an abbreviation for the National Security Council Executive Committee that was unknown even to members of the group until it was repeated paragraph after paragraph by Bartlett and Alsop. The Post story is filled with Druryisms and some language that seems to be left over from the magazine's serialization of Fail-Safe. Leaders negotiate "in the shadow of nuclear war" and make "the live-or-die decisions when the chips are down." As cliches mount, the reader half expects the next phone call to be answered by old Scab Cooley. But instead it is McGeorge Bundy who hears a CIAman's cryptic, spy-befuddling report of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. "Those things we've been worrying about"; says the CIAman cleverly, "it looks as though we've really got something." There is even room to mention a minor Russian official in Washington named Georgi Bolshakov, who is duped by his own bosses so that he can pass along to Kennedy the incorrect information that "those things" are strictly defensive.
Bartlett and Alsop say that in the days between the discovery of the missile bases and the Kennedy announcement of a blockade, Ex-Comm was split between "hawks" and "doves"—those who wanted to invade Cuba or bomb out the missile bases, and those who urged caution. The "most hawklike of the hawks," they write, was Dean Acheson. One of the doves was normally belligerent Bobby Kennedy, who, said the Post, thought that "an air attack against Cuba would be a Pearl Harbor in reverse, and contrary to all American traditions."
Although the hawks were originally in the majority, according to the Post, opinions finally merged, and everybody joined Dean Rusk as a "dawk or a hove."* The group formed a "rolling consensus" built around McNamara's plan of "maintaining options" by blockading Cuba, leaving the door open for invasion or bombing if the blockade failed to get rid of the missiles. Who was the only person who did not roll with the consensus? Why, Adlai Stevenson, of course.