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"There is disagreement in retrospect about what Stevenson really wanted," admitted Bartlett and Alsop. But they were sure it was something bad. And they quote that "non-admiring official" as saying: "He wanted to trade the Turkish, Italian and British missile bases for the Cuban bases." In the post-mortem speculation about who that official might have been, many fingers were pointed at Acheson, whose dislike for Stevenson is notorious. But Acheson coolly and flatly denied it. Said he: "I do not know to this day what Adlai Stevenson's position was, and I don't care. I never bothered to find out where he stood."
In fact-fiction books about Washington, everything, as the readers know, turns out well for the good guys. Now Dean Rusk, in a line Allen Drury could never have invented, sums up the victory: "We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked." It was a statement, wrote Bartlett and Alsop, that will go down with "such immortal phrases as 'Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes.' " But the Post compensates for the lack of a surprise ending by hammering away at the villain. The Munich quote is bannered across the top of one page. Opposite is a full-page portrait of Adlai, chin in hand, looking like a man who is incapable of making up his Christmas list. "Stevenson was strong during the U.N. debate," reads the caption, "but inside the White House the hard-liners thought he was soft."
The response from Stevenson was immediate and angry. On NBC-TV's early-morning Today show—which has the advantage of catching half-dressed and partly shaved Washington officials before they leave for the office—and in later conversations, Stevenson made some telling points to support his claim that "this must be some kind of record for irresponsible journalism." Stevenson said that he:
— "Emphatically approved the blockade on further arms shipments to Cuba" three days before the Kennedy announcement, and "opposed, equally emphatically, an invasion of Cuba at the risk of nuclear war until the peace-keeping machinery of the United Nations had been used."
— Never advocated a swap of bases, but merely predicted correctly that Khrushchev might bring up the matter. Stevenson's suggested response: to tell Khrushchev that the matter of foreign bases was already on the agenda of disarmament talks, but that those talks could not even begin until the weapons were out of Cuba. Says a White House aide and former hawk: "Anyone who did not think about the bases as possible points that would be raised in any negotiations after the blockade would have been nutty."
Aside from some demonstrable inaccuracies in the story, the whole hawk-dove theme was a vast oversimplification. In an effort to examine all possibilities, everybody at the Executive Committee meetings offered ideas that they were not willing to live or die by. That was the advisers' function—and the final decisions were the President's. There was no doubt whatever about where he stood: during the hottest moments of the Cuba crisis he was planning in the most positive terms to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union did not forthwith promise to remove its missiles.