ABSTRACT
Waiter Lippmann, in a search for a compromise, suggested that the United States negotiate a new accord with the Soviets to regulate the status of West Berlin. The argument moved from the abstract to the urgent a few months later when rumors began circulating that the Russians were secretly building long-range-missile bases in Cuba. The moment of reckoning would most likely come when Soviet ships reached the five-hundred-mile barrier Kennedy had drawn around Cuba. The President seemed eager to have him understand that the Russians wanted to carry out their part of the bargain, but were having trouble with the Cubans, who wanted to keep the missiles. The Cuban confrontation demonstrated, Lippmann argued in his role as spokesman for the administration's nuclear strategy, that "the command of nuclear power to balance Soviet nuclear power cannot be divided or shared." Lippmann never shared the feeling of irredeemable loss so many felt on Kennedy's death.
