OLD MEN FORGET

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Henry V, Act iv, Scene 3

The rapprochement between Washington and Havana has stirred half-forgotten memories, and like the aged men who waited all those years earlier to go into battle with Prince Hal at Agincourt, I remember with advantages the little deeds I did more than half a century ago. 

On April 17, 1961, a band of Cuban exiles, longing for the return of the defeated dictator Batista, and funded by the CIA in one of its less successful attempts to overthrow a progressive government, were unleashed by the newly elected John Kennedy in the misbegotten Bay of Pigs invasion.  Three days later, it was all over and the survivors slunk back to Miami to begin their long, vastly more successful and lucrative effort to warp domestic American politics.

The failed invasion forced me, and others like me, to face the fact that we were not Democrats, for Jack Kennedy was a Democrat --  not even liberal Democrats, for Jack Kennedy was a liberal Democrat --  but something else.  Some of my colleagues at Harvard in those days had read Marx and knew that they were Socialists, but the best I could do was to call myself a Radical -- anything to make clear that I did not, I could not, continue to support the Harvard graduate whose election I had greeted with such elation.

Six days after the collapse of the Bay of Pigs CIA fiasco, a group of us put on a Cuba Protest Rally at Harvard.  We met in Emerson D, the large lecture room at the back of the first floor of the Philosophy Building where Raphael Demos had for so many decades taught "Phil 1."  The three co-sponsors of the rally were H. Stuart Hughes, Nadav Safran, and myself.  I served at the podium as chair.  The class act of the three of us was clearly Hughes, a senior member of the Harvard History department, grandson of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and later co-director with baby doctor Benjamin Spock of SANE, the leading anti-nuclear weapons peace organization of that era.  Safran was a Middle Eastern scholar, later implicated in and much tarnished by the CIA's covert funding of academic meetings and publications which they hoped would promote pro-American Cold War policies.  [Those who are really clued up on Cold War gossip will recall the scandal surrounding the CIA's underwriting of the journal of opinion Encounter.]

Although we drew a pretty good crowd to the rally, we were overshadowed that same night by a throng of raucous students outraged at Harvard's announced intention henceforward to print diplomas in English rather than the traditional Latin.

It being Harvard, the new president's alma mater, our rally hit the newspapers, and some time later I received a batch of cablegrams from young Cuban poets, musicians, and academics thanking me for my support.  It was one of my finest hours in a life that has, for the most part, been quiet and uneventful.

Susie has expressed a desire to visit Cuba [because her parents once did, long before the Revolution].  I wonder whether any of those artists and academics are still around.