BBC Radio 4 – Letter from America by Alistair Cooke, Invasion of Grenada

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During the past many months it seems to me there's hardly a newspaper or a magazine, certainly there's not a television network, and not only in America, that has been laggard in its preparations to commemorate the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy 20 years ago next 22 November.

I've given up trying to analyse this morbid preoccupation. Superficially, you could say that Kennedy's presidency has taken on an heroic glow, the Camelot legend, even an air of confidence and serenity which is absolutely at variance with the facts. The appalling debacle of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba – a secret plan, unauthorised by Congress and, in the result, a public disaster. And then the almost unbearable tension of the Soviet threat to Berlin.

Most memorable and most frightening of all, the appalling few days – 21 years ago this weekend if you want to wallow in an anniversary – when we appeared to be on the verge of a nuclear showdown until the news came through on a shining Sunday morning that the Russians had decided not to run the naval blockade that Kennedy had set up in the Caribbean along all the sea approaches to Cuba.

As always happens these days, some magazines could not wait for the anniversary itself. They chose to get the jump on their rivals by putting our their Kennedy memorial issue this week, just too early to draw the striking moral that would have made Kennedy's gamble in the Caribbean very relevant indeed to what has happened there this week.

Well, it's hard to know where to begin with this now burning issue. I'll begin with the vivid memory that came to me last Tuesday – a memory which by a bizarre coincidence had to do with Kennedy's death and the turbulent weeks that followed it. A friend of mine, an old American navy man, guessing quite rightly that I was pretty fagged out from a couple of months of covering the Dallas horror and the turmoil of the early days of the Johnson administration, he called me and proposed a holiday on an island not much known to Americans, the perfect place to get away from it all. We flew down there. He was right. It was a volcanic island of great beauty, a mountainous, small island, geologically I suppose quite unlike its nearest neighbour which, by contrast, looks like Sussex with sugar cane.

There was a five-mile round horseshoe bay, fringed by white sand and a nearly transparent ocean of green water. There was no industry. The people were easygoing and placid, the British Raj was in relaxed control. I remember at a party, the jolly, not subservient, but courteous behaviour of a black man in Bermuda shorts – a great pal of his overlords, the chief I believe at the time of the local labour party, a man named Eric Gairy. What my old salt liked best about the island was the behaviour, the attitude of the natives. 'What I like about these people,' he said, 'is they are content and reasonable and courteous.' 'You mean,' I suggested, 'they know their place?' 'Well, yes! If you like!' he said.

The only other snatch of that conversation I remember was my possibly sententious remark that if these people hadn't yet heard of the Reverend Martin Luther King, they were going to. Need I say that we're talking about the Grenadians and that they did hear the King message, though they got it not from his lips or the text of his speeches, but from the way in which those speeches and those convictions could be reported and exploited by the Russian and the Cuban radio.

Well, as all the world knows, just before dawn on Tuesday morning, 1900 American marines and airborne soldiers invaded the tiny island of Grenada in an action which, again, had not been authorised by Congress, which had been just barely announced ahead of time to the allies and which confronted the British prime minister with the acute embarrassment of begging an American president not to invade a member, however self-governing or ungoverned, of the British Commonwealth.

The first announcement from the White House was that it had been done to protect American citizens, most of them medical students, and to help restore democratic institutions on the island. We heard an hour or so later that the first wave of Americans had been followed by about 300 soldiers, natives of Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Antigua and Saint Kitts and Nevis and when we wondered what they were doing there, it was explained that the Americans had not gone in on their own initiative but at the urgent plea of something called the OCS – the Organisation of Caribbean States – which, even though most of us had never heard of it, is a going protective association of most of the chain of tiny islands that run down through the Antilles from Jamaica to Trinidad and the coast of Venezuela.

This assurance that the United States was coming to the help of several small and comparatively helpless states, understandably alarmed by the Marxist overthrow and murder of a prime minister and Cabinet members on a neighbouring island, this assurance put the invasion in a new light. However, within 24 hours it was a pretty murky light. When Mr Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, came next day to brief the press on what had happened and why, he was reminded that the United States is a signatory to the United Nations Charter and also to the charter of the Organisation of American States which grants the right of self-defence to any member against external aggression but absolutely forbids external interference in an internal rebellion. At an emergency meeting of the OAS, the United States was reminded of this ban in very lively language.

Mr Weinberger, to give some legal authority to the American invasion, had to fall back on the treaty of alliance of that little-known Organisation of Caribbean States. By the time the press faced him, some people had had time to bone up on that obscure treaty which was signed in 1981 by the member states including Grenada, at that time already under a Marxist leader, Mr Bishop. The treaty says that all the members of the OCS are bound by the United Nations Charter and by the charter of the Organisation of American States which prohibit military force, except in self-defence against an aggressor. The Caribbean treaty explicitly allows its members to join together against external aggression and then, only by unanimous vote of its members. In this case, there was no unanimity. Obviously, Grenada did not vote to be invaded by a non-signatory nation.

So, the legal pretext is very shaky. There have to be real reasons for such a peremptory move and one which is dangerously easy to interpret as an exercise of might in the Soviet manner, the sort of thing we deplore in Afghanistan as only one example. The legal expert of the State Department gamely maintained that some members of the Caribbean alliance felt that the brutal overthrow of Mr Bishop's Marxist régime by an even more Marxist leader, General Austin, presented a threat of external aggression, presumably by the new Grenadian régime, to them.

The Reagan administration has not acted on this presumption though and says it has no direct information that Cuba or the Soviet Union was behind the bloody overthrow of the Bishop régime. But now, I believe we're coming down to the cause, which is one of fear about the possible or probable strategy of the Soviet Union and Cuba throughout the Caribbean.

For at least two years, the Reagan administration has watched the strengthening of ties between Grenada and both the Russians and the Cubans and has seen, in this alliance, something quite different from, and maybe more menacing, than the revolutions in Cuba and in Nicaragua. The official word from the White House is that the decision to invade was made last Friday evening.

On that morning, there appeared in the Wall Street Journal the most powerful expression we've had of the kind of misgivings that drove the President to act as he did. Briefly, the Journal says that under Mr Bishop Grenada was well on its way to becoming a Soviet proxy base. The Russians were building a port as well as the famous two-mile long airstrip. Libyans were recruiting students for training.

Why the fuss about this speck in the ocean? For starters, it's right on the deep-water channel through which more than 50 per cent of the Caribbean oil shipping goes. Its new airport is dandy for the Cuban supply route to Angola. It is within easy range of the Venezuelan oil fields. Above all, the coup shows an amazing surge of Soviet Cuban boldness. Cuba and Nicaragua are one thing. There, at least, the revolutions had local roots. A miniature Afghanistan in the Caribbean is quite another. The Monroe Doctrine may not mean much these days but we're in sad shape indeed if the Soviets think they can prop up an island version of the Babrak Karmal Afghanistan régime in our own backyard.

In other and sharper words, it appears that the administration, thinking back to Kennedy's missile crisis, was convinced it was nipping in the bud the more gradual growth of a similarly threatening Soviet base in the Western hemisphere and one that, on that speck of an island, would not be noticed.

If you hold that conviction which President Reagan holds more passionately than anyone, then, questions of legality, of the right to impose democracy on somebody else at the point of a sword, of not attempting preliminary negotiations or putting out a warning, of, you might say, the very un-American nature of this military move, they are questions likely to be brushed aside.

But it's plain already that the press, furious at the unheard-of precedent of being denied their traditional right in a military manoeuvre to inform the people, neither the press nor the Congress, rousing itself from the torpor that follows from being in shock, mean to let those very serious questions go a'begging.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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