We have several times called attention to the failures of Eco, the news service of Televisa, Mexico's main television chain. The hurricane which hit the Pacific coast of Mexico provided another example of the use of ECO for government propaganda. There was widespread criticism of the government's failure to respond adequately to the crisis. Eco simply showed President Zedillo visiting the devastated regions and promising help. Then it ran pictures of the Acapulco hotels, with assurances that life had returned to normal, that the weather was beautiful, and that tourists should come without delay. Mexicans who depend on Televisa for news about Mexico are grossly disinformed. Fortunately, they realize it.
In the U.S. the situation in more complicated. The old Hispanic American Report was well-known for the care with which it followed events in Cuba, especially the Bay of Pigs and its aftermath. We were grateful to C-Span when last week it devoted five days to commentaries by participants in the 13 days of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The new book The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis was the basis for the series, and some of the tapes, now in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, were played.
My response was surprise at the theme that the world was on the brink of a nuclear meltdown, and that only President Kennedy's statesmanlike handling of the discussions among his advisers produced the right decisions. The fulsome praise of Kennedy was quite unconvincing. As the only surviving member of the Mugwump Party, I am distressed by the attempts of both major parties to idealize their heroes and to vilify those of the other party. We need the facts and a balanced presentation of them. We are only now beginning to get those about the Kennedy family, which succeeded in banning the distribution of copies of the "Biography" series film on President Kennedy, documenting among other things his ties with the mafia. Historians, especially those associated with President Kennedy, rate him very highly. When I go through the record with them, they are finally reduced to saying, "Well, he made us feel good." My assessment of the TV operation was that they were trying to fix in our minds a version of events which does not correspond to reality.
Now my views have been confirmed (Newsweek, 10/20/97) by Robert Manning, who was assistant secretary of state in the Kennedy administration . The title of his article reads "How close to the brink? I believe that the apocalyptic view of the Cuban missile crisis has been greatly exaggerated." Read it.
The same historians place Herbert Hoover low in the scale of presidents, which is unfair to one of our most honest and idealistic, if ill-fated, presidents. Lest any think that my views reflect a political bias (they do not), let me say that the latest revelations about President Nixon confirm his enemies' charges. The most important task of historians is to get the facts straight.
Ronald Hilton, 10-26-97
