Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 5
At six-thirty on Monday evening, October 22, 1962, 146 members of the Folding Paper Box Association, highballs and filter-tipped cigarettes in hand, swung into the cocktail party preceding the group’s evening banquet at the venerable Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. At that same hour, in another room of the immense, splashily decorated hotel, members of the Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers Association and the American Coke and Coal Chemicals Institute were beginning their own receptions, chatting with the sort of loud amiability that had long since raised American convention-going to a raucous national art.
And yet, one can almost hear the nervous edge to that evening’s conversation and see, as the clock nears seven, a temporary shrinkage of each gathering, as a number of the gentlemen detach themselves from the groups and make their way to a hotel parlor where a black-and-white television has begun transmitting some remarks by President Kennedy: “It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.…I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat.…My fellow citizens: Let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred.”
The speech and situation were so grim that some of the conventioneers probably called home, delaying their return to the receptions, but the cocktail parties and banquets went forward, and life being what it is, the day’s golf scores no doubt found their way into the conversation along with assumptions about the nautical-mile range of Soviet missiles. But something in the assistant manager’s report for October 22, 1962, suggests that Cuba remained Topic A that night at the Greenbrier: Only 30 of the hotel’s 842 registered guests decided to view the evening’s movie, Judgment at Nuremberg. It would have been difficult to concentrate on World War II with World War III so much in the air.
There was no need to smoke one’s cigar outside in those days, but some of the conventioneers probably took themselves out onto the Greenbrier’s vast grounds for an after-dinner stroll. The more history-minded among them would already have taken note, from plaques at the resort and brochures they’d carried in their luggage on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, that Americans had been coming to take the waters near White Sulphur Springs for nearly two hundred years; that Generals Robert E. Lee and Dwight D. Eisenhower had each visited their wounded troops on the site, when the Greenbrier served as a hospital in two great wars eighty years apart; and that many American Presidents from James Monroe on had at one time or another come here to stay,