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Ever since Hiroshima, the mushroom cloud had been a nightmarish possibility hanging over all our imaginations, and now, quite suddenly, it was threat… - Peregrine Worsthorne
" "Ever since Hiroshima, the mushroom cloud had been a nightmarish possibility hanging over all our imaginations, and now, quite suddenly, it was threatening to materialise. Oddly enough, fear did not come into it, so there was no need to keep a stiff upper lip; no need to ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. For if everybody was going to die, then nobody was going to die, since dying involves leaving loved ones behind and this time there were going to be no loved ones left behind. No need, therefore, for tears or sadness. It was more a question of intense excitement; of being in on not the creation but the destruction of the world; in on, that is, the drama to end all dramas.
From the moment of announcing the exclusion zone, President Kennedy and his small team of advisers had gone into purdah in the White House, making no appearances and issuing no statements. This unprecedented hush lasted for several days during which there was nothing much to do except wait and pray and hope for the best. I think we all knew by then that if anybody was going to flinch from this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, it would not be President Kennedy. How we knew that I do not know, but we did, and somehow or other the total public silence from the White House had succeeded in communicating determination more effectively than any number of official communiqués.
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About Peregrine Worsthorne
Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (22 December 1923 – 4 October 2020) was a British journalist, writer, and broadcaster. He spent the largest part of his career at the Telegraph newspaper titles, eventually the editor of The Sunday Telegraph from 1986 to 1989. He left the newspaper in 1997. Worsthorne was a conservative-leaning political journalist, who wrote columns and leaders for many years.
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Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne
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Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne
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Additional quotes by Peregrine Worsthorne
The liberal-progressive view, so beloved of the intellectual community, is that the most crucial battle in the world today is in the field of race, and that Britain, for reasons of morality and expediency, must throw in its lot with the coloured peoples, for all their imperfections. But one can only doubt whether any Government in fact will pay more than lip-service to this view. During its last period of office Labour was able to blur the issue in a way that gave some satisfaction to both the realists and the idealists, backing the liberal-progressive view in words but only very partially in actions. It did not sell arms to South Africa, but it carried on cynically enough with trade and defence co-operation.
Nobody should suppose that the slightly ridiculous picture painted of the Wilson kitchen cabinet by Mr. Haines or his real Cabinet by Mr. Crossman, is the result of some particular flaw in the character of a specially contemptible Prime Minister. Wilson's character merely compounded a danger common to all Labour Governments, perhaps to all Governments in an increasing egalitarian age: that of containing too high a proportion of men and women near the seats of power who have no feel for the appearance of office, none of that effortless cohesion and mutual trust of a ruling class for long accustomed to rule, no sense of public dignity or decorum and, in some ways, no instinctive flair for excluding those likely to let the side down by telling all for money.
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I supported the legalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults in '67 and still do so. I think that anything which would increase… I regard homosexuality as being a great misfortune. I see it as something the less frequent it is in any society, the better for that society. All I am saying is that at schools, and I do think one has to emphasise at schools, I think that it shouldn't be something which anybody should be allowed to encourage or promote, certainly not any schools which are funded by the local authorities and where people have to go to by law.
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