Eisenhower expressed his “inexpressible shock” at the Soviets’ actions. For sheer cynicism, however, it was hard to compete with the words of Henry Cabot Lodge. With the Soviet attack under way, he rushed into an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, the same body that he’d blocked from taking up the Hungarian crisis less than twelve hours earlier, to declare: “If ever there was a time when the action of the U.N. could literally be a matter of life and death for a whole nation, this is that time.”
