History The world was about to blow up. With us in it. That's how I remember the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.
In those days before universal television, international news filtered through to me from the older members of the family. They would come home in the evening to report in subdued tones that well-known "hard-chaws" (i.e. long-time sinners and rakes) were seen queuing for a last confession. Armed with the dreaded atom bomb, the Americans and the Russians were on a collision course. There seemed to be no way out. It was a terrifying time.
Now comes this book from Max Frankel, distinguished journalist and former executive editor of the New York Times, to say that it really wasn't quite as serious as it looked. Kennedy and Khrushchev were never going to let things get completely out of hand, he maintains, but it seems like an unduly sanguine view of what many feel was the greatest near-miss ever.
Frankel, who has also written a wise and entertaining book about his life in newspapers, actually covered the crisis as it developed. He was listening on an extension when Kennedy sought to persuade the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, James "Scotty" Reston, to hold off on a news story about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Many of us in the trade would love to return to a major news event years afterwards, when more information had come out and secret files were released, so that we could satisfy our own curiosity and tell the full story at last. Some examples that come to mind are the Good Friday Agreement or the downfall of Albert Reynolds as taoiseach. What really happened? Frankel has realised that journalistic dream. More than 40 years on, he has had access to a wealth of material, histories and memoirs, scholarly studies and oral testimony. No one would have dared forecast at the time that the Soviet system would collapse in a pile of dust, giving Westerners access to its former archives. Khrushchev's own memoirs have also appeared and been authenticated. And it turned out that Kennedy was secretly taping White House meetings at the time.
But the more information, the less clarity. Frankel writes that "paradoxically, all these studies have also exacerbated debate about the motivations of the Soviet and American leaders who produced, managed, and finally resolved the crisis".
Leaders? There were really only two that mattered: JFK and Nikita S. Khruschev. For all their power, both were plagued by insecurity. The Soviet leader humiliated the inexperienced US president at a meeting in Vienna in June 1961. For his part, Khrushchev knew Moscow's long-range nuclear missiles were erratic and inadequate and felt he needed a launching-pad close to the target.
Enter Cuba, the sunny Caribbean playground which, within a short few years, became part of the communist bloc. When Kennedy, reassuring an important ally, located weapons of mass destruction on the Soviet border in Turkey, Khrushchev decided to respond in kind by placing missiles only 90 miles from the United States.
It all happened in secret and US intelligence took some time to catch on to it. The parallels with Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction are obvious. But in this case, the weapons were indisputably real and threatening.
In theory, Kennedy could have sat on his hands and done nothing. If there were missiles in Turkey, why couldn't there be missiles also in Cuba? But domestic opinion was never going to live with that. The sense of territorial inviolability has always been crucial to American psychology. In a sense, the Cuban missile crisis was a 9/11 that never happened. Kennedy himself believed inaction would have led to impeachment.
In addition, as this book makes clear, senior members of the US military establishment were itching to have a crack at Cuba, to avenge the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs, the US-sponsored invasion which ended in disaster the previous year - and pluck the Castro thorn from their flesh once and for all.
At the time Kennedy was reading and learning from Barbara Tuchman's recently published The Guns of August, a study of how misinformation and miscalculation helped to precipitate the first World War. Kennedy was preoccupied, not with Cuba but with the highly vulnerable West Berlin, where the infamous wall that symbolised the division between communism and democracy had been built the previous year. The implications for West Berlin and the fear that Khruschchev would "just grab" the place were factored into all of Kennedy's decisions about Cuba. Indeed, by this stage he was taking a comparatively restrained approach towards the Caribbean island, apart from illegally encouraging efforts to assassinate the erratic Fidel.
The first of the Soviet nuclear missiles reached Cuba on September 15th, 1962, but it was October 16th before Kennedy knew about it. Whereas Kennedy and Khrushchev had both seen the horrors of war at first hand and neither wished for a nuclear confrontation, they also shared a common fear of being perceived as weak and inadequate by their own side.
We hear much about Kennedy's private life these days but, incredible as it may now seem, reporters did not consider this a worthy or proper subject for investigation at the time. Frankel reminds us that JFK's capacities ranged more widely than the bedroom and that he proved, in the course of this crisis, to have the temperament and wisdom of a statesman.
Deciding not to go public for the moment on the presence of missiles in Cuba, Kennedy assembled an informal and at times even disorderly group of top advisers and officials called the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExCom for short. At meetings, he usually flicked on the hidden microphones that only his secretary and perhaps his brother Robert knew about. Scholars have feasted on the transcripts, which were published in recent years, but the shifting sands of the debate remain difficult to analyse.
One of the few who kept a cool head most of the time was secretary of state Dean Rusk, who took a consistent approach that combined clarity and determination with caution and restraint. It was necessary to take a stand, "but to do it in a way that gives everybody a chance to pull away".
The joint chiefs of staff wanted to launch a pre-emptive strike, attacking the missiles from the air before they could be launched on the US. With the exception of their chairman, Gen Maxwell Taylor, they also favoured sending in ground troops for a full-scale invasion. It all sounds very familiar. Kennedy said an attack on Cuba would be regarded as "a mad act by the United States" and in the end opted for a limited form of blockade or "quarantine" to prevent further missiles being brought to the island.
In the end, after many nightmare moments, a compromise was reached. In return for a withdrawal of the missiles, Kennedy publicly pledged, in effect, that the US would never invade Cuba and he also secretly agreed to pull Jupiter nuclear missiles out of Turkey. But Frankel's contention that the crisis was not quite as grave as we thought at the time is ultimately unconvincing, not least because of the danger in those tense days that a simple operational blunder could have led to war, or as Kennedy himself put it: "There's always some sonofabitch who doesn't get the word."
Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland published by Collins Press, Cork
High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis By Max Frankel Ballantine Books, 209pp. $23.95