A new look at the war that wasn’t

High Noon in the Cold War

Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Max Frankel

Presidio Press/Ballantine Books: 208 pp., $23.95

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The Cuban missile crisis stands out as the great near miss of the 20th century. “This may end in a big war,” Nikita Khrushchev lamented to his Kremlin colleagues once he realized that the Americans had unraveled his secret plan to transform Cuba into a Soviet strategic missile base in October 1962. Similarly engulfed by dread, President Kennedy assumed that he would eventually have to resort to military force to get the missiles out. Kennedy confessed to his brother Robert that he would be impeached if he failed. “We were eyeball to eyeball,” a relieved Dean Rusk said in the Cabinet room after the Soviet leader began to back down and the danger of nuclear war crested.

It is tempting to ask what more need be said about this event, already the subject of films and countless books. Part of the enduring fascination, however, is the protean nature of the accounts of this crisis. In the 1960s the Kennedy administration and the Soviets had an interest in hiding aspects of what happened from their own side and each other. Kennedy’s decision to trade away U.S. missiles in Turkey to ensure a diplomatic settlement contradicted his resolute cold warrior image. Moscow hid Khrushchev’s grander aims in sending the missiles, suggesting it was solely to protect Fidel Castro. Ever since, documents and oral testimony have trickled out from both sides, and with the release of Kennedy’s presidential recordings form an increasingly nuanced mosaic of brinksmanship and statesmanship at the highest levels and frighteningly close calls on the ground.

Max Frankel, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who spent a half-century at the New York Times, has written the brisk and engaging “High Noon in the Cold War,” adding insightful autobiographical details. Frankel, who was a Times correspondent in Moscow in the late 1950s, provides a vivid analysis of Khrushchev’s thinking: The Cuban missile gambit was his last in a series of efforts to redress the imbalance between the two superpowers. Frankel captures the strange brew of inferiority and assertiveness in this particular adversary. He is less persuasive about the Kremlin goings-on during the crisis. Relying on the memories of Sergei Khrushchev, the premier’s son, and a Kremlin staffer who did not witness key episodes, Frankel perpetuates the notion that Kremlin hawks pushed their leader to take a harder line. However, recently declassified high-level Soviet minutes from the Khrushchev era demonstrate that there were no such hawks. From the moment he dispatched his key rivals in 1957, Khrushchev was always the greatest risk-taker in the room.

With Kennedy’s secret recordings of his strategy sessions, Frankel’s reconstruction of the U.S. side is much closer to the mark. The president emerges as a paragon of crisis leadership: pragmatic, open-minded and decisive. Relations between civilian leaders and the military did not reach the level of insubordination depicted in the otherwise meticulous film “13 Days.” But in correcting one version of history, he misses where Hollywood got it right: how dangerous the advice of the U.S. military was during the crisis. Frankel repeats the enduring myth that Washington didn’t know that Soviet troops in Cuba had tactical nuclear missiles, each with the firepower to irradiate an entire beachhead. In fact, the U.S. intelligence community spotted the weapons and concluded that they must have nuclear warheads or they would have been useless. Yet Pentagon leaders continued to advise an invasion. Though Cuba would eventually have been taken, thousands of Marines would have died in just the first wave had Kennedy been so reckless.

Frankel concludes that the world did not come that close to nuclear war in 1962. There were moments in which emotions overtook each man, but in the end Khrushchev and Kennedy sought compromise. At the height of the crisis, both leaders chose to ignore events that more aggressive men might have seen as a pretext for war.

The Cuban missile crisis can seem very remote or eerily relevant today. It depends on which of the current threats to U.S. security one considers. Khrushchev would never have ordered suicide bombings. Yet his determination to use nuclear power to acquire international prestige is reminiscent of nuclear efforts by authoritarians in Iran and North Korea, vulnerable countries that see an opportunity to make gains at the expense of U.S. interests by altering the international balance of power. The ultimate decisions in 1962 rested with two prudent and flexible leaders. It remains an open and troubling question whether a similar coolheadedness would prevail in the capitals that matter now.

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Timothy J. Naftali directs the Presidential Recordings Program and the Kremlin Decision-Making Project at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and is writing a history of U.S. counterterrorism.