The missile crisis Posted on July 4th
One Minute to Midnight
Kennedy, Khrushchev
and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
By Michael Dobbs
Alfred A. Knopf. 426 pp. $28.95
Reviewed by Chris Patsilelis
On Oct. 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy pored over photographs taken by a U-2 reconnaissance plane as it flew over western Cuba two days before. The photos revealed, shockingly, the unmistakable presence of Soviet medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles capable of striking most of the Eastern Seaboard, including Washington, in 13 minutes.
All that the missiles needed to be fully operational was for their nuclear warheads to be attached.
Within minutes a grim Kennedy told his aides that he would, if need be, authorize an air strike “to take out those missiles.”
Thus began the Cuban missile crisis, the tense, 13-day drama that directly involved Cuba, the United States and the Soviet Union, but ultimately threatened much of the world with nuclear annihilation.
In his assiduously researched study of the crisis, One Minute to Midnight, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, a 1997 PEN award finalist for his book Down With Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, gives us an accurate and comprehensive chronicle of this nerve-racking Cold War imbroglio.
Dobbs recounts Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s plan to make Cuba his nuclear window on the West and Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s willingness to oblige him after the attempted CIA-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.
The author also paints a vivid portrait of Kennedy as the president aimed a threatening message at the leaders of Cuba and the Soviet Union. Dobbs describes in great detail Kennedy’s order for the greatest mobilization of troops (120,000) and equipment since World War II, and his dangerous gamble on a naval blockade.
U.S. warships soon succeeded in turning back freighters bearing missiles and warheads en route to Cuba. The blockade quickly led Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles from the island, but only in return for America’s removal of missiles from Turkey.
Dobbs also reveals new information about the crisis, including the Soviet Union’s intention to destroy the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base with nuclear weapons.
In One Minute to Midnight Dobbs shapes a fine, moment-to-moment narrative from a huge amount of available information. But it is his rendering of the human stories, his in-depth exploration of the characters’ psychological motivations and emotions, that really propels this book.
He explains the unlikely relationship between the chubby, 5-foot-3 Khrushchev and the slender, bearded, 6-foot-4 Castro. He writes that upon their first meeting in 1960 the two leaders warmly embraced. Castro and his revolutionaries “had stirred the romanticism of the tired old men in the Kremlin, reminding them that they, too, had once been revolutionaries. Eventually, Khrushchev would come to love Fidel,” in Khrushchev’s own words, “like a son.”
Strongly implying that Kennedy’s World War II combat experiences very likely had a bearing upon his cautious attitude during the missile crisis, the author quotes a letter written by young Navy Lt. Kennedy, then serving in the Pacific in 1943: “It’s easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers, that thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket. But . . . the people deciding . . . had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal.” And the goal had better be worth the effort.
In the realm of the lesser-known figures of the story, Dobbs for the first time reveals how U-2 pilot Capt. Chuck Maultsby, at the height of the crisis on Oct. 27, 1962, came perilously close to starting a nuclear war when he became lost above the Arctic Circle and flew 1,000 miles off-course over Soviet airspace.
Frantically eluding Soviet jet fighters, Maultsby did make it back safely. But that was not the case with U-2 pilot Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr. On a reconnaissance mission over eastern Cuba on the same day Maultsby was in the air, Anderson was shot down by Soviet surface-to-air missiles: “Several pieces of shrapnel sliced through the cockpit, piercing the pilot’s partial-pressure suit and the back of his helmet. Rudolf Anderson was probably killed instantly.”
The Cuban missile crisis is often summarized in the windy, ethereal terms of how Kennedy and Khrushchev came “eyeball to eyeball,” how they each “stared into the abyss” and backed away. But Dobbs time and again stresses that the players in this crisis, as in all major conflicts, were mostly brave, lesser-known individuals who suffered terribly, wounded or killed while doing their jobs in situations over which they had little or no control.
Riveting and highly informative, One Minute to Midnight portrays the intense human drama of mankind on the brink of an unthinkable war.
Chris Patsilelis has reviewed books on military subjects for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
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