One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

But even as he fulminated against the Soviets, Castro remained the practical politician. 'We won't make the same mistake twice,' he told his youthful followers. Cuba would not 'break with the Russians' so soon after 'breaking with the Americans.' Anything was preferable to being driven back into the arms of Uncle Sam. In order to save his revolution, Fidel was willing to make the supreme sacrifice: he would swallow his pride.

Back at the White House, after the rest of the ExComm had left, JFK found himself alone with Bobby. Together, they reviewed the events of the previous thirteen days, and particularly the final day, Black Saturday, when the world had seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear war. There had been many times over the last twenty-four hours when Kennedy, like Abraham Lincoln before him, had reason to ask himself whether he controlled events or events controlled him.

History, Kennedy understood, does not always flow in predictable directions. Sometimes it can be hijacked by fanatics of various descriptions, by men with long beards, by ideologues living in caves, by assassins with rifles. At others, it can be yanked from its normal path by a combination of chance events, such as an airplane going astray, the misidentification of a missile, or a soldier losing his temper. Statesmen try to bend the chaotic forces of history to their will, with varying degrees of success. The likelihood of an unpredictable event occurring that can change the course of history is always greater at times of war and crisis, when everything is in flux.

The question the world confronted during what came to be known as the Cuban missile crisis was who controlled history: the men in suits, the men with beards, the men in uniform, or nobody at all. In this drama, Kennedy ended up on the same side as his ideological nemesis, Nikita Khrushchev. Neither man wanted war. They both felt an obligation to future generations to rein in the dark, destructive demons they themselves had helped to unleash.

Much of the relief felt by Kennedy on the afternoon of Sunday, October 28, was due to the fact that he and Khrushchev had succeeded in regaining control of historical events. After threatening to erupt in nuclear conflagration, the Cold War would settle back into its familiar rhythm. Men of common sense and reason had defeated the forces of destruction and chaos. The issue now was whether the victory for order and predictability would be long-lasting or fleeting.

Casting around for an appropriate historical precedent, JFK thought of one of his predecessors. On April 14, 1865, five days after accepting the South's surrender in the Civil War, Lincoln decided to celebrate his moment of triumph by paying a visit to Ford's Theatre, to see a production of Our American Cousin.

'This is the night I should go to the theater,' said Jack.

Unsure whether to be amused or protective, Bobby played along with his brother's macabre joke.

'If you go, I want to go with you.'

Some of the characters in this story were quickly forgotten; others were destined for fame and notoriety. Some were disgraced; others rose to positions of great influence. Some led long and happy lives; others had their lives cut short by tragedy. But all were marked in a lasting way by 'the most dangerous moment' in history.

The two CIA saboteurs, Miguel Orozco and Pedro Vera, spent seventeen years in Cuban jails before being sent back to the United States. The man who smuggled them into Cuba, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, was arrested at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 while breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Charles Maultsby was forbidden by the U.S. Air Force from flying anywhere remotely near the North Pole or the Chukot Peninsula. He died of prostate cancer in 1998.

Viktor Mikheev, the Russian soldier killed while preparing a nuclear missile attack on the Guantanamo Naval Base, was buried in Cuban military uniform in Santiago. His remains were later transferred to the Soviet military cemetery in El Chico. His family was told only that he died 'performing his internationalist duty.'

George Anderson was dismissed from his position as chief of naval operations in August 1963 and appointed U.S. ambassador to Portugal.

William Harvey was removed as head of Operation Mongoose after the missile crisis and sent as CIA station chief to Rome, where he drank heavily.

Dmitri Yazov became Soviet defense minister in 1987 and led a failed coup against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991.

John Scali served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Nixon.

Curtis LeMay was caricatured as the maniacal Air Force general Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. In 1968, he ran for vice president of the United States on a ticket headed by the segregationist George Wallace.

Ernesto 'Che' Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to pursue his dream of worldwide revolution. He was killed in the mountains of Bolivia by CIA-supported government forces in 1967.

Robert McNamara remained secretary of defense until 1968. He later repented of his role in escalating the war in Vietnam, and came to believe that only 'luck' had prevented nuclear war over Cuba.

Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office in October 1964. His fellow Presidium members accused him of 'megalomania,' 'adventurism,' 'damaging the international prestige of our government,' and taking the world to 'the brink of nuclear war.'

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in California in June 1968 while campaigning to be elected president.

John F. Kennedy was murdered in November 1963. His assassin had been active in a left-wing protest group that called itself 'Fair Play for Cuba.'

Fidel Castro remained in power for another forty-five years. In February 2008, he was succeeded as president of Cuba by his brother, Raul.

AFTERWORD

The mythologization of the Cuban missile crisis got under way almost immediately. Kennedy loyalists seized on the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba to burnish JFK's image as a peacemaker and a man of action. As usual on such occasions, they accentuated the positive and played down the negative, emphasizing the president's resolve and skill in managing the test of wills with Nikita Khrushchev. The relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote that Kennedy had 'dazzled the world' through a 'combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated.' Bobby Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen, and many lesser acolytes reached similar starry-eyed conclusions.

Kennedy himself contributed to the mythmaking. Soon after the crisis, he gave a long off-the-record interview to one of his closest journalist friends, Charles Bartlett. A subsequent article by Bartlett and Stewart Alsop in the Saturday Evening Post described how the president had resisted pressure from Adlai Stevenson to trade away Turkish, Italian, and British bases for the Soviet missile sites on Cuba. It quoted a rival Kennedy aide as saying that 'Adlai wanted a Munich.' By contrast, JFK was depicted as a tough-minded leader who 'never lost his nerve' despite going 'eyeball to eyeball' with Khrushchev. Bobby Kennedy was the 'leading dove' on the ExComm who argued passionately that an unannounced air strike against Cuba would be 'a Pearl Harbor in reverse and contrary to all American traditions.'

The official version of history omitted some inconvenient facts. The tapes of the ExComm meetings make clear that RFK's position was more ambiguous and contradictory than the early accounts suggest. He was hardly 'a dove from the start,' as Schlesinger claimed in his biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978). On the first day of the crisis, he was one of the leading advocates for invading Cuba and even ruminated aloud about staging a 'Sink the Maine'-type incident as a pretext for getting rid of Castro. He veered from one camp to another depending on the signals he was getting from his brother