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jeremybost's review against another edition
4.0
This was probably my favorite book of the several I used for a paper on the Cuban missile crisis. The author's take on the crisis is very interesting. Doesn't get bogged down in details.
steves_reading's review
4.0
I really enjoyed this perspective on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most tellings of the story (at least American tellings) pose Khrushchev as a bellicose instigator, perfectly willing to take the world into a nuclear war to demonstrate his strength to the West. In these versions, Kennedy is the levelheaded sage, guiding the brilliant men of his executive committee through intricate diplomatic maneuvers to outfox the wily old Russian and defuse the crisis. The world came to the very brink of nuclear annihilation, and the Kennedy White House averted it. Frankel, a longtime reporter for the New York Times who covered the crisis, tells a different version, more subtle and more believable than the American myth. Khrushchev believes that he can secretly establish his missiles in Cuba and announce their presence after the U.S. presidential election. The missiles, he believes, are no different from the American Jupiter missiles aimed at the USSR from Turkey and Italy. Once the crisis erupts, Frankel describes a Khrushchev who will do almost anything to avoid a nuclear exchange, even on a tactical level. Kennedy is the dove of his group, taking the most conservative route through the crisis short of rolling over. Chance plays a larger part in Frankel’s telling of the story as well, working sometimes for and sometimes against the players in the game. Frankel’s brief analysis of the longer term effects of the crisis in the last chapter of this book connects Khrushchev’s ouster, the escalation of hostilities in Vietnam, and Lyndon Johnson’s rise to the presidency to the arms race that nearly bankrupted the U.S. and did lead to the collapse of the USSR.
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