The Cuban Missile Crisis is, once again, at the top of many people’s minds as Putin threatens nuclear war.
As it happens, I’ve read extensively about the Missile Crisis. For those who would like to get a sense of what happened — and its relevance to Putin’s mad posturing — here are three books I’ve found essential to understanding the conflict. There are, of course, many others, including books that scholars prefer, but this is a pretty good start for those vaguely familiar with what happened.
Michael Dobbs’s One Minute to Midnight is an hour-by-hour description of the Crisis from the American, Russian, and Cuban sides. It is riveting and terrifying: you can’t help concluding that it wasn’t diplomatic genius that saved us but merely sheer luck.
The Kennedy Tapes was the first widely published transcript of the secretly-taped meetings that Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Lemay, Sorensen, and many others had in order to plan the American strategy for dealing with the Crisis. It is an astonishing read and provides considerable insight into JFK’s leadership — close to exemplary, in my opinion — and the serious limitations of many of the other participants. (JFK, however, has been blamed for blundering into the Crisis, and that, too, is not an unreasonable opinion to hold). Not to be missed is the insane confrontation between the far right General Curtis Lemay and Kennedy; had Lemay’s advice to bomb and invade Cuba been followed, none of us would be here today. (If you’re truly serious about studying the Missile Crisis, this transcript has been superseded by somewhat more accurate (and expensive) ones, There are also detailed analyses which are well worth reading. You can also find the original secret recordings online.)
The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg is about the history and planning for nuclear war. It includes a terrifying chapter or two on the Missile Crisis but extends both earlier and later. It is, like other writings by Ellsberg, brilliant, convincing, and terrifying. The assumption that nuclear weapons should not be allowed to fall into the hands of bad or irrational actors is an insane assumption. There is no one, and no country, that can be trusted with nuclear weapons. Banning them entirely might sound like an absurd, unrealistic goal but what is far more absurd and far more unrealistic is to assume that somehow humanity can not ban them and survive.
Just for the record, Bobby Kennedy’s Thirteen Days is deliberately misleading and inaccurate. It will, however, give you an idea of how RFK hoped history would remember the Missile Crisis. The tape transcripts paint a very different picture.
And also, no docudrama (like the movie Thirteen Days) comes close to evoking the terror of the Missile Crisis. To get a sense of how frightening and nuts it was, you’d be better off watching the (barely) fictional Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove.
(Incidentally, Fail-Safe the novel was published on October 22, 1962 — smack dab in the middle of the actual Cuban Missile Crisis.)