One Hell of a Gamble: Krushchev, Castro, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1958-62 Book

The Berlin Wall has been rubble for a decade and the memories of the Cold War are growing dim. And yet no one is ever likely to forget the Cuban Missile crisis of October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of full-scale nuclear war as Russia and America locked horns off the coast of Florida. The origins of the crisis are as murky as many of the facts. Ever since the time of Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, the US tended to regard Cuba as its own personal playground and it came as a hell of a shock to the Americans when the corrupt Cuban dictator, Batista, was overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959 and a Marxist regime installed in place. Castro's seizure of power was music to Soviet ears as it gave them a naturally little more than a stone's throw from the American mainland. The US was alert to the threat and in 1961 Pentagon hawks persuaded the newly elected John F. Kennedy to launch his disastrous attempt to oust Castro, the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Later that year, the Soviets persuaded Castro to allow them to build missile bases on Cuban soil. In 1962, the Soviet navy set sail for Cuba, loaded with nuclear warheads, and it was this perceived threat and escalation that precipitated the crisis.After 10 days of high tension, the Soviet Union backed down. The warheads were sent back home and war was averted, but up till now no one has ever been too certain just how close the world came to catastrophe. Kennedy was assassinated long before he could write his memoirs, Castro's lips are sealed and the Soviet archives were a closed book. Fursenko and Naftali have taken advantage of unrestricted access to Soviet records and have undertaken painstaking detective work to fill in the gaps. Some of the tension of the narrative is lost because we know the outcome, and yet even so they give a penetrating insight as they reconstruct the drama step by step. We learn that the Kremlin did seriously consider launching a nuclear attack on the US. The appropriate orders were discussed and Khrushchev spent the night of October 22 so he could be on hand to cable his authorisation. However, the most interesting facts to emerge are those concerning John Kennedy and his brother Robert. JFK had always previously been portrayed as something of a parochial gung-ho type, but this, it emerges, was a public persona designed to appease the warmongering military rather than the real him. For at the same time as he was talking about a Cuban invasion, he and his brother were engaging in a more secret policy of appeasement through the Soviet ambassador. Fortunately for all of us, diplomacy won the day. JFK has been widely discredited as a leader in recent years for his unpleasant sexual carryings-on and corruption. It may just be though that this view is as incomplete as his portrayal as the whiter-than-white "King of Camelot". If so, One Hell of a Gamble could be the first stage in his partial rehabilitation. --John CraceRead More