Content area
Full Text
High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Max Frankel. New York: Ballantine, 2004. 206 pages. $23.95.
Max Frankel's monograph on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis adds another entry to a very long bibliography. Frankel is a distinguished American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who covered the missile crisis as a reporter for The New York Times in Washington. To that personal experience he has added a familiarity with the constantly expanding literature on the crisis, as well as what he describes as additional understanding of the political and diplomatic styles of the principal actors, derived from his reporting days in "Kennedy's Washington, Khrushchev's Moscow, and Castro's Havana."
Frankel's narrative tells the story of the 14-day crisis clearly and concisely, starting from the morning of 16 October 1962, when National security Advisor McGeorge Bundy brought to President John F. Kennedy's bedroom some photographs, taken by high-flying U-2 spy planes, that showed Soviet troops engaged in setting up nuclear-capable missile sites in Cuba. Frankel describes the crisis as rooted in the complementary miscalculations of Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The American President mistakenly believed that the USSR would never deploy nuclear weapons to Cuba; the Soviet leader believed that the Americans would acquiesce if they were deployed and presented as a fait accompli.
Frankel takes us briskly through the President's creation of the ExCommshort for the Executive Committee of the National security Council-which quickly divided into "hawks," who favored early and robust military intervention to solve the problem of the missiles, and "doves," who...