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Cuban Crisis Countdown Is Fresh, Fascinating

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By CHARLES TRUEHEART

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 13, 2008

"One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War," by Michael Dobbs (Knopf, $28.95)

The Cuban Missile Crisis is an oft-told tale of near-war in the nuclear age. Time hasn't diminished the fascination it holds for historians, diplomats, generals and their armchair equivalents.

So if Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs is covering old ground in "One Minute to Midnight," he has also unearthed and reconstructed more than enough fresh material to justify this new and much-improved account.

Dobbs frames his book as a gripping tick-tock - news parlance for a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour reconstruction of events - of the two weeks in October 1962, when American, Soviet and Cuban leaders actively contemplated the unthinkable.

Their decision to step back from the brink stands as one of the great triumphs of modern leadership. Yet Dobbs shows that dumb luck played as important a role as humanitarian idealism and steely statecraft in averting the worst.

A veteran foreign correspondent who covered the fall of Soviet communism, Dobbs provides an almost cinematic narrative of those momentous autumn days. He shifts back and forth from John F. Kennedy's White House to Nikita Khrushchev's Kremlin to Fidel Castro's hideaways in Havana, following events in real time as they unfolded to the key actors in the drama.

He also tracks selected bit players in U.S. reconnaissance planes and in bombers loaded with atomic payloads. He takes us inside CIA sabotage teams in Cuban jungles, aboard Soviet naval vessels steaming toward Cuba and into Cuban command posts.

From the vantage of less than 50 years later, "One Minute to Midnight" reveals how limited the information and how crude the communications were for all of the individuals caught up in the crisis. Official messages between Moscow and Washington could take 12 hours for transmission.

The U.S. grossly underestimated the number of Soviet troops in Cuba - the potential invaders thought they would be fighting mainly Cubans - having also systematically dismissed signs of Soviet missiles on the island because of what Dobbs calls "the tyranny of conventional wisdom."

So numerous and unreliable were the channels of frantic diplomacy between Washington and Moscow that the leaders were often dealing in rumor, fabrication and just plain stupidity. One supposed deadline that the Russians agonized to meet - an address to the nation by Kennedy on the eve of an attack - turned out to come from a U.S. television network teaser for a rerun of the president's earlier speech.

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev, in Dobbs' analysis, knew early in the crisis that the slightest provocation or misstep would lead inexorably to a nuclear exchange that would kill tens of millions, destroying their nations and several others, too.

"They also understood that a commander in chief could not always control his own armies," Dobbs writes. "They were awed, sobered, frightened by their power to blow up the world."

His research was extensive. Dobbs talked to Soviet officers who had never been interviewed before about their role in the 1962 crisis. He watched little-viewed reconnaissance films of the military situation in Cuba to give his account the fine grain and authority that make this book so absorbing.

Among his important contributions to the revision of history is his analysis of the moment when Kennedy and Khrushchev went "eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked," as U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously put it.

This, Dobbs shows, is essentially a myth. The alleged "confrontation" of a Soviet ship and U.S. vessels enforcing the island blockade couldn't have happened, as they were 500 miles (800 kilometers) apart.

Dobbs also challenges the received version of the so-called Trollope ploy - Kennedy's decision to answer an earlier Khrushchev message rather than a more recent, less promising one. The White House and State Department drafters of Kennedy's response, whom Dobbs identifies line by line, clearly answered both messages.

"One Minute to Midnight" makes a significant contribution to our understanding of that perilous autumn - and of the high potential for catastrophe that remains when misjudgment and machismo can trigger weapons of mass destruction.

Charles Trueheart, director of the American Library in Paris, is a critic for Bloomberg News.

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