Customer Reviews

High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Most Americans know the Hollywood mythology of the Cuban missile crisis. Our collective assessment of the significance of this national security crisis, the participants and the process, has been largely shaped by emotion, fantasy and politics. Max Frankel in his remarkable new book, High Noon in the Cold War, has changed all that.

Frankel shares the real story of this critical series of events like an old friend sitting with us in front of a flickering fire on a crisp fall evening. Gracefully he enlightens and fascinates with well-crafted portraits of John F. Kennedy, his close advisors, those in the periphery at the Pentagon and in the Congress, and their counterparts in Moscow and Havana. High Noon presents the story without the bluster and self-confidence of history written by the winners, and instead allows us into the hearts and minds of the key decision-makers and their world that autumn of 1962.

John F. Kennedy, privately pain-wracked and publicly politically assaulted for his youth and a lack of seriousness in 1962, played this game of global chess, in part by doing what one might believe any president would do. He consulted with a variety of advisors, trusted and some less trusted, and he attempted to more deeply understand what Khrushchev's first surprising call of "Check!" required of America. Frankel does a wonderful job of putting the reader inside the pressure cooker of the Executive Committee as well as insightfully portraying the extensive series of possible moves weighed minute by minute by John Kennedy himself.

The deliberation and debate in both Washington and Moscow, after false starts and misunderstood and mixed messages resulted in the American declaration of a Cuban blockade-lite, described as a quarantine, implemented with a sensitivity that seemed at times an affront to Navy tradition. The eventual resolution surprisingly satisfied America, satisfied the Soviets, and only Fidel Castro felt betrayed at the immediate outcome. The Soviet nuclear-capable SS-4 Medium Range Ballistic Missiles were removed from Cuba, as were the Soviet strategic IL-28 bombers. Khrushchev allowed Castro to retain the defensive antiaircraft batteries provided he not use them against American U-2 high altitude surveillance planes, left a 3,000 man Soviet combat brigade on the island, and Castro was promised that he would never have to pay for any future Soviet defensive weaponry. In return, Khrushchev received a direct and very public pledge that the United States would never invade Cuba, and a secret pledge that the United Stated would dismantle the obsolete but symbolic Jupiter medium range ballistic missile from Turkey within five months time. Later in 1962, Castro accepted $53 million in American medical supplies and baby food in return for his release of 1,113 survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Frankel portrays the facts of the resolution of the Cuban Missile crisis cogently, but it is in his exploration of the dramatic and frenetic internal debate over the meaning of the signals on both sides, and even the logistics of information flow, that make the book difficult to put down.

The Kennedy administration had secretly recorded many meetings, including those of the ExCom, and the revealed data now available sheds new light on the events as they occurred. Frankel is a reporter, a former executive editor of the New York Times, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of President Nixon's 1972 visit to China. As he writes about the events and decisions that precipitated and then resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis over forty years after the fact, with newly available information, and some fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, Frankel can be both brutally and breathtakingly honest.

Some might say that the most brutal as well as breathtaking conclusion drawn by Max Frankel is that Khrushchev and Kennedy never came as near the point of no return, a nuclear Armageddon over the Soviet missiles in Cuban as has been oft declared and glorified with a kind of delicious horror in America and around the world. Instead, the story is more about the way both national leaders were plagued with over-aggressive and at times illogical advisors, and internally confronted by an array of opportunistic political critics. The truth is revealed in the ways both leaders personally intended to act, and did act, to avoid escalation - even as events indeed escalated, and misunderstandings appeared to mushroom like the fearful images that colored the entire affair. This correction to the historical record is welcome indeed. Yet, this is not the sole accomplishment of High Noon. Our understanding of key important players and events is not only enhanced by Frankel's attention and perspicacity, but readers gain a whole new perspective on the crisis and its resolution. Just as certain "paradigm blindness" afflicted key members of the national security bureaucracy in the United States, and the Soviet Union, and Havana for that matter, historians and other observers have also been afflicted with a kind of paradigm blindness. We have seen Kennedy and Khrushchev as responding to a purely military threat and weighing fair options posed by advisors who were only serving their President. Yet, Frankel exposes two men who were attempting to resolve not only the facts of the threat, but the paradigm flaws driving their own advisors. Khrushchev, the "wily old peasant" and Kennedy the wunderkind occupying a fresh new White House faced down fear as they faced down their own animated and noisy advisors, and their internal critics.

We have long been aware of the impact and perspectives on the crisis of men like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the crusty Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Frankel reveals the real depth of animosity for the White House during this high-pressure predicament. Likewise, the perspectives of senior Communist Party leadership of Nikita Khrushchev's wild ideas are richly illustrated. What comes through most clearly is that in different ways, the inexperienced and urbane Kennedy and unsophisticated political survivor Khrushchev both overcame the animal reactivity stoked by much of their staff. While the world waited in fear and helplessness, this unlikely pair of leaders learned a great deal about each other, and themselves, in October 1962. In response to what both sides later recognized as alarmingly dangerous communications pitfalls, Kennedy and Khrushchev implemented a hotline teletype connection between Washington and Moscow in 1963, with an eye to avoiding the nuclear brink. High noon had come and gone without a shootout, and we would not pass this way again.

A review of High Noon in the Cold War would not be complete without a mention of the outstanding work Frankel does in portraying one lesser known hero on the American side. CIA Director John McCone, a traditional conservative brought over into the Kennedy Administration for political reasons after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is a man that modern political observers often seek in Washington today and do not find. McCone is distinguished in modern studies of CIA history as the only Director of Central Intelligence who gave primacy to accurate intelligence estimating, instead of to either covert action or managerial aspects of the CIA. An outsider to the intelligence community, in the months leading up to the Cuban Missile crisis McCone took issue with his own CIA's assessment that the Soviet Union was preparing for nothing much in Cuba, despite of the deployment of a ring of SAM anti-aircraft batteries being installed in August 1962. McCone instead advised Kennedy that this activity logically related to something else either planned or ongoing that warranted immediate and serious American attention. The world, and certainly the mythology of a new Camelot in America, would have placed the white-haired 60-year-old Republican in the Kennedy administration as the odd man out - and he was. But his dead on reasoning and independent streak (later seen in his resignation from the Johnson administration in 1965 because of Johnson's disregard for the bleak CIA assessment of the possibility of U.S. success in Vietnam in favor of more rosy Pentagon assessments) were a precious balm to a President who needed reason instead of reactionaries.

While John F. Kennedy may also fit the bill, McCone brings to mind the characteristic contributions of a group of Americans most recently illuminated by former Navy Secretary James Webb in his new book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (Broadway, 2004). The intrinsic stubbornness and fierce individualism of McCone was a key factor in the resolution of the Cuban Missile crisis, and that Kennedy gave credence to McCone's advice over the majority opinion attests to his own qualities of Scots-Irish independence in the face of overwhelming pressure.

While the Cuban Missile crisis holds a unique position in American history, Frankel's fresh visitation of the men and the process of October 1962 is also of critical importance today. High Noon provides not only a wise enhancement of our national memory but a prudent guide for the present. John F. Kennedy listened to the heated and often confused chatter and outdated paradigms of his national security team, and then sought time alone or with key advisors, away from the microphones, to assess the reasonability of the recommendations - as well as the soundness and logic inherent in the information that came to him under the guise of national intelligence. When determining his course of action, a course that could have led to all-out war and the death of thousands of servicemen and civilians here and in the Soviet Union, Kennedy contacted each of the living former American Presidents for advice and comment. His pre-decision conversation with Dwight D. Eisenhower is particularly poignant and simultaneously amusing. Furthermore, while he informed a group of twenty key congressional leaders after his decision to respond to the Soviet missile deployment with a Cuban quarantine had been made, they were pleased to have been informed if not consulted about a decision that was still very much unknown to the American public or the rest of the world.

Almost a full generation after the end of the Cold War, America finds itself engaged in multiple overseas military deployments, wars of liberation, and wars against terrorism. While nuclear annihilation seems far from imminent, warnings of the danger of weapons of mass destruction used against innocent civilians in America and elsewhere flow consistently from Washington and from other monitors of global security. Congressmen and women, politics-watchers around the country and living ex-Presidents can only imagine the role of deliberation and ascendance of reason over bureaucratic or political agendas that Max Frankel so elegantly and engagingly portrays in High Noon in the Cold War.

Posted on Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Karen Kwiatkowski, (...)

I really enjoyed this book. It is an easy read and the author has done a great job in his research. I thought the perspective he presented about what it was about the 2 leaders personally that allowed this situation to occur was very interesting. I also enjoyed the lack of bias. The situation was presented as neutral as possible I believe.

NO MATTER HOW YOU LOOK AT IT, THIS IS AN EXCELLENT BOOK.
IT'S TAKES A SUBJECT, THE FACTS ABOUT WHICH HAVE BEEN BEATEN TO DEATH IN ALL MEDIA FORMS, AND FOR ONCE, ALLOWS YOU TO COME AWAY WITH A CLEAR, FACTUAL, THOROUGH, UNCOMPLICATED, UNBIASED UNDERSTANDING OF EXACTLY WHAT TOOK PLACE. IT'S LIKE CUTTING THROUGH BUTTER WITH A HOT KNIFE. IF THIS SUBJECT INTERESTS YOU, IT'S A MUST READ.

This book is very informative on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The author gives great prespective on the mindsets of the leaders of both Soviet Russia and America. I recommend this book.