As I read this big, enthralling book I often wrote the words ‘muddle,’ ‘misunderstanding,’ and ‘the brink’ in the margins. From 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union, until his dismissal, sudden, unexpected and brutal (but not violent) by his comrades and ex-protégés in 1964, the world teetered several times on the edge of nuclear war, most notably during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Khrushchev, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson were men of substance, imagination, even some genius — and yet they blundered through upheavals in Iraq (yes, then too), the Congo, Laos, Berlin and Egypt, threatening, feinting, risking and daring, usually with little reliable knowledge of their adversaries’ motives and power. Khrushchev emerges as ill-educated, insecure, cunning and, when it counted, cautious. When his comrades on the Presidium told him he was finished, according to a first-hand document he replied, ‘You gathered together and splattered shit on me.’
This book is a cautionary tale as we flounder in a world of leaders who by comparison are pygmies, flexing their muscles, issuing threats, ever-blundering, also with next to no reliable knowledge of their adversaries.
Aleksandr Fursenko, a historian and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Timothy Naftali, professor at the University of Virginia, have made use of quantities of previously secret Soviet documents and of interviews with Russian and American survivors of events which could have blown us all to radio- active smithereens. They are the co-authors of One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy: 1958-1964, a study of the Cuban near-disaster. Because of their expertise on this particular subject, and the new sources about it, the Cuban chapters of their new book are truly exciting, and I use that word deliberately.
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