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The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962
Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded.
In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis—America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors.
Combining in-depth research with Hasting’s well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today.
Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.
In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis—America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors.
Combining in-depth research with Hasting’s well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today.
Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.
538 pages, Hardcover
First published October 13, 2022
About the author
Max Hastings
104 books1,502 followersSir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL, FRHistS is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. His parents were Macdonald Hastings, a journalist and war correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar.
Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard.
Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize.
After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. He has won many awards for his journalism, including Journalist of The Year and What the Papers Say Reporter of the Year for his work in the South Atlantic in 1982, and Editor of the Year in 1988.
He stood down as editor of the Evening Standard in 2001 and was knighted in 2002. His monumental work of military history, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 was published in 2005.
He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Sir Max Hastings honoured with the $100,000 2012 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.
Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard.
Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize.
After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. He has won many awards for his journalism, including Journalist of The Year and What the Papers Say Reporter of the Year for his work in the South Atlantic in 1982, and Editor of the Year in 1988.
He stood down as editor of the Evening Standard in 2001 and was knighted in 2002. His monumental work of military history, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 was published in 2005.
He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Sir Max Hastings honoured with the $100,000 2012 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.
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June 3, 2023
“In Khrushchev’s memoirs, he asserted that the notion of the Cuban deployment [of nuclear weapons] first came to him during a May visit to Bulgaria: ‘Something had to be done to make Cuba safe. But what? The idea gradually took shape in my mind. I didn’t tell anyone what I was thinking. This was my personal opinion, my inner torment.’ Yet it is generally accepted that he had already mooted the plan while staying at his Black Sea dacha, the very place where he so often peered across the limpid waters through binoculars and inveighed against the American Jupiter missiles sited in neighboring Turkey. A month earlier when defense minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky arrived to brief his leader on the latest state of the nuclear balance, as a preliminary to demanding more resources, the chairman had suddenly demanded: ‘Rodion Yakovlevich, what if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?’ He had conceived a grandstand play: to make a covert deployment to Cuba, then stun the world with an announcement of it, at his planned UN General Assembly appearance in November, after the US mid-term congressional elections…”
- Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba, 1962
The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is widely considered to be the closest the world has come to a full nuclear exchange. In a ploy apparently meant to taunt the United States, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev sent medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles to the Caribbean nation, along with enough atomic warheads to devastate America’s eastern seaboard.
Once those missiles were discovered by U2 overflights, President John F. Kennedy came under intense pressure from the military establishment – especially a barely-hinged Curtis Lemay, head of the Strategic Air Command – to destroy the missiles by airstrike, followed by an invasion. Indeed, the desire of the armed forces for swift action led them to make the kind of impossible guarantees typically reserved for salesmen of used automobiles.
Despite their certainty of success, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed strangely unconcerned that their overwhelming conventional forces might require the Soviet Union to escalate to the use of nuclear missiles and bombs. They were also unaware that tactical nukes had been sent to Cuba and – in the high heat of an amphibious assault – could very well have been used on the beaches.
Obviously – as we do not yet inhabit a world of radioactive ash – the missiles of October never flew. Still, the margins were so thin, and the human element so pronounced, that it is unsurprising that this event has been the subject of numerous, sometimes excellent books.
So, what sets Max Hastings’s The Abyss apart?
It’s not the primary source research, for there are no new revelations that have not been published elsewhere. And it’s not the ultimate judgments, for Hastings’s conclusions – that Khrushchev acted precipitously, that the American military establishment verged on the insane, and that President Kennedy handled the situation quite well – are fairly standard.
Rather, two things jumped out to me. First, there is an expanded scope that gives Cuba equal billing with the Soviet Union and the United States. Second, there is Hastings himself, whose writing is imbued with sharp observations, idiosyncratic tangents, and no shortage of confidence.
***
At 479 pages of text, The Abyss is a spacious book, and it is in no hurry to simply jump right into the Crisis. Signaling an early intention to center events on Cuba, Hastings starts with the embarrassing and disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
Following this prologue, Hastings checks in with each of the three major players, giving us chapters on Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the United States. While of uneven quality, and filled with some rather extraneous information, this opening provides a solid context for the narrative.
It also reinforces one of the chief tenets of the Crisis: that much of it was driven by domestic politics. The placement of the Cuban missiles did not drastically change the strategic picture for the United States, yet Kennedy could not let them remain and still hope to be president. Likewise, Khrushchev could not simply remove them without humiliating his regime and weakening his own position. As for Fidel Castro, he ably used anti-American sentiment to fan his people’s revolutionary spirit, and to distract them from his failed economic policies.
***
Hastings’s retelling of the Crisis is very well done. He shifts perspectives a lot, from Kennedy to Khrushchev to Castro, which ably demonstrates how different people can interpret the exact same thing in dramatically opposite ways. Hastings also spends a lot of time in Great Britain, where most people seemed more afraid of what America would do, as opposed to the Soviet Union. Though Great Britain had no real bearing on matters, it’s interesting to see the Crisis unfold from their eyes. For the average British civilian especially, it was a particularly wrenching sensation knowing that a politician you did not vote for, in a distant country across the sea, might make a choice that destroys you.
Of course, much of the action takes place in the White House, where the so-called Executive Committee met to discuss options, all while being secretly recorded. Unlike the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Cuba, America’s decision-making has been made transparent by the voluminous transcripts that have been released. I appreciated that Hastings took this into account when forming his verdicts, noting that the imperfect logic employed in the U.S. was probably no worse – and likely far better – than that which took place in the Soviet Union.
Occasionally, Hastings leaves the world leaders behind completely, to give us anecdotes from average individuals living through the Crisis, powerless observers in a high-stakes game they never joined. The sheer number of viewpoints presented adds richness and depth to the proceedings.
***
Nearing eighty, Hastings still writes with the pungent style that suffused his earlier books. At one point, for instance, he refers to Ernest Hemingway as “the big bullshitter with the mustache.” He also makes frequent references to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, connecting the past with the present in a way that feels unforced.
Overall, the lively prose – sometimes a bit too lively – keeps things rolling along. However, there are times when Hastings’s pose as a provocateur leads to internal contradictions. For example, he enjoys twitting the Americans over their insistence that sovereign Cuba could not be allowed to house nuclear missiles, even though Turkey hosted American Jupiter batteries. It is a point he insists upon at length.
Meanwhile, Hastings also presents a portrait of Castro that strongly belies his popular image as a romantic revolutionary. Specifically, Castro encouraged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike, believing – not unlike North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – that the fate of his regime overrode all other considerations. Castro’s willingness to start an atom-splitting war – which he personally admitted long after the Crisis ended – thus provided a pretty good reason for the U.S. to insist upon putting distance between Castro and the Soviet Union’s ballistic armaments. Hastings, though, never seems to realize he is wrongfooting himself.
***
There are so many lessons to be drawn from the Cuban Missile Crisis that it feels less like a real-world near-cataclysm, and more a hypothetical designed by political science professors. The starkest takeaway is that humans represent the chief flaw in the system. Then, as now, it is not nuclear weapons that are dangerous, but the people who are in charge of them.
- Max Hastings, The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba, 1962
The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is widely considered to be the closest the world has come to a full nuclear exchange. In a ploy apparently meant to taunt the United States, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev sent medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles to the Caribbean nation, along with enough atomic warheads to devastate America’s eastern seaboard.
Once those missiles were discovered by U2 overflights, President John F. Kennedy came under intense pressure from the military establishment – especially a barely-hinged Curtis Lemay, head of the Strategic Air Command – to destroy the missiles by airstrike, followed by an invasion. Indeed, the desire of the armed forces for swift action led them to make the kind of impossible guarantees typically reserved for salesmen of used automobiles.
Despite their certainty of success, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed strangely unconcerned that their overwhelming conventional forces might require the Soviet Union to escalate to the use of nuclear missiles and bombs. They were also unaware that tactical nukes had been sent to Cuba and – in the high heat of an amphibious assault – could very well have been used on the beaches.
Obviously – as we do not yet inhabit a world of radioactive ash – the missiles of October never flew. Still, the margins were so thin, and the human element so pronounced, that it is unsurprising that this event has been the subject of numerous, sometimes excellent books.
So, what sets Max Hastings’s The Abyss apart?
It’s not the primary source research, for there are no new revelations that have not been published elsewhere. And it’s not the ultimate judgments, for Hastings’s conclusions – that Khrushchev acted precipitously, that the American military establishment verged on the insane, and that President Kennedy handled the situation quite well – are fairly standard.
Rather, two things jumped out to me. First, there is an expanded scope that gives Cuba equal billing with the Soviet Union and the United States. Second, there is Hastings himself, whose writing is imbued with sharp observations, idiosyncratic tangents, and no shortage of confidence.
***
At 479 pages of text, The Abyss is a spacious book, and it is in no hurry to simply jump right into the Crisis. Signaling an early intention to center events on Cuba, Hastings starts with the embarrassing and disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
Following this prologue, Hastings checks in with each of the three major players, giving us chapters on Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the United States. While of uneven quality, and filled with some rather extraneous information, this opening provides a solid context for the narrative.
It also reinforces one of the chief tenets of the Crisis: that much of it was driven by domestic politics. The placement of the Cuban missiles did not drastically change the strategic picture for the United States, yet Kennedy could not let them remain and still hope to be president. Likewise, Khrushchev could not simply remove them without humiliating his regime and weakening his own position. As for Fidel Castro, he ably used anti-American sentiment to fan his people’s revolutionary spirit, and to distract them from his failed economic policies.
***
Hastings’s retelling of the Crisis is very well done. He shifts perspectives a lot, from Kennedy to Khrushchev to Castro, which ably demonstrates how different people can interpret the exact same thing in dramatically opposite ways. Hastings also spends a lot of time in Great Britain, where most people seemed more afraid of what America would do, as opposed to the Soviet Union. Though Great Britain had no real bearing on matters, it’s interesting to see the Crisis unfold from their eyes. For the average British civilian especially, it was a particularly wrenching sensation knowing that a politician you did not vote for, in a distant country across the sea, might make a choice that destroys you.
Of course, much of the action takes place in the White House, where the so-called Executive Committee met to discuss options, all while being secretly recorded. Unlike the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Cuba, America’s decision-making has been made transparent by the voluminous transcripts that have been released. I appreciated that Hastings took this into account when forming his verdicts, noting that the imperfect logic employed in the U.S. was probably no worse – and likely far better – than that which took place in the Soviet Union.
Occasionally, Hastings leaves the world leaders behind completely, to give us anecdotes from average individuals living through the Crisis, powerless observers in a high-stakes game they never joined. The sheer number of viewpoints presented adds richness and depth to the proceedings.
***
Nearing eighty, Hastings still writes with the pungent style that suffused his earlier books. At one point, for instance, he refers to Ernest Hemingway as “the big bullshitter with the mustache.” He also makes frequent references to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, connecting the past with the present in a way that feels unforced.
Overall, the lively prose – sometimes a bit too lively – keeps things rolling along. However, there are times when Hastings’s pose as a provocateur leads to internal contradictions. For example, he enjoys twitting the Americans over their insistence that sovereign Cuba could not be allowed to house nuclear missiles, even though Turkey hosted American Jupiter batteries. It is a point he insists upon at length.
Meanwhile, Hastings also presents a portrait of Castro that strongly belies his popular image as a romantic revolutionary. Specifically, Castro encouraged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike, believing – not unlike North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – that the fate of his regime overrode all other considerations. Castro’s willingness to start an atom-splitting war – which he personally admitted long after the Crisis ended – thus provided a pretty good reason for the U.S. to insist upon putting distance between Castro and the Soviet Union’s ballistic armaments. Hastings, though, never seems to realize he is wrongfooting himself.
***
There are so many lessons to be drawn from the Cuban Missile Crisis that it feels less like a real-world near-cataclysm, and more a hypothetical designed by political science professors. The starkest takeaway is that humans represent the chief flaw in the system. Then, as now, it is not nuclear weapons that are dangerous, but the people who are in charge of them.
May 17, 2023
A definite account of the Cuban missile crisis, with some chilling lessons for today
Between July and September 1962, Khrushchev secretly deployed a range of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Together with those missiles, came the deployment of tens of thousands of troops and bombers, SAM missiles and bombers. Khrushchev mistakenly and naively thought that ...
Read more on my blog
Between July and September 1962, Khrushchev secretly deployed a range of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Together with those missiles, came the deployment of tens of thousands of troops and bombers, SAM missiles and bombers. Khrushchev mistakenly and naively thought that ...
Read more on my blog
December 6, 2022
Max Hastings – O Abismo. A crise dos mísseis de Cuba
Mil novecentos e sessenta e dois, tinha seis anos. O mundo a abrir-se para mim. Tudo era novo e desafiante. Em Samora Correia, município de Benavente, terra humilde sem gente ilustre, iniciava nesses idos de Outubro a minha aprendizagem e fazia os primeiros amigos. Aprendi por esses tempos o significado de cumplicidade e partilha. Aprendi os limites e as regras que me permitiram desde então viver no meio de uns e exigir o respeito de outros. Aprendi a importância da pertença a um grupo e a uma comunidade. A aprendizagem e as escolhas nem sempre foram fáceis. Nem tudo era claro e havia momentos em que se impunha fazer escolhas. Umas eram fáceis e obvias, outras, as mais difíceis, eram sempre complexas e implicavam perdas e ganhos. As escolhas desses tempos ledos recordo-as com doçura e nostalgia. E de algumas lembro-me bem! Estava na escola, numa sala toda ela dominada pela figura austera da D. Urraca. Ainda hoje estremeço ao recordar o seu nome e aquela personagem. Recordo-a sempre de negro, esguia, alta, tão alta que dos meus olhos parecia roçar o teto. Recordo-a a questionar-nos, a perscrutar-nos por cima dos seus aros metálicos, sempre atenta, sempre lesta e austera com a mais pequena ruga no nosso comportamento.
A meio da manhã saíamos para o recreio. Não me lembro se havia toque, se o sinal era dado pela linha do sol que vertia pela janela virada a este. Talvez não fosse por nada disso e estivesse farta de nos aturar, ou que o corpo lhe pedisse uma pausa. Fosse porque fosse, o recreio era sempre a melhor parte do dia. Se me perguntarem se nesses tempos de escola me destacava na leitura ou nas “contas”, eu diria que era no recreio que me sublinhava, era aí que era feliz.
E foi nesse recreio, nesse quadrado mágico de poucas dezenas de metros de lado que fundei os meus alicerces. Fiz amigos, corri, brinquei, saltei e fiz escolhas. Recordo de nos jogos haver sempre duas equipas, os nossos e os outros (uns de tronco nu, outros não). Foi aí que, conscientemente e sem tutela, que escolhi entre uns e outros. Inicialmente fui de uns, acho porque aí tinha mais amigos, mas não fiquei por lá muito tempo. Rapidamente passei para os de “tronco coberto”. Ainda hoje me pergunto o que me levou a tal traição. Creio que foi o fascínio de pertencer a um grupo que tinha como ídolo “o pantera negra”, Eusébio, um ícone. Creio que foi isso que me pendeu o coração. Esse era o meu mundo e essas eram as minhas preocupações.
Longe estava eu de imaginar que a mais de cinco mil quilómetros de distância havia quem também fizesse escolhas. Alguém cujas decisões determinavam o futuro da humanidade. Como num jogo a duas mãos, uns e outros determinavam o destino. Uns por se verem farol da liberdade, da sua liberdade, e por isso entenderem que a autodeterminação e a soberania eram atributos defensáveis se não desafiassem o seu próprio modo de vida. Um modo de vida assente na liberdade, mas num conceito de liberdade que sempre se sobrepôs à liberdade dos outros. E os outros, autocráticos que já tinham abandonado o romantismo da revolução de outubro agora pautavam as suas escolhas por conceitos mais simples de uns contra os outros.
Uns e outros ditaram os dias, mas não sem a velada intervenção dos “jovens revolucionários barbudos” que com um romantismo de revolucionários adolescentes interpretaram os anseios de uma população pobre, explorada e esmagada pelo opulência e autoritarismo do poder instalado.
Como qualquer povo que se liberta da opressão era inevitável que na enxurrada revolucionária tudo fosse questionado e reescrito. E claro que o povo tinha esse direito, e com igual clareza os “os revolucionários barbudos” souberam interpretar esse desejo.
Do outro lado da ilha, na outra “ilha” mais a norte, exilados, expropriados e gente recomendável como a representada no filme de Francis Ford Coppola de 1974, “O Padrinho Parte II”, ainda na presidência de Dwight D. Eisenhower, desenharam o desastre de Abril de 1961, o golpe que para a história ficou conhecido como a “baia dos porcos”. O assalto à “Playa Girón” foi um vexame para os estado-unidenses e em particular para os falcões que com o orgulho ferido desde logo ficaram com urgência em lamber e cicatrizar as feridas.
O cenário para o abismo estava montado. Só faltava alguém que fizesse as escolhas erradas. E muitos foram os protagonistas que lideraram as más escolhas e tomaram opções erradas. Desde logo os derrotados da baía dos porcos, a que se acresce todos aqueles que culparam a administração americana por ter perdido a China para o campo comunista e todos os que achavam que no final da contenda, entre os sobreviventes, não importa quantos, os americanos somassem mais um que os russos, isso seria uma vitória. Para esses que sempre tiveram o dedo no gatilho e a mira focada em Cuba, qualquer pretexto seria bom para dar um passo em frente ao abismo – um abismo satirizado no filme de 1974 “Doutor Estranho-Amor” de Stanley Kubrick.
Do outro lado do tabuleiro, o outro jogador sentia-se acossado pela superioridade militar americana, e pela desproporção de arsenal nuclear de então 1/30. Os falcões desse lado do tabuleiro viam-se ainda mais acossados quando o seu líder Nikita Khrushchov depois de satanizar o seu antecessor, enveredou pela desvalorização das estruturas militares clássicas em favor da segurança que o armamento nuclear lhe parecia garantir. E claro, armas nucleares são sempre defensivas desde que sejamos nós, e não os outros a ter o dedo no gatilho.
Nesta liderança não contestada abertamente, Nikita Khrushchov sentia que qualquer passo em falso seria aproveitado por aqueles que na sombra aguardavam a melhor oportunidade para o abocanhar. Precisava assim o líder soviético de uma acção que com espetacularidade equilibrasse o potencial de armas que à altura pendia claramente para o lado americano.
Essa oportunidade de equilíbrio surgiu com a disponibilidade dos “barbudos revolucionários” em receber essas armas táticas. Esse passe mágico iria equilibrar as coisas pela proximidade das ogivas americanas em solo europeu apontadas ao coração soviético.
Este era o enquadramento de então, mas pouco importa para o que pretendo sublinhar, e que é o direito de um povo, uma nação em fazer as suas escolhas. Não importa se boas, se más, são prorrogativa sua. E isso, em 1962 foi negado a Cuba com soberba e pesporrência.
Mas esta não foi a imagem que passou no mundo ocidental. Na maioria dos registos históricos, a crise dos misseis de cuba é vista como um desafio que a união soviética lançou ao mundo ocidental que se não tivesse sido combatido na origem, talvez tivesse pervertido de modo irremediável o “equilíbrio pacífico” entre nações.
Talvez! Mas curiosamente, sessenta anos depois, o confronto tende a repetir-se, mas agora com papeis e posições invertidas em espelho. Se na década de sessenta os EUA eram a potência que ameaçava invadir, sessenta anos depois os invasores são os herdeiros da União Soviética e os EUA a passaram a assumir o papel de defesa dos valores da soberania, autodeterminação e integridade territorial.
Não deixa também de ser curioso que as vítimas, tanto as de há sessenta anos como as actuais são os adeptos mais aguerridos da resolução pelas armas. Em ambos os casos os líderes são fortes, vestem igual, são carismáticos e têm inequivocamente as populações consigo. Em ambas as ocasiões ouvimos as sentidas palavras de ordem “patria o muerte” ou “Україна завжди”.
Não importa os motivos pelos quais os russos em 2022 invadiram a Ucrânia e colocaram de novo o abismo na ordem do dia. Pode ter sido para esconder dificuldades internas de afirmação da liderança, para camuflarem fracassos anteriores (leia-se perda do império soviético), porque os falcões passaram a ter maior visibilidade e o Ur-fascismo resultou das suas escolhas, ou por nunca terem deixado de ser uma autocracia, porque podiam, ou tal como os EUA em 1962 por se sentirem ameaçados pelas escolhas dos outros.
Foram dois abismos em que os interlocutores trocaram as posições. De ambos os lados havia falcões ainda que em maior número sempre do lado dos agressores. Haviam e há igualmente pombas e falcões. Quem há sessenta anos evocava a “Doutrina Monroe de 1823” é recordado como estadista com genialidade, inteligência e argúcia. Para os do outro lado do espelho estes adjectivos não têm equivalente. Muitos aliados dos EUA em 1962 não acompanharam as escolhas dos falcões americanos. Mas com esta posição não pretenderam mostrar respeito pela autodeterminação e soberania dos povos. Mais não era que um olhar para um umbigo que dava pelo nome de Berlin, ou resultava das memórias ainda recentes quando pequenos acontecimentos aparentemente inofensivos tomaram conta do destino de 20 milhões de mortos e outros tantos feridos e estropiados. Não, não houve nem há respeito pelos outros. Aquilo que aos 6 anos aprendi, mais não é do que uma visão romântica da realidade. O mundo não é de duas cores e entre os decisores haverá sempre pombas e falcões.
Dir-me-ão que o mundo está diferente! É certo que sim. Em especial o da europa ocidental onde se vê um comportamento diferente talvez tenha resultado de uma maior prevalência do “gene” do altruísmo ou da tolerância à lactose.
Sessenta anos depois do meu “quest” vejo o mundo de outra forma. Um mundo onde em gabinetes há quem trace o destino e o futuro. Um mundo onde espero que alguém daqui a sessenta anos recorde os seus idos de Outubro de 2022, altura em que num qualquer recreio o mundo se resumia a ter de optar fosse pelo que fosse, mas o fosse enquanto menino capaz de recordar esses tempos com carinho e doçura. Oxalá tenhamos esse futuro.
Mil novecentos e sessenta e dois, tinha seis anos. O mundo a abrir-se para mim. Tudo era novo e desafiante. Em Samora Correia, município de Benavente, terra humilde sem gente ilustre, iniciava nesses idos de Outubro a minha aprendizagem e fazia os primeiros amigos. Aprendi por esses tempos o significado de cumplicidade e partilha. Aprendi os limites e as regras que me permitiram desde então viver no meio de uns e exigir o respeito de outros. Aprendi a importância da pertença a um grupo e a uma comunidade. A aprendizagem e as escolhas nem sempre foram fáceis. Nem tudo era claro e havia momentos em que se impunha fazer escolhas. Umas eram fáceis e obvias, outras, as mais difíceis, eram sempre complexas e implicavam perdas e ganhos. As escolhas desses tempos ledos recordo-as com doçura e nostalgia. E de algumas lembro-me bem! Estava na escola, numa sala toda ela dominada pela figura austera da D. Urraca. Ainda hoje estremeço ao recordar o seu nome e aquela personagem. Recordo-a sempre de negro, esguia, alta, tão alta que dos meus olhos parecia roçar o teto. Recordo-a a questionar-nos, a perscrutar-nos por cima dos seus aros metálicos, sempre atenta, sempre lesta e austera com a mais pequena ruga no nosso comportamento.
A meio da manhã saíamos para o recreio. Não me lembro se havia toque, se o sinal era dado pela linha do sol que vertia pela janela virada a este. Talvez não fosse por nada disso e estivesse farta de nos aturar, ou que o corpo lhe pedisse uma pausa. Fosse porque fosse, o recreio era sempre a melhor parte do dia. Se me perguntarem se nesses tempos de escola me destacava na leitura ou nas “contas”, eu diria que era no recreio que me sublinhava, era aí que era feliz.
E foi nesse recreio, nesse quadrado mágico de poucas dezenas de metros de lado que fundei os meus alicerces. Fiz amigos, corri, brinquei, saltei e fiz escolhas. Recordo de nos jogos haver sempre duas equipas, os nossos e os outros (uns de tronco nu, outros não). Foi aí que, conscientemente e sem tutela, que escolhi entre uns e outros. Inicialmente fui de uns, acho porque aí tinha mais amigos, mas não fiquei por lá muito tempo. Rapidamente passei para os de “tronco coberto”. Ainda hoje me pergunto o que me levou a tal traição. Creio que foi o fascínio de pertencer a um grupo que tinha como ídolo “o pantera negra”, Eusébio, um ícone. Creio que foi isso que me pendeu o coração. Esse era o meu mundo e essas eram as minhas preocupações.
Longe estava eu de imaginar que a mais de cinco mil quilómetros de distância havia quem também fizesse escolhas. Alguém cujas decisões determinavam o futuro da humanidade. Como num jogo a duas mãos, uns e outros determinavam o destino. Uns por se verem farol da liberdade, da sua liberdade, e por isso entenderem que a autodeterminação e a soberania eram atributos defensáveis se não desafiassem o seu próprio modo de vida. Um modo de vida assente na liberdade, mas num conceito de liberdade que sempre se sobrepôs à liberdade dos outros. E os outros, autocráticos que já tinham abandonado o romantismo da revolução de outubro agora pautavam as suas escolhas por conceitos mais simples de uns contra os outros.
Uns e outros ditaram os dias, mas não sem a velada intervenção dos “jovens revolucionários barbudos” que com um romantismo de revolucionários adolescentes interpretaram os anseios de uma população pobre, explorada e esmagada pelo opulência e autoritarismo do poder instalado.
Como qualquer povo que se liberta da opressão era inevitável que na enxurrada revolucionária tudo fosse questionado e reescrito. E claro que o povo tinha esse direito, e com igual clareza os “os revolucionários barbudos” souberam interpretar esse desejo.
Do outro lado da ilha, na outra “ilha” mais a norte, exilados, expropriados e gente recomendável como a representada no filme de Francis Ford Coppola de 1974, “O Padrinho Parte II”, ainda na presidência de Dwight D. Eisenhower, desenharam o desastre de Abril de 1961, o golpe que para a história ficou conhecido como a “baia dos porcos”. O assalto à “Playa Girón” foi um vexame para os estado-unidenses e em particular para os falcões que com o orgulho ferido desde logo ficaram com urgência em lamber e cicatrizar as feridas.
O cenário para o abismo estava montado. Só faltava alguém que fizesse as escolhas erradas. E muitos foram os protagonistas que lideraram as más escolhas e tomaram opções erradas. Desde logo os derrotados da baía dos porcos, a que se acresce todos aqueles que culparam a administração americana por ter perdido a China para o campo comunista e todos os que achavam que no final da contenda, entre os sobreviventes, não importa quantos, os americanos somassem mais um que os russos, isso seria uma vitória. Para esses que sempre tiveram o dedo no gatilho e a mira focada em Cuba, qualquer pretexto seria bom para dar um passo em frente ao abismo – um abismo satirizado no filme de 1974 “Doutor Estranho-Amor” de Stanley Kubrick.
Do outro lado do tabuleiro, o outro jogador sentia-se acossado pela superioridade militar americana, e pela desproporção de arsenal nuclear de então 1/30. Os falcões desse lado do tabuleiro viam-se ainda mais acossados quando o seu líder Nikita Khrushchov depois de satanizar o seu antecessor, enveredou pela desvalorização das estruturas militares clássicas em favor da segurança que o armamento nuclear lhe parecia garantir. E claro, armas nucleares são sempre defensivas desde que sejamos nós, e não os outros a ter o dedo no gatilho.
Nesta liderança não contestada abertamente, Nikita Khrushchov sentia que qualquer passo em falso seria aproveitado por aqueles que na sombra aguardavam a melhor oportunidade para o abocanhar. Precisava assim o líder soviético de uma acção que com espetacularidade equilibrasse o potencial de armas que à altura pendia claramente para o lado americano.
Essa oportunidade de equilíbrio surgiu com a disponibilidade dos “barbudos revolucionários” em receber essas armas táticas. Esse passe mágico iria equilibrar as coisas pela proximidade das ogivas americanas em solo europeu apontadas ao coração soviético.
Este era o enquadramento de então, mas pouco importa para o que pretendo sublinhar, e que é o direito de um povo, uma nação em fazer as suas escolhas. Não importa se boas, se más, são prorrogativa sua. E isso, em 1962 foi negado a Cuba com soberba e pesporrência.
Mas esta não foi a imagem que passou no mundo ocidental. Na maioria dos registos históricos, a crise dos misseis de cuba é vista como um desafio que a união soviética lançou ao mundo ocidental que se não tivesse sido combatido na origem, talvez tivesse pervertido de modo irremediável o “equilíbrio pacífico” entre nações.
Talvez! Mas curiosamente, sessenta anos depois, o confronto tende a repetir-se, mas agora com papeis e posições invertidas em espelho. Se na década de sessenta os EUA eram a potência que ameaçava invadir, sessenta anos depois os invasores são os herdeiros da União Soviética e os EUA a passaram a assumir o papel de defesa dos valores da soberania, autodeterminação e integridade territorial.
Não deixa também de ser curioso que as vítimas, tanto as de há sessenta anos como as actuais são os adeptos mais aguerridos da resolução pelas armas. Em ambos os casos os líderes são fortes, vestem igual, são carismáticos e têm inequivocamente as populações consigo. Em ambas as ocasiões ouvimos as sentidas palavras de ordem “patria o muerte” ou “Україна завжди”.
Não importa os motivos pelos quais os russos em 2022 invadiram a Ucrânia e colocaram de novo o abismo na ordem do dia. Pode ter sido para esconder dificuldades internas de afirmação da liderança, para camuflarem fracassos anteriores (leia-se perda do império soviético), porque os falcões passaram a ter maior visibilidade e o Ur-fascismo resultou das suas escolhas, ou por nunca terem deixado de ser uma autocracia, porque podiam, ou tal como os EUA em 1962 por se sentirem ameaçados pelas escolhas dos outros.
Foram dois abismos em que os interlocutores trocaram as posições. De ambos os lados havia falcões ainda que em maior número sempre do lado dos agressores. Haviam e há igualmente pombas e falcões. Quem há sessenta anos evocava a “Doutrina Monroe de 1823” é recordado como estadista com genialidade, inteligência e argúcia. Para os do outro lado do espelho estes adjectivos não têm equivalente. Muitos aliados dos EUA em 1962 não acompanharam as escolhas dos falcões americanos. Mas com esta posição não pretenderam mostrar respeito pela autodeterminação e soberania dos povos. Mais não era que um olhar para um umbigo que dava pelo nome de Berlin, ou resultava das memórias ainda recentes quando pequenos acontecimentos aparentemente inofensivos tomaram conta do destino de 20 milhões de mortos e outros tantos feridos e estropiados. Não, não houve nem há respeito pelos outros. Aquilo que aos 6 anos aprendi, mais não é do que uma visão romântica da realidade. O mundo não é de duas cores e entre os decisores haverá sempre pombas e falcões.
Dir-me-ão que o mundo está diferente! É certo que sim. Em especial o da europa ocidental onde se vê um comportamento diferente talvez tenha resultado de uma maior prevalência do “gene” do altruísmo ou da tolerância à lactose.
Sessenta anos depois do meu “quest” vejo o mundo de outra forma. Um mundo onde em gabinetes há quem trace o destino e o futuro. Um mundo onde espero que alguém daqui a sessenta anos recorde os seus idos de Outubro de 2022, altura em que num qualquer recreio o mundo se resumia a ter de optar fosse pelo que fosse, mas o fosse enquanto menino capaz de recordar esses tempos com carinho e doçura. Oxalá tenhamos esse futuro.
November 14, 2022
Despite our occasional disagreements about politics and defence policy, I continue to place Sir Max Hastings in the very first rank of current military historians. Fortunately, the confrontation between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev never crossed the threshold that divides military from diplomatic history, though those of us who followed it at the time were unaware of how close it came. And had Kennedy heeded the advice of his military advisors, it surely would. The crisis coincided with my 21st birthday, when I was an undergraduate at Georgetown University. Personally, I shared the view of most Europeans – perhaps because I’d spent the previous summer in England – that the American response to Russian missiles in Cuba was both hysterical and hypocritical. Yet in hindsight one cannot admire enough the sanity and level-headedness of John Kennedy that saved the world from nuclear war. Only later were we aware of just how ready the Russian weapons were and how enthusiastically Fidel Castro welcomed the prospect of a war between Russia and America over Cuba. And yet he long outlived the other principal actors in the drama. It is very hard for an observer of whatever political persuasion to wonder how the current or recent residents of the White House would respond to a similar crisis. Fortunately, for all his personal flaws, John Kennedy was a sophisticated and literate person who studied history – that Barbara Tuchman’s study of the outbreak of the First World War had been a recent bestseller was a most happy coincidence.
January 5, 2023
I always enjoy reading a Max Hastings work of history. This book covers the Cuban Missile Crisis and I certainly learned a lot. Hastings is not afraid to give his opinions and is particularly critical of Khrushchev and Castro (and Kennedy at times to be fair). Hasting's narratives always include random drop-ins of local people or obscure figures and while that can certainly add to the context and atmosphere of the history, at times I felt that it made it more challenging to read and keep track of all the names. With that said, definitely recommended.
January 26, 2023
I can’t deny this book and its brilliant historian of an author, Max Hastings, the five stars it so righteously deserves. It was an incredibly detailed, piece by piece account of the ideas and actions taken by the three sides of the Cuban Missile Crisis’s main actors.
I am not feeling well but do hope to continue this review soon, as I do have considerably more to say - especially concerning the reflections of Hastings (and the reflections WE OURSELVES should be making) in modern-day 2023, in respect to the very real possible outcomes of 1962. However, we don’t seem to be the greatest nation when it comes to taking heed of the cautionary advice “to learn from our mistakes in history and take great measures to avoid repeating them.”
I am not feeling well but do hope to continue this review soon, as I do have considerably more to say - especially concerning the reflections of Hastings (and the reflections WE OURSELVES should be making) in modern-day 2023, in respect to the very real possible outcomes of 1962. However, we don’t seem to be the greatest nation when it comes to taking heed of the cautionary advice “to learn from our mistakes in history and take great measures to avoid repeating them.”
November 11, 2022
Vladimir Putin’s ill-advised invasion of Ukraine last February has not produced the results that he expected. As the battlefield situation has degenerated for Russian army due to the commitment of the Ukrainian people and its armed forces, along with western assistance the Kremlin has resorted to bombastic statements from the Russian autocrat concerning the use of nuclear weapons. At this time there is no evidence by American intelligence that Moscow is preparing for that eventuality, however, we have learned the last few days that Russian commanders have discussed the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. The conflict seems to produce new enhanced rhetoric on a daily basis, and the world finds itself facing a situation not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 amidst the Cold War.
Since the possibility of nuclear war seems unfathomable the fears of many have put western intelligence agencies on high alert. To understand how we might solve the current impasse it might be useful to turn to Max Hastings latest book, ABYSS: THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, but one must remember Vladimir Putin is no Nikita Khrushchev. The author of thirty books, most of which focus on topics related to World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, Hastings is one of the most experienced and knowledgeable historians to tackle the confrontation that ended peacefully in 1962.
Hastings recounts the history of the crisis from the viewpoints of national leaders, Soviet officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British peacemakers. Hastings, success as an author has always rested upon eyewitness interviews, archival work, tape recordings, and insightful analysis – his current work is no exception. The positions, comments, and actions of President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro among many other important personalities are on full display.
Hastings offers a very thoughtful approach to the study of history while applying his immense analytical skills. A major theme that Hastings carries throughout the narrative is that the American response to Soviet actions was based more on political considerations rather than threats to American national security. America was not more vulnerable with missiles in Cuba because “both sides submarine-launched ballistic missiles were becoming ubiquitous realities in the oceans of the world.” JFK is a controversial actor in the crisis according to historians. Did he act to reassure his reelection in 1964 and burnish his anti-communist credentials or was he the bulwark against an American military led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff with members such as General Curtis LeMay. Hastings’ conclusion is clear, JFK was a towering and inspirational figure during the crisis contributing some of its most memorable rhetoric.
The author introduces his topic by immediately delving into the Bay of Pigs fiasco which earned JFK the enmity of the Pentagon by calling off any air strikes to support the invaders. History has shown that the decision was correct and did not allow a possible crisis to spiral out of control. The problem that emerged is that Khrushchev could not understand the president’s lack of action. For the Soviet Premier, the president’s indecision and indecisiveness during the invasion confirmed that JFK was weak and rife for bullying as events a year later would reflect.
Hastings correctly argues that the Kennedy brothers became Castro haters due to the Bay of Pigs, an emotion they did not feel previously. They felt humiliated and became obsessed with Cuba as they sought revenge – hence Operation Mongoose to get rid of Castro which Robert Kennedy was put in charge of. As the narrative unfolds a true portrait of Castro emerges. He was considered a beloved politician in Cuba at the time but a poor administrator. He had overthrown Cuban President Fulgencio Batista and at the outset was a hero for his countrymen. However, the crisis highlighted a delusional individual who at times believed his own heightened rhetoric and whose actions scared Khrushchev.
Once the background historical events are pursued Hastings settles in presenting an almost daily account of the crisis. The American response is presented through the actions of the Kennedy brothers, a series of advisors, the most important of which was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, described as the “wizard of odds;” Chief of Staff, McGeorge Bundy; CIA head, John McCone; former ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson; Maxwell Taylor, head of the Joint Chiefs; other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a host of others. The only foreign leader who demands a great deal of coverage in the narrative is British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan who comes across as an appeaser who believed in diplomacy, an approach much different from his Suez Crisis days, and held the view that England and Europe had lived for years under the threat of Russian nuclear attack and could not accept that missiles in Cuba was a menace for the United States. At times it appeared that JFK humored his British counterpart, but his respect for the man evaporated quickly.
In the Soviet Union, the crisis was caused, driven, and finally resolved because of the actions of Nikita Khrushchev, a man who survived Stalin’s purges and worked his way up the Kremlin bureaucracy. Khrushchev was an opportunist who launched the crisis without considering what would happen if his plan faltered. In foreign policy, it is quite clear that if you start something without a clear exit strategy it probably will result in disaster. The Soviet leader’s major errors were confusing two objectives: the defense of Cuba, and his plan to project Soviet power and threaten the United States by extending the Kremlin’s reach into the American backyard. Further, Khrushchev believed that the missiles could be hidden from American U2 flights and once the American election was over he would spring his surprise on Washington. When things began to unravel, Khrushchev resorted to bullying and threats dealing with nuclear war or at least a move on West Berlin. Khrushchev engaged in unbridled adventurism, and willingly took a risk that had little or no chance of success.
Hastings’ account is balanced as he also examines the role of important Soviet officials including Defense Minister, Rodion Malinovsky who prepared the strategy to place missiles in Cuba; Anastas Mikoyan, the First Deputy of the Soviet Council of Ministers; Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin; Alexandr Alekseev, the KGB station chief in Havana who had a close relationship with Castro; Andrei Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a number of others.
What sets Hastings’ account apart from other historians is his integration of the views of everyday individuals in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. Cuban peasants, Russian workers, and American college students are all quoted as to their reactions and emotional state during the crisis. The result is a perspective that is missing from other accounts and educates the reader as to the mindset of ordinary citizens who would pay the ultimate price if the crisis had gone sideways.
The diplomatic and military dance presented places the reader inside the ExCom Committee in Washington, the Presidium in Russia, and the seat of the Cuban government in Havana, and interactions with NATO allies. We witness the strain on all participants, less so perhaps for Castro who seemed to seek martyrdom, and the delicate negotiations that led to a settlement. All the tools were used to reach a settlement. Backchannel talks, bringing in “the Wise Men” such as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, individual conversations between ordinary citizens who had influence on their governments, the role of U Thant and the United Nations, the bombastic approach advocated by the US military, and the strategic analysis of each communication are all included. Within this context, Hastings effectively delves into a number of controversial areas including the Kennedy brothers’ distrust of the Pentagon and at times fearing they would disobey his orders, and JFK’s role in combating Pentagon pressure to launch air strikes followed by an invasion to remove the missiles and overthrow Castro.
According to Hastings JFK’s major error was expecting Khrushchev to think and act like himself. “He assumed that the Kremlin would be deterred from shipping offensive nuclear weapons by the strength of his own public and private warnings….and its own consciousness of the USSR’s nuclear weakness.” The debate at the heart of the crisis was JFK’s need to convince the Russian leader that his actions in fact risked nuclear war, something Khrushchev was against. He wanted to test American resolve, not cause a nuclear conflagration.
Hastings corrects a number of myths associated with the crisis. One of the most famous was the idea that on October 24, 1962, as Soviet ships approached the quarantine line the White House held its breath as to whether they could stay the course. In reality no merchant ship carrying weapons or troops approached anywhere near the invisible line. Soviet ships had reversed course the previous day, only one of which was closer than 500 miles. This was due in large part because of the weakness American naval communications. Another area that historians have overlooked was events in the Atlantic Ocean – particularly concerning were four Soviet submarines, one carrying a nuclear warhead. Hastings explores this aspect of the crisis, and the reader can only cringe as to what Washington did not know and the slow communication process that existed throughout the crisis.
JFK had ample opportunity to resort to military action, but staid his hand despite pressure from members of the Joint Chiefs and others. The president was the driver of debate and became more of an “analyst-in-chief.” He pressed his colleagues to probe the implications of any actions the United States would take and offer reasonable solutions to end the crisis. For JFK it seemed as if he was in a chess match with Khrushchev countering each of his moves and trying to offer him a way out of the crisis he precipitated.
JS Tennant in his review of ABYSS in The Guardian, October 16, 2022 points out that “In January this year, Russia’s deputy foreign minister threatened to deploy “military assets” to Cuba if the US continued to support Ukrainian sovereignty. As has become all too apparent in the past weeks, tactical nuclear missiles are still a threat, along with chemical weapons and supersonic missiles. It’s as if Russia’s desperate scramble to maintain influence will stop at nothing and, as Hastings points out, ‘the scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.’ Abyss provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted.”
The book has arrived at a propitious moment in history as once again there is a nuclear threat from the Kremlin. One can only hope that our current crop of leaders will strive to avoid the worst with the same fervor of JFK and Khrushchev in October 1962.
Since the possibility of nuclear war seems unfathomable the fears of many have put western intelligence agencies on high alert. To understand how we might solve the current impasse it might be useful to turn to Max Hastings latest book, ABYSS: THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, but one must remember Vladimir Putin is no Nikita Khrushchev. The author of thirty books, most of which focus on topics related to World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, Hastings is one of the most experienced and knowledgeable historians to tackle the confrontation that ended peacefully in 1962.
Hastings recounts the history of the crisis from the viewpoints of national leaders, Soviet officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British peacemakers. Hastings, success as an author has always rested upon eyewitness interviews, archival work, tape recordings, and insightful analysis – his current work is no exception. The positions, comments, and actions of President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro among many other important personalities are on full display.
Hastings offers a very thoughtful approach to the study of history while applying his immense analytical skills. A major theme that Hastings carries throughout the narrative is that the American response to Soviet actions was based more on political considerations rather than threats to American national security. America was not more vulnerable with missiles in Cuba because “both sides submarine-launched ballistic missiles were becoming ubiquitous realities in the oceans of the world.” JFK is a controversial actor in the crisis according to historians. Did he act to reassure his reelection in 1964 and burnish his anti-communist credentials or was he the bulwark against an American military led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff with members such as General Curtis LeMay. Hastings’ conclusion is clear, JFK was a towering and inspirational figure during the crisis contributing some of its most memorable rhetoric.
The author introduces his topic by immediately delving into the Bay of Pigs fiasco which earned JFK the enmity of the Pentagon by calling off any air strikes to support the invaders. History has shown that the decision was correct and did not allow a possible crisis to spiral out of control. The problem that emerged is that Khrushchev could not understand the president’s lack of action. For the Soviet Premier, the president’s indecision and indecisiveness during the invasion confirmed that JFK was weak and rife for bullying as events a year later would reflect.
Hastings correctly argues that the Kennedy brothers became Castro haters due to the Bay of Pigs, an emotion they did not feel previously. They felt humiliated and became obsessed with Cuba as they sought revenge – hence Operation Mongoose to get rid of Castro which Robert Kennedy was put in charge of. As the narrative unfolds a true portrait of Castro emerges. He was considered a beloved politician in Cuba at the time but a poor administrator. He had overthrown Cuban President Fulgencio Batista and at the outset was a hero for his countrymen. However, the crisis highlighted a delusional individual who at times believed his own heightened rhetoric and whose actions scared Khrushchev.
Once the background historical events are pursued Hastings settles in presenting an almost daily account of the crisis. The American response is presented through the actions of the Kennedy brothers, a series of advisors, the most important of which was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, described as the “wizard of odds;” Chief of Staff, McGeorge Bundy; CIA head, John McCone; former ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson; Maxwell Taylor, head of the Joint Chiefs; other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a host of others. The only foreign leader who demands a great deal of coverage in the narrative is British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan who comes across as an appeaser who believed in diplomacy, an approach much different from his Suez Crisis days, and held the view that England and Europe had lived for years under the threat of Russian nuclear attack and could not accept that missiles in Cuba was a menace for the United States. At times it appeared that JFK humored his British counterpart, but his respect for the man evaporated quickly.
In the Soviet Union, the crisis was caused, driven, and finally resolved because of the actions of Nikita Khrushchev, a man who survived Stalin’s purges and worked his way up the Kremlin bureaucracy. Khrushchev was an opportunist who launched the crisis without considering what would happen if his plan faltered. In foreign policy, it is quite clear that if you start something without a clear exit strategy it probably will result in disaster. The Soviet leader’s major errors were confusing two objectives: the defense of Cuba, and his plan to project Soviet power and threaten the United States by extending the Kremlin’s reach into the American backyard. Further, Khrushchev believed that the missiles could be hidden from American U2 flights and once the American election was over he would spring his surprise on Washington. When things began to unravel, Khrushchev resorted to bullying and threats dealing with nuclear war or at least a move on West Berlin. Khrushchev engaged in unbridled adventurism, and willingly took a risk that had little or no chance of success.
Hastings’ account is balanced as he also examines the role of important Soviet officials including Defense Minister, Rodion Malinovsky who prepared the strategy to place missiles in Cuba; Anastas Mikoyan, the First Deputy of the Soviet Council of Ministers; Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin; Alexandr Alekseev, the KGB station chief in Havana who had a close relationship with Castro; Andrei Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a number of others.
What sets Hastings’ account apart from other historians is his integration of the views of everyday individuals in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. Cuban peasants, Russian workers, and American college students are all quoted as to their reactions and emotional state during the crisis. The result is a perspective that is missing from other accounts and educates the reader as to the mindset of ordinary citizens who would pay the ultimate price if the crisis had gone sideways.
The diplomatic and military dance presented places the reader inside the ExCom Committee in Washington, the Presidium in Russia, and the seat of the Cuban government in Havana, and interactions with NATO allies. We witness the strain on all participants, less so perhaps for Castro who seemed to seek martyrdom, and the delicate negotiations that led to a settlement. All the tools were used to reach a settlement. Backchannel talks, bringing in “the Wise Men” such as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, individual conversations between ordinary citizens who had influence on their governments, the role of U Thant and the United Nations, the bombastic approach advocated by the US military, and the strategic analysis of each communication are all included. Within this context, Hastings effectively delves into a number of controversial areas including the Kennedy brothers’ distrust of the Pentagon and at times fearing they would disobey his orders, and JFK’s role in combating Pentagon pressure to launch air strikes followed by an invasion to remove the missiles and overthrow Castro.
According to Hastings JFK’s major error was expecting Khrushchev to think and act like himself. “He assumed that the Kremlin would be deterred from shipping offensive nuclear weapons by the strength of his own public and private warnings….and its own consciousness of the USSR’s nuclear weakness.” The debate at the heart of the crisis was JFK’s need to convince the Russian leader that his actions in fact risked nuclear war, something Khrushchev was against. He wanted to test American resolve, not cause a nuclear conflagration.
Hastings corrects a number of myths associated with the crisis. One of the most famous was the idea that on October 24, 1962, as Soviet ships approached the quarantine line the White House held its breath as to whether they could stay the course. In reality no merchant ship carrying weapons or troops approached anywhere near the invisible line. Soviet ships had reversed course the previous day, only one of which was closer than 500 miles. This was due in large part because of the weakness American naval communications. Another area that historians have overlooked was events in the Atlantic Ocean – particularly concerning were four Soviet submarines, one carrying a nuclear warhead. Hastings explores this aspect of the crisis, and the reader can only cringe as to what Washington did not know and the slow communication process that existed throughout the crisis.
JFK had ample opportunity to resort to military action, but staid his hand despite pressure from members of the Joint Chiefs and others. The president was the driver of debate and became more of an “analyst-in-chief.” He pressed his colleagues to probe the implications of any actions the United States would take and offer reasonable solutions to end the crisis. For JFK it seemed as if he was in a chess match with Khrushchev countering each of his moves and trying to offer him a way out of the crisis he precipitated.
JS Tennant in his review of ABYSS in The Guardian, October 16, 2022 points out that “In January this year, Russia’s deputy foreign minister threatened to deploy “military assets” to Cuba if the US continued to support Ukrainian sovereignty. As has become all too apparent in the past weeks, tactical nuclear missiles are still a threat, along with chemical weapons and supersonic missiles. It’s as if Russia’s desperate scramble to maintain influence will stop at nothing and, as Hastings points out, ‘the scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.’ Abyss provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted.”
The book has arrived at a propitious moment in history as once again there is a nuclear threat from the Kremlin. One can only hope that our current crop of leaders will strive to avoid the worst with the same fervor of JFK and Khrushchev in October 1962.
June 25, 2023
Good book . It beautifully shows the tension in those times what i have problem is with hastings constant mention of the british during the crisis and hastings himself acknowledged that the british virtually did nothing, so why man?!? Also his constant mention of ukraine and russia seems foolish yeah i know you have a problem with the russians but why bring that in this book? The book ends with a great quote which i'll mention here.
"Our planet best hope to survive the 21st century relies upon an imperative that no one national leader shows themselves deficient in the fear which must lie at the heart of wisdom and which was indispensable to a peaceful resolution of cuban missile crisis"
Ps- jfk was a great statesman
"Our planet best hope to survive the 21st century relies upon an imperative that no one national leader shows themselves deficient in the fear which must lie at the heart of wisdom and which was indispensable to a peaceful resolution of cuban missile crisis"
Ps- jfk was a great statesman
March 8, 2023
Far more detailed than I needed, nevertheless this is an interesting, thorough, immersive analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis and it’s place in the broader arc of the Cold War. A great passive commute audio to get me in the zone for my scholarship programme on communism this year.
June 1, 2024
This is a splendid, indeed admirable history, of an event which because it did not lead to war does not attract the same attention as the run-up/causes of WWI or II, it should, but more on that anon. What this history reinforced for me was a belief that in trying to determine if new work of history is worth investing time in that the first thing to do is look is look at what else the author has published. If they have written about similar or overlapping periods and subjects then I regard them with much greater confidence. Although this is not an infallible criteria I have acquired an immense antipathy to writers whose books cover wildly different subjects and historical periods. My most recent encounter with this genre of history was a book claiming to reveal Pope Pius XII extensive and unflagging efforts on behalf of European Jews. Previously the author had written extensively on UFOs, the only connection between UFOs and Pius XII as an active defender of Europe's Jews is that both topics are equally fictitious.
Max Hastings book on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis gains enormously from the knowledge and insights he gained studying and writing about Vietnam because so many of those who lead the USA disastrously into that imbroglio were the 'Hawks' who Kennedy (JFK) restrained and/or ignored in 1962. But it is Hasting's broader knowledge and understanding of the military and political history of WWII and its aftermath which grounds his writing about the Cuban crisis in context and gives it depth (pardon the digression but it is for exactly the same reason that the work David Kertzer on Pius XII is superb and unchallenged. It is grounded on a lifetime study of the Vatican between 1848 and 1945 and numerous other books and articles). It is Hasting's grounding of the crisis in an understanding of the history and backgrounds of the USA, Soviet Union and Cuba and the leaders Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro that gives this history its richness. Even when disagreeing or being outright shocked or appalled (and there is much to shock anyone reading about the crisis and its handling) by the actions or statements of those involved it comes anchored in insistence on seeing it within the context of its time - which does not mean either excusing actions that were morally wrong or dangerously stupid. He just does not use them as an excuse for retrospective morally superior posing.
Having been born in 1958 I am just old enough to have some contemporaneous memory of these events but even so, and with many years of having heard or read things about the missile crisis, I found myself staggered by a retrospective fear of how really close the world came to armageddon in 1962 not so much through the actions of Kennedy or Khrushchev but through incomprehensibly stupid mistakes. I can't help quoting the following circumstances surrounding the rush to broadcast a message direct from Khrushchev to Kennedy:
"A critical feature of the Crisis (sic) was the snail-like pace of communication between Moscow and Washington, impeded by bureaucracy, imperfect technology and the requirements of ciphering and deciphering, followed by physical delivery of messages to intended recipients in the Kremlin, Soviet Embassy, US State Department and the White House...Khrushchev was thoroughly aware of this...that is why (they) used radio to contact the President, because the other means might have been to slow. This time we were on the verge of war.
"Radio Moscow was alerted that an important bulletin was coming...Yet when speed might be a matter of humankind's life and death, the black government Chaika limousine carrying Khrushchev's to the radio building first lost its way, then became delayed by traffic...When (the message) finally (arrived) at the building...one of its six elderly lifts was being held in readiness, for (the courier's) exclusive passage to the studio floor. Even as he ascended...this conveyance abruptly halted, stranded between floors...being a Sunday no engineer was on duty. The hapless (courier) tried to push the document through the jammed lift doors to station staff, but thick wax seals made this impossible...suddenly and inexplicably, the lift once more shuddered into life...(and) the historic broadcast (was made)."
The absurdity of the delays caused by those wax seals (and what about the time wasted applying them?) is equal to the farce in the film 'Dr. Strangelove' over the inability to make a call from a payphone for lack of change. I could have quoted different but equal absurdities from the US side.
One of the major strengths of Hastings account of the missile crisis is his grounding of actions and responses of the politicians on all sides in real time and never was the gap between the taking of decisions and the receipt of such decisions by the other side been more important. Hastings is also incredibly good at highlighting how far technological advances had slipped out of the control or understanding of those supposedly its master. It is terrifying to read how many US or Soviet officers at extremely low levels had the ability to launch nuclear weapons. It is hard not to see that this didn't happen as the result of staggering good luck as the actions of Kennedy or Khrushchev.
At one point during the crisis one of the US military leaders said that if after the bombs had been unleashed there were one Russian and two Americans left then America had won. That there was no irony in this statement is perhaps one of the most awful things to read in this book. Although we have thanks to JFK's unacknowledged and certainly immoral if not illegal secret tape recordings of White House deliberations a full and account of the advice given during those days by America's military there is absolutely no reason to believe that their Kremlin equivalents were any less cavalier in their insouciant demands for the use of nuclear weapons. When reading of the various military chiefs advice on what action to take and their assurances of how effective they would be Hastings is always there reminding us of how wrong those men proved when giving similar advice over Vietnam. While deploring their hubris he places it in context. He is also equally harsh in his treatment of Khrushchev's action in his reckless, and secret, deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba. It was that secrecy, and the Soviets denial that the weapons were there, that more than anything else forfeited the support of everyone except his Warsaw pact satraps.
Hastings is very good at including the perspective of Cuba in his account. Like so many then and later Hastings while completely sympathetic in most ways to the USA cannot accept the USA's obsession with Cuba nor its inability to accept that sovereign nations have a right to do things the USA might not like. Hastings also provides a devastating portrait of Castro as a vainglorious nincompoop whose posturings over nuclear annihilation, his own country's as much as the USA or USSR, should be enough to destroy any remnant of reputation he still has.
I could go on, and on, there are so many fine things in this popular history - and I use that phrase as one of praise. There is a place for academic history and there is a place for accounts like this which draws on much specialised research and writing. Hastings hasn't brought any new information to the story of the missile crisis but he has written the story for the 21st century. My one reservation is about his references to the current situation in Ukraine. It is not extensive, it is generally well thought out, but it is the type of reference more suited to a magazine article than a history book. Current events and history are of course inseparable but there is so much we don't know don't know or understand about what happening now that Hastings closely linking an analysis of the events in 1962 to today's events he risks tainting his account.
Max Hastings book on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis gains enormously from the knowledge and insights he gained studying and writing about Vietnam because so many of those who lead the USA disastrously into that imbroglio were the 'Hawks' who Kennedy (JFK) restrained and/or ignored in 1962. But it is Hasting's broader knowledge and understanding of the military and political history of WWII and its aftermath which grounds his writing about the Cuban crisis in context and gives it depth (pardon the digression but it is for exactly the same reason that the work David Kertzer on Pius XII is superb and unchallenged. It is grounded on a lifetime study of the Vatican between 1848 and 1945 and numerous other books and articles). It is Hasting's grounding of the crisis in an understanding of the history and backgrounds of the USA, Soviet Union and Cuba and the leaders Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro that gives this history its richness. Even when disagreeing or being outright shocked or appalled (and there is much to shock anyone reading about the crisis and its handling) by the actions or statements of those involved it comes anchored in insistence on seeing it within the context of its time - which does not mean either excusing actions that were morally wrong or dangerously stupid. He just does not use them as an excuse for retrospective morally superior posing.
Having been born in 1958 I am just old enough to have some contemporaneous memory of these events but even so, and with many years of having heard or read things about the missile crisis, I found myself staggered by a retrospective fear of how really close the world came to armageddon in 1962 not so much through the actions of Kennedy or Khrushchev but through incomprehensibly stupid mistakes. I can't help quoting the following circumstances surrounding the rush to broadcast a message direct from Khrushchev to Kennedy:
"A critical feature of the Crisis (sic) was the snail-like pace of communication between Moscow and Washington, impeded by bureaucracy, imperfect technology and the requirements of ciphering and deciphering, followed by physical delivery of messages to intended recipients in the Kremlin, Soviet Embassy, US State Department and the White House...Khrushchev was thoroughly aware of this...that is why (they) used radio to contact the President, because the other means might have been to slow. This time we were on the verge of war.
"Radio Moscow was alerted that an important bulletin was coming...Yet when speed might be a matter of humankind's life and death, the black government Chaika limousine carrying Khrushchev's to the radio building first lost its way, then became delayed by traffic...When (the message) finally (arrived) at the building...one of its six elderly lifts was being held in readiness, for (the courier's) exclusive passage to the studio floor. Even as he ascended...this conveyance abruptly halted, stranded between floors...being a Sunday no engineer was on duty. The hapless (courier) tried to push the document through the jammed lift doors to station staff, but thick wax seals made this impossible...suddenly and inexplicably, the lift once more shuddered into life...(and) the historic broadcast (was made)."
The absurdity of the delays caused by those wax seals (and what about the time wasted applying them?) is equal to the farce in the film 'Dr. Strangelove' over the inability to make a call from a payphone for lack of change. I could have quoted different but equal absurdities from the US side.
One of the major strengths of Hastings account of the missile crisis is his grounding of actions and responses of the politicians on all sides in real time and never was the gap between the taking of decisions and the receipt of such decisions by the other side been more important. Hastings is also incredibly good at highlighting how far technological advances had slipped out of the control or understanding of those supposedly its master. It is terrifying to read how many US or Soviet officers at extremely low levels had the ability to launch nuclear weapons. It is hard not to see that this didn't happen as the result of staggering good luck as the actions of Kennedy or Khrushchev.
At one point during the crisis one of the US military leaders said that if after the bombs had been unleashed there were one Russian and two Americans left then America had won. That there was no irony in this statement is perhaps one of the most awful things to read in this book. Although we have thanks to JFK's unacknowledged and certainly immoral if not illegal secret tape recordings of White House deliberations a full and account of the advice given during those days by America's military there is absolutely no reason to believe that their Kremlin equivalents were any less cavalier in their insouciant demands for the use of nuclear weapons. When reading of the various military chiefs advice on what action to take and their assurances of how effective they would be Hastings is always there reminding us of how wrong those men proved when giving similar advice over Vietnam. While deploring their hubris he places it in context. He is also equally harsh in his treatment of Khrushchev's action in his reckless, and secret, deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba. It was that secrecy, and the Soviets denial that the weapons were there, that more than anything else forfeited the support of everyone except his Warsaw pact satraps.
Hastings is very good at including the perspective of Cuba in his account. Like so many then and later Hastings while completely sympathetic in most ways to the USA cannot accept the USA's obsession with Cuba nor its inability to accept that sovereign nations have a right to do things the USA might not like. Hastings also provides a devastating portrait of Castro as a vainglorious nincompoop whose posturings over nuclear annihilation, his own country's as much as the USA or USSR, should be enough to destroy any remnant of reputation he still has.
I could go on, and on, there are so many fine things in this popular history - and I use that phrase as one of praise. There is a place for academic history and there is a place for accounts like this which draws on much specialised research and writing. Hastings hasn't brought any new information to the story of the missile crisis but he has written the story for the 21st century. My one reservation is about his references to the current situation in Ukraine. It is not extensive, it is generally well thought out, but it is the type of reference more suited to a magazine article than a history book. Current events and history are of course inseparable but there is so much we don't know don't know or understand about what happening now that Hastings closely linking an analysis of the events in 1962 to today's events he risks tainting his account.
November 15, 2022
This effort shows a lack of focus, zooming around at a high level through the Cuban revolution, the evolution of the Kennedy-Khruschev relationship, and a jumbled mass of facts thrown together into an impressionistic but unsatisfying picture of the "thirteen days." The tone is in a way too judgmental but not judgmental enough ("remember, the UN was far more important in those days," constant comments about irresponsibility and lack of forethought but nowhere near enough actual international legal analysis). We know (from maps) where the SAMs were, but somehow he missed where the actual nuclear warheads were. He had access to tapes of most of the Excom meetings but rarely quoted anyone. I just found it all quite vague compared to more direct accounts like Plokhy's "Nuclear Folly."
October 15, 2022
A brilliant book about the most dangerous period of time in the Cold War, written by a master historian and storyteller, encompassing almost all the possible points of view regarding these unfortunate and dark times. This is a must read for anyone who would like to see how vulnerable our existence on this planet can be, especially when the fate of hundreds of millions of people depends on the sanity or insanity of some leaders. Highly recommended and relevant these days ,when a madman called Putin can unleash the most horrible weapons mankind knows:the atomic bomb.
May 13, 2023
I wanted to read about the Cuban missile crisis for quite some time so the release of Max Hastings' The Abyss was perfect. Hastings does a fantastic job of telling the terrifying story of the crisis using both historical archives but also eye witness testimonies.
In between the meetings of great leaders and the movement of ships and submarines he added the recollections of regular Cuban and Russian people that were stationed in Cuba during the time of the crisis. These eye witnesses were interviewed for the book and they are a fantastic addition because they add a much needed ground level view.
Hastings sets the scene for the crisis by starting with the story of Castro and the Cuban revolution and of course the Bay of Pigs disaster. He then moves to describe the political and social situation in both the US and the Soviet Union and also briefly goes over the biography of Khrushchev and Kennedy.
What strikes the reader about the crisis was the fact that the whole missile placement was a decision taken by Khrushchev without planning in advance of what would happen. He just assumed that Kennedy was a young inexperienced President who he could take advantage of. It was a terrible miscalculation by Khrushchev as he backed himself into a corner once the US caught wind of the missile placement. However, once the crisis started both Khrushchev and Kennedy proved to be very level headed and rational actors. It is to the great fortune of the world that these two men were the leaders of their respective countries.
Despite the fact that the blame for starting the crisis lies solely with Khrushchev the great villains in the story are the US military leaders that were intent on pushing Kennedy to invade Cuba and were preparing invasion plans and Fidel Castro who was pushing Khrushchev to do a nuclear first strike on the US. The US civilian leadership with JFK, RFF and Robert McNamara were constantly trying to push back against the pressure of the hawks in the military. The same carelessness and aggressiveness will later be in full view during the Vietnam war. And while McNamara would later live in infamy due to his role in Vietnam he was actually one of the voices of reason in 1962. On the other side Khrushchev had to actually keep Castro in the dark due to his obsession with fighting the Americans, the Soviet leader thought that Castro didn't actually understand what nuclear war meant.
Probably the biggest takeaway of the book was that as in the words of McNamara the missile crisis was not actually a 'military crisis' but rather a 'political crisis'. The reason for that is because the geopolitical strategic balance had not really been modified by the placement of the missiles in Cuba. At the same time, the withdrawing of the US Jupiter missiles from Turkey would not have been any difference either because the missiles were obsolete and out of date. At the time nuclear missiles on submarines were just as dangerous and there were Soviet submarines with such missiles near the US and US submarines with such missiles near the Soviet Union yet nobody made a big fuss about it. However, publicly Kennedy could not be seen to accept the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba so close to the US. If he would have allowed that to go on his Presidency would be compromised and he would have had no chance for a second term.
The book also goes over all of the incidents during the crisis such as the shooting down of the American U2 spy plane and the famous Soviet nuclear submarine whose captain allegedly was prevented from launching a nuclear missile by his subordinate and potentially preventing World War III. Hastings casts some doubt on the submarine incident as the timeline and the recollections of the witnesses are quite contradictory.
This book came out at the right time in 2022 as the world is once again threatened by nuclear war. It is a sobering reminder of how close we came to nuclear apocalypse and the importance of cool headed leaders, something which the world seems to lack more and more.
In between the meetings of great leaders and the movement of ships and submarines he added the recollections of regular Cuban and Russian people that were stationed in Cuba during the time of the crisis. These eye witnesses were interviewed for the book and they are a fantastic addition because they add a much needed ground level view.
Hastings sets the scene for the crisis by starting with the story of Castro and the Cuban revolution and of course the Bay of Pigs disaster. He then moves to describe the political and social situation in both the US and the Soviet Union and also briefly goes over the biography of Khrushchev and Kennedy.
What strikes the reader about the crisis was the fact that the whole missile placement was a decision taken by Khrushchev without planning in advance of what would happen. He just assumed that Kennedy was a young inexperienced President who he could take advantage of. It was a terrible miscalculation by Khrushchev as he backed himself into a corner once the US caught wind of the missile placement. However, once the crisis started both Khrushchev and Kennedy proved to be very level headed and rational actors. It is to the great fortune of the world that these two men were the leaders of their respective countries.
Despite the fact that the blame for starting the crisis lies solely with Khrushchev the great villains in the story are the US military leaders that were intent on pushing Kennedy to invade Cuba and were preparing invasion plans and Fidel Castro who was pushing Khrushchev to do a nuclear first strike on the US. The US civilian leadership with JFK, RFF and Robert McNamara were constantly trying to push back against the pressure of the hawks in the military. The same carelessness and aggressiveness will later be in full view during the Vietnam war. And while McNamara would later live in infamy due to his role in Vietnam he was actually one of the voices of reason in 1962. On the other side Khrushchev had to actually keep Castro in the dark due to his obsession with fighting the Americans, the Soviet leader thought that Castro didn't actually understand what nuclear war meant.
Probably the biggest takeaway of the book was that as in the words of McNamara the missile crisis was not actually a 'military crisis' but rather a 'political crisis'. The reason for that is because the geopolitical strategic balance had not really been modified by the placement of the missiles in Cuba. At the same time, the withdrawing of the US Jupiter missiles from Turkey would not have been any difference either because the missiles were obsolete and out of date. At the time nuclear missiles on submarines were just as dangerous and there were Soviet submarines with such missiles near the US and US submarines with such missiles near the Soviet Union yet nobody made a big fuss about it. However, publicly Kennedy could not be seen to accept the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba so close to the US. If he would have allowed that to go on his Presidency would be compromised and he would have had no chance for a second term.
The book also goes over all of the incidents during the crisis such as the shooting down of the American U2 spy plane and the famous Soviet nuclear submarine whose captain allegedly was prevented from launching a nuclear missile by his subordinate and potentially preventing World War III. Hastings casts some doubt on the submarine incident as the timeline and the recollections of the witnesses are quite contradictory.
This book came out at the right time in 2022 as the world is once again threatened by nuclear war. It is a sobering reminder of how close we came to nuclear apocalypse and the importance of cool headed leaders, something which the world seems to lack more and more.
July 9, 2023
An excellent account of the Cuban missile crisis - an episode of which I was previously only vaguely aware. The lack of strategy by Khrushchev and the bellicosity of the US military chiefs shocked me.
October 9, 2022
This book is a very well crafted and literate account of one of the defining and most frightening events of the twentieth century when, in October 1962, the World stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It draws heavily on the recordings of discussions between President Kennedy and his military and civilian advisors during the crisis. Thus we gain an insight into the frightening problems they faced as if in ‘real time’ although, as Hastings observes, we can hear what they say but we cannot know what they were actually thinking. The records of the Soviet discussions are more sparse but clearly, Khrushchev recognised quickly that his rash and hastily decided gamble had backfired spectacularly and he realised that he had to find a way of backing down in the least humiliating fashion. Sadly for the World at large, this angry, bellicose and deeply resentful man took the crisis to the very edge of a cataclysmic inferno before accepting the necessity to retreat.
Kennedy had many, by now, well known and copiously documented faults.His willingness however, to refrain from the lethal and precipitate action pressed so hard upon him by his military advisors while he pursued a diplomatic solution, I believe, represents his ‘finest hour’. It is a strange paradox that so many of the men who performed so well during this crisis exercising cool nerves and sound judgement such as McNamara, Rusk, Bundy etc would be abandon such qualities and have their reputations destroyed and swallowed up by the quagmire of the Vietnam war just a few short years later.
The book raises some profound questions. Did the placing of strategic nuclear missiles on Cuba a few miles from the American mainland really alter the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere? Europe had been living with a Soviet led Armageddon on its doorstep for years and in any event, submarines equipped with nuclear missiles parked in the Atlantic would offer an even greater, less easily detectable threat than Cuba. Also, the stark contrast between the enormous destructive power of the weaponry involved and the frighteningly slow and primitive means of communication available to the Americans and the Soviets.
When it fully dawned upon the Soviets that they must back down, their reaction appears panicked and utterly confused. Was their objective to safeguard the Cuban revolution or to alter the balance of nuclear strike capability in their favour given the vast superiority of American weaponry at this time? At one point it was suggested that the missiles be transferred to the Cubans in order to reduce tensions. Anastas Mikoyan, a wiser head, realising by now that in Fidel Castro the Soviets had shackled themselves to a cruel, vain, unstable and irrational despot who was desperate to retain his own grip on power, suggested that such a move would have the directly opposite effect.
In my opinion, this is absorbing account off a pivotal moment in history which provides the background to the decision to install in secret, strategic nuclear weapons on Cuba, the personalities involved, the decision making processes of each side, the implications for the future and its resonance to the present day. A superb read. Recommended.
Kennedy had many, by now, well known and copiously documented faults.His willingness however, to refrain from the lethal and precipitate action pressed so hard upon him by his military advisors while he pursued a diplomatic solution, I believe, represents his ‘finest hour’. It is a strange paradox that so many of the men who performed so well during this crisis exercising cool nerves and sound judgement such as McNamara, Rusk, Bundy etc would be abandon such qualities and have their reputations destroyed and swallowed up by the quagmire of the Vietnam war just a few short years later.
The book raises some profound questions. Did the placing of strategic nuclear missiles on Cuba a few miles from the American mainland really alter the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere? Europe had been living with a Soviet led Armageddon on its doorstep for years and in any event, submarines equipped with nuclear missiles parked in the Atlantic would offer an even greater, less easily detectable threat than Cuba. Also, the stark contrast between the enormous destructive power of the weaponry involved and the frighteningly slow and primitive means of communication available to the Americans and the Soviets.
When it fully dawned upon the Soviets that they must back down, their reaction appears panicked and utterly confused. Was their objective to safeguard the Cuban revolution or to alter the balance of nuclear strike capability in their favour given the vast superiority of American weaponry at this time? At one point it was suggested that the missiles be transferred to the Cubans in order to reduce tensions. Anastas Mikoyan, a wiser head, realising by now that in Fidel Castro the Soviets had shackled themselves to a cruel, vain, unstable and irrational despot who was desperate to retain his own grip on power, suggested that such a move would have the directly opposite effect.
In my opinion, this is absorbing account off a pivotal moment in history which provides the background to the decision to install in secret, strategic nuclear weapons on Cuba, the personalities involved, the decision making processes of each side, the implications for the future and its resonance to the present day. A superb read. Recommended.
October 6, 2023
Hoe slaagde de Soviet-Unie erin om ongezien nucleaire langeafstandswapens te installeren op Cuba, ofschoon hiervoor naar verhouding een grotere armada voor nodig was dan bij een Amerikaanse operatie?
Waarom? Deze vraag gaat niet onbeantwoord. Zoals zoveel dictators stond Krutchev onder evenveel druk van binnenuit als van buitenaf om zich hard op te stellen. Amerikaanse cartoonisten gaven hem soms gelijk wat betreft het Enkreisung gevoel dat de Russen als "reus op lemen voeten" met slecht verdedigbare natuurlijke grenzen eigen is & alleen nog versterkt werd door NAVO raketten in Turkije etc.
Aan Amerikaanse zijde valt het door Hastings geschetste contrast op tussen de politieke "denktank"
Waarom? Deze vraag gaat niet onbeantwoord. Zoals zoveel dictators stond Krutchev onder evenveel druk van binnenuit als van buitenaf om zich hard op te stellen. Amerikaanse cartoonisten gaven hem soms gelijk wat betreft het Enkreisung gevoel dat de Russen als "reus op lemen voeten" met slecht verdedigbare natuurlijke grenzen eigen is & alleen nog versterkt werd door NAVO raketten in Turkije etc.
Aan Amerikaanse zijde valt het door Hastings geschetste contrast op tussen de politieke "denktank"
November 11, 2022
Not a terrible book, but not a great one. Like most books on this topic, the author includes so much detail that the larger picture gets lost. Sometimes it's not clear what the connection is between paragraphs. Finally, the book is full of awkwardly phrased sentences like this one:
That island, slightly smaller than Pennsylvania, provided the stage for Theodore Roosevelt to secure one of the fastest-earned military reputations in history, leading his volunteer 'Rough Riders' up San Juan Hill on 1 July 1898 against Spanish colonialists, who in 1902 were compelled to cede Cuba's independence from themselves, though not from the United States.
December 8, 2023
500 pages of quotes of people fannyjng about in America in olden times. TLDR the Russian bad guy wasn’t an evil genius, he was just feeling impulsive. Maybe I should’ve just read the Wikipedia page about the Cuban missile crisis and left it there
August 20, 2024
More like a 4.5
April 6, 2023
Max Hastings excellent book on the Cuban Missile Crisis is terrifying, not least because of its contemporary relevance as relations between Russia and the West enter a new, colder phase. The events that unfolded in late 1962 as the USA realised that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear weapons in Cuba and sought to secure their removal are quite possibly the closest humanity has ever come to self-extinction. Hastings journalistic instinct for storytelling serves to capture the drama of those frantic days, and his understanding of the principal actors involved on all sides, and of their motivations, add a further depth of insight. All told, this is a first-rate piece of popular narrative history.
One of the most instructive aspects of the book is the comparison and contrast it offers between the main three national leaders involved. For Kennedy, it was his finest hour. Liberal democracies by no means always exercise their influence benignly, so it is greatly to Kennedy's credit that he handled the Crisis in the manner that he did: "He adopted a strategy that emphasized his own and his nation's resolve, while rejecting courses that might have precipitated Armageddon. His remarkable gifts as a listener were seen to utmost advantage in the meetings of Excom at the White House, which concluded with clear, rational executive decisions. Against the instincts not only of the military but of much domestic opinion, almost from the outset he determined to strike a bargain with the Soviets. He expected to pay a price in order to secure peacefully his unwavering objective - removal of the missiles from Cuba." Castro is much more changeable, initially rational but later reckless in his calls for escalation. At the outset, he urged Moscow to deploy the missiles openly through an announced agreement, making it similar to the presence of American missiles in Britain, Italy and Turkey. This would have put the Kremlin in a totally different moral and diplomatic position, and one which world opinion (outside the US) may have been more sympathetic to. After the crisis broke it became clear that Castro's only concern was for Cuba's standing as a significant player on the world stage, and by extension his own, regardless of the consequences. Finally, Khrushchev's position is the most baffling of all, characterised by what Hastings calls a "desperate and dangerous confusion of purpose." Possessed of no coherent plan, he "was floundering in a morass of his own creation." Hastings commentary on this is devastating: "In the course of the Cold War the Americans, British and other allies launched many ill-judged initiatives. In the summer of 1962, however, the Russians surpassed them in folly. Only a politician of the most erratic judgement could have expected to get away with shipping manpower and equipment for a small army halfway across the world, through ports within a few minutes' flight time of the United States, without anybody noticing. Yet that is what Nikita Khrushchev did. Stranger still, there is no evidence that he or his staff prepared any response to the eventuality of exposure...Khrushchev merely started something, then - recalling his favourite maxim - waited to 'see what would happen'. Hitherto, most of the Soviets' initiatives - whether in Germany, the Middle East or elsewhere - had been launched in plain sight, announced to the world by the Kremlin with defiant pride. This time, however, Moscow's move aspired to secrecy, which made it an inherent cause for guilt. When revelation later came, nothing did more to damage Khrushchev's case in the eyes of the world than the fact that he had sought to act in darkness. From the start, the undertaking held the seeds of its own failure...The nuclear deployment in Cuba represented an extraordinary break with the Soviets' accustomed strategic caution, even if they shrouded the latter beneath public bombast. When the missiles were later revealed, some of the shrewdest strategic thinkers in the West avowed astonishment at Moscow's recklessness."
During the crisis, Robert McNamara contended that the fundamental issue at stake was political, not strategic or tactical. Hastings is in agreement with this, and provides some convincing analysis on this point: "three leaders and their nations marched towards a fateful rendezvous in the Caribbean, with hapless allies such as the British trailing behind. Fidel Castro was driven by a craving to secure for his small country a celebrity and importance to which it could lay claim only by promoting sensation and even outrage. Nikita Khrushchev cherished no desire for war, but was happy to use the threat of it as a means of asserting the Soviet Union's right to be viewed on the world stage as the equal of the United States. His conduct represented the negation of statesmanship but was, instead, the bitter fruit of the Russian experience since 1917, and arguably even before. Khrushchev probably recognized that he had little prospect of securing the love of his people, never mind that of his Presidium colleagues. However, he needed at least their respect, which he sought by presenting himself as standard-bearer for Russian greatness and socialist revolution. Unfortunately for the cause of peace, however, such a display mightily alarmed the peoples of the West, and especially Americans...John F. Kennedy was one of the most enlightened men ever to occupy the presidency of the United States. But his instinct towards moderation and compromise, fostered by sophistication and international experience, stood at odds with the conservative worldview of a substantial proportion of his fellow-countrymen, who demanded that America should be seen to be strong. Whereas Khrushchev, in making foreign policy decisions, was seldom obliged to consider a domestic public, as distinct from political, opinion, Kennedy could never neglect his own. His presidency, and above all his conduct of the approaching Crisis, would be characterized by a tension between personal rationality and a determination to be seen by his people to conduct himself in a fashion that did not injure his 1964 re-election prospects. The most frightening aspect of this was that more than a few Americans, especially those who wore uniforms with stars on their shoulders, were less fearful of war than was the rest of the planet."
This last comment highlights the chilling war hunger of US military chiefs, which even at this distance is quite shocking. In particular, Curtis Le May's reputation deserves to suffer in light of his hawkish, and downright aggressive conduct during the crisis. Conversely, despite his later loss of reputation related to Vietnam, Robert McNamara deserves huge credit for his restraining influence over the Joint Chiefs at this point. The plan to bomb the missile sites and then invade Cuba, destroying or expelling remaining Soviet forces, without triggering a wider crisis or nuclear conflict, was extremely high risk. In this scenario it is overwhelmingly likely that the Soviet commanders on the ground in Cuba would have utilised a tactical nuclear weapon to repel the invasion, at which point the world would have entered uncharted territory: "The menace to the planet was not that the Russians would purposefully launch a First Strike against the US, but instead that the Americans, provoked at their most sensitive point, would consider that the missile deployment justified devastating military action against Cuba. It seems mistaken to take for granted that President Kennedy would resist the urgings of his military chiefs to go to war, or that a conflict could thereafter have been confined to conventional weapons, since the choice would have been partially dependent upon the discretion and restraint of Soviet officers under American bombardment on Cuban battlefields." Furthermore, as Kennedy and his advisors, military and civilian, talked back and forth over these points the innocence and ignorance they showed was, "as future events in many parts of the world would show, a chronic flaw in Western interventions abroad: governments treated them as tactical military problems, whereas in truth the towering and intractable issues were political. When politics was mentioned, naïveté and ignorance predominated." All in all, this is a frightening brew which could easily have boiled over into nuclear conflict.
A couple of other features of the crisis are particularly deserving of comment. One, which shocked me, was the completely inadequate communications between the main players. Hastings comments that, "A critical feature of the Crisis was the snail-like pace of communication between Washington and Moscow, impeded by bureaucracy, imperfect technology and the requirements of ciphering and deciphering, followed by physical delivery of messages to intended recipients in the Kremlin, Soviet embassy, US State Department and White House." Remarkably, it was some 18 hours after Rudy Anderson's U-2 was shot down over Cuba that Khrushchev was informed of the event. In our age of instant and easy communication that fact is bonkers and emphasises yet again just how easily events could have slipped out of control.
Another is the cultural and national assumptions that all those involved brought to the table. Hastings points out that, "In the eyes of all save Americans, a piece is missing from both the fevered October 1962 discussions in Washington and most histories published since. US leaders took it for granted that their country could not be expected to endure the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It was undoubtedly the case that domestic opinion regarded the deployment as representing as much a mortal insult as a deadly peril. But, echoing Harold Macmillan's courteous observation to JFK, there was no more logical or legal cause why the Cubans should not choose to host nuclear weapons on their soil than that the Turks, Italians or British should be denied such a right. European NATO members had lived for years with a proximate Soviet atomic threat. The American debate was conducted by men wearing historical blinkers - sharing the assumption that the United States had privileges in determining what was, and was not, acceptable in Cuba such as were a commonplace to President Theodore Roosevelt, but represented an anachronism in 1962." The US took its imperialism for granted, much as the Soviet Union assumed that America was weak and decadent. Hastings comments elsewhere that Kennedy's reality was not Khruschev's reality, that they did not see the world in the same way and could not assume that the other would react in the same way to events as they would themselves. That is good advice in personal interactions, never mind in international affairs, and it is remarkable that it was not applied more thoughtfully during the Crisis.
Once the presence of the missiles became public, and it was clear to a watching world that this was an unacceptable state of affairs for the US, the reaction in the Kremlin was a state of profound alarm: "Whatever Nikita Khrushchev's private recognition of reality, he was still days away from acknowledging the logic of his untenable predicament in Cuba and the surrounding Caribbean, which demanded hasty retreat. He was shaken; desperate to avoid a nuclear showdown with the US. The subsequent history of the Missile Crisis is that of the Soviet Union writhing and twisting, to find means to extricate itself with- out overt humiliation from a shambles of its own making. The difficulties inherent in achieving this could well have proved so great that nuclear disaster nonetheless came about through accident or miscalculation, especially on the part of subordinate commanders."
There is plenty more high drama in Hasting's account, from the US Excom and Soviet Presidium meetings to debate the unfolding events, to the US Navy's high-risk confrontation of Soviet nuclear submarines. However, the turning point came after the death of an American service man, Rudy Anderson, whose U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet SAM. Hastings quotes the then National Security Advisor, who later wrote that, "It seems likely that the shoot-down of Anderson...a severe shock...was a powerful influence in persuading Khrushchev to step back from danger. To recognize and honor Anderson's role in this result is a better repayment to his memory than any act of vengeance could have been." It seems likely that the shock of shots fired in anger made Khrushchev even more urgently anxious to find a way to step back from the brink. Whatever the case, the following day Khrushchev announced that the nuclear weapons would be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union: "The Crisis that had come so terrifyingly close to war thus ended, without a bang but with many whimpers: from disgruntled Soviet Presidium members and commanders; from Cubans; from US uniformed brass."
We can all be grateful that it did end with a whimper, farcical rather than tragic, and that thereafter the Cold War was fought indirectly and at a distance until it gradually thawed. We can also hope that more recent events do not represent the start of a new Cold War, and that if they do that the leaders involved learn the lessons both of Khrushchev's reckless folly and of Kennedy's statesmanlike restraint.
One of the most instructive aspects of the book is the comparison and contrast it offers between the main three national leaders involved. For Kennedy, it was his finest hour. Liberal democracies by no means always exercise their influence benignly, so it is greatly to Kennedy's credit that he handled the Crisis in the manner that he did: "He adopted a strategy that emphasized his own and his nation's resolve, while rejecting courses that might have precipitated Armageddon. His remarkable gifts as a listener were seen to utmost advantage in the meetings of Excom at the White House, which concluded with clear, rational executive decisions. Against the instincts not only of the military but of much domestic opinion, almost from the outset he determined to strike a bargain with the Soviets. He expected to pay a price in order to secure peacefully his unwavering objective - removal of the missiles from Cuba." Castro is much more changeable, initially rational but later reckless in his calls for escalation. At the outset, he urged Moscow to deploy the missiles openly through an announced agreement, making it similar to the presence of American missiles in Britain, Italy and Turkey. This would have put the Kremlin in a totally different moral and diplomatic position, and one which world opinion (outside the US) may have been more sympathetic to. After the crisis broke it became clear that Castro's only concern was for Cuba's standing as a significant player on the world stage, and by extension his own, regardless of the consequences. Finally, Khrushchev's position is the most baffling of all, characterised by what Hastings calls a "desperate and dangerous confusion of purpose." Possessed of no coherent plan, he "was floundering in a morass of his own creation." Hastings commentary on this is devastating: "In the course of the Cold War the Americans, British and other allies launched many ill-judged initiatives. In the summer of 1962, however, the Russians surpassed them in folly. Only a politician of the most erratic judgement could have expected to get away with shipping manpower and equipment for a small army halfway across the world, through ports within a few minutes' flight time of the United States, without anybody noticing. Yet that is what Nikita Khrushchev did. Stranger still, there is no evidence that he or his staff prepared any response to the eventuality of exposure...Khrushchev merely started something, then - recalling his favourite maxim - waited to 'see what would happen'. Hitherto, most of the Soviets' initiatives - whether in Germany, the Middle East or elsewhere - had been launched in plain sight, announced to the world by the Kremlin with defiant pride. This time, however, Moscow's move aspired to secrecy, which made it an inherent cause for guilt. When revelation later came, nothing did more to damage Khrushchev's case in the eyes of the world than the fact that he had sought to act in darkness. From the start, the undertaking held the seeds of its own failure...The nuclear deployment in Cuba represented an extraordinary break with the Soviets' accustomed strategic caution, even if they shrouded the latter beneath public bombast. When the missiles were later revealed, some of the shrewdest strategic thinkers in the West avowed astonishment at Moscow's recklessness."
During the crisis, Robert McNamara contended that the fundamental issue at stake was political, not strategic or tactical. Hastings is in agreement with this, and provides some convincing analysis on this point: "three leaders and their nations marched towards a fateful rendezvous in the Caribbean, with hapless allies such as the British trailing behind. Fidel Castro was driven by a craving to secure for his small country a celebrity and importance to which it could lay claim only by promoting sensation and even outrage. Nikita Khrushchev cherished no desire for war, but was happy to use the threat of it as a means of asserting the Soviet Union's right to be viewed on the world stage as the equal of the United States. His conduct represented the negation of statesmanship but was, instead, the bitter fruit of the Russian experience since 1917, and arguably even before. Khrushchev probably recognized that he had little prospect of securing the love of his people, never mind that of his Presidium colleagues. However, he needed at least their respect, which he sought by presenting himself as standard-bearer for Russian greatness and socialist revolution. Unfortunately for the cause of peace, however, such a display mightily alarmed the peoples of the West, and especially Americans...John F. Kennedy was one of the most enlightened men ever to occupy the presidency of the United States. But his instinct towards moderation and compromise, fostered by sophistication and international experience, stood at odds with the conservative worldview of a substantial proportion of his fellow-countrymen, who demanded that America should be seen to be strong. Whereas Khrushchev, in making foreign policy decisions, was seldom obliged to consider a domestic public, as distinct from political, opinion, Kennedy could never neglect his own. His presidency, and above all his conduct of the approaching Crisis, would be characterized by a tension between personal rationality and a determination to be seen by his people to conduct himself in a fashion that did not injure his 1964 re-election prospects. The most frightening aspect of this was that more than a few Americans, especially those who wore uniforms with stars on their shoulders, were less fearful of war than was the rest of the planet."
This last comment highlights the chilling war hunger of US military chiefs, which even at this distance is quite shocking. In particular, Curtis Le May's reputation deserves to suffer in light of his hawkish, and downright aggressive conduct during the crisis. Conversely, despite his later loss of reputation related to Vietnam, Robert McNamara deserves huge credit for his restraining influence over the Joint Chiefs at this point. The plan to bomb the missile sites and then invade Cuba, destroying or expelling remaining Soviet forces, without triggering a wider crisis or nuclear conflict, was extremely high risk. In this scenario it is overwhelmingly likely that the Soviet commanders on the ground in Cuba would have utilised a tactical nuclear weapon to repel the invasion, at which point the world would have entered uncharted territory: "The menace to the planet was not that the Russians would purposefully launch a First Strike against the US, but instead that the Americans, provoked at their most sensitive point, would consider that the missile deployment justified devastating military action against Cuba. It seems mistaken to take for granted that President Kennedy would resist the urgings of his military chiefs to go to war, or that a conflict could thereafter have been confined to conventional weapons, since the choice would have been partially dependent upon the discretion and restraint of Soviet officers under American bombardment on Cuban battlefields." Furthermore, as Kennedy and his advisors, military and civilian, talked back and forth over these points the innocence and ignorance they showed was, "as future events in many parts of the world would show, a chronic flaw in Western interventions abroad: governments treated them as tactical military problems, whereas in truth the towering and intractable issues were political. When politics was mentioned, naïveté and ignorance predominated." All in all, this is a frightening brew which could easily have boiled over into nuclear conflict.
A couple of other features of the crisis are particularly deserving of comment. One, which shocked me, was the completely inadequate communications between the main players. Hastings comments that, "A critical feature of the Crisis was the snail-like pace of communication between Washington and Moscow, impeded by bureaucracy, imperfect technology and the requirements of ciphering and deciphering, followed by physical delivery of messages to intended recipients in the Kremlin, Soviet embassy, US State Department and White House." Remarkably, it was some 18 hours after Rudy Anderson's U-2 was shot down over Cuba that Khrushchev was informed of the event. In our age of instant and easy communication that fact is bonkers and emphasises yet again just how easily events could have slipped out of control.
Another is the cultural and national assumptions that all those involved brought to the table. Hastings points out that, "In the eyes of all save Americans, a piece is missing from both the fevered October 1962 discussions in Washington and most histories published since. US leaders took it for granted that their country could not be expected to endure the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It was undoubtedly the case that domestic opinion regarded the deployment as representing as much a mortal insult as a deadly peril. But, echoing Harold Macmillan's courteous observation to JFK, there was no more logical or legal cause why the Cubans should not choose to host nuclear weapons on their soil than that the Turks, Italians or British should be denied such a right. European NATO members had lived for years with a proximate Soviet atomic threat. The American debate was conducted by men wearing historical blinkers - sharing the assumption that the United States had privileges in determining what was, and was not, acceptable in Cuba such as were a commonplace to President Theodore Roosevelt, but represented an anachronism in 1962." The US took its imperialism for granted, much as the Soviet Union assumed that America was weak and decadent. Hastings comments elsewhere that Kennedy's reality was not Khruschev's reality, that they did not see the world in the same way and could not assume that the other would react in the same way to events as they would themselves. That is good advice in personal interactions, never mind in international affairs, and it is remarkable that it was not applied more thoughtfully during the Crisis.
Once the presence of the missiles became public, and it was clear to a watching world that this was an unacceptable state of affairs for the US, the reaction in the Kremlin was a state of profound alarm: "Whatever Nikita Khrushchev's private recognition of reality, he was still days away from acknowledging the logic of his untenable predicament in Cuba and the surrounding Caribbean, which demanded hasty retreat. He was shaken; desperate to avoid a nuclear showdown with the US. The subsequent history of the Missile Crisis is that of the Soviet Union writhing and twisting, to find means to extricate itself with- out overt humiliation from a shambles of its own making. The difficulties inherent in achieving this could well have proved so great that nuclear disaster nonetheless came about through accident or miscalculation, especially on the part of subordinate commanders."
There is plenty more high drama in Hasting's account, from the US Excom and Soviet Presidium meetings to debate the unfolding events, to the US Navy's high-risk confrontation of Soviet nuclear submarines. However, the turning point came after the death of an American service man, Rudy Anderson, whose U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet SAM. Hastings quotes the then National Security Advisor, who later wrote that, "It seems likely that the shoot-down of Anderson...a severe shock...was a powerful influence in persuading Khrushchev to step back from danger. To recognize and honor Anderson's role in this result is a better repayment to his memory than any act of vengeance could have been." It seems likely that the shock of shots fired in anger made Khrushchev even more urgently anxious to find a way to step back from the brink. Whatever the case, the following day Khrushchev announced that the nuclear weapons would be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union: "The Crisis that had come so terrifyingly close to war thus ended, without a bang but with many whimpers: from disgruntled Soviet Presidium members and commanders; from Cubans; from US uniformed brass."
We can all be grateful that it did end with a whimper, farcical rather than tragic, and that thereafter the Cold War was fought indirectly and at a distance until it gradually thawed. We can also hope that more recent events do not represent the start of a new Cold War, and that if they do that the leaders involved learn the lessons both of Khrushchev's reckless folly and of Kennedy's statesmanlike restraint.
July 31, 2024
A thorough, balanced and engaging work.
Since there are so many books about this, Hastings’ work isn’t always all that original. Hastings often adopts new interpretations in his books, so I was wondering if this book had any, but it doesn’t really have any. Hastings wrote this book during the Covid pandemic, and he notes that much of his research was done online rather than archives.
It is riveting, though, and he does a good job describing the experience of some overlooked figures like the Soviet military personnel in Cuba, the people of Cuba, and the British and German governments. Hastings also does a good job explaining the psychological dimension of deploying missiles on the island, pointing out that it did nothing to really change the strategic balance, given the existence of ICBMs and nuclear-armed submarines. American alarm at having missiles so close to shore was not shared by America’s allies in Europe, for instance; Europeans feared the American reaction more than they feared the Soviet presence in Cuba. Hastings also explains how the technology of the era slowed communication between policymakers, diplomats, military commanders, and all parties involved in the crisis. He also notes the broad authorities and discretion that were delegated to military commanders in that day regarding the decision to deploy nuclear weapons. Hastings does a great job explaining decisions in context, no matter how reckless or stupid they seem in retrospect. He’s also pretty critical of Kennedy’s military advisors (LeMay is called “idiotic”), though he does note that Kennedy exploited their bellicosity to threaten the Soviets when he felt it necessary.
Hastings also describes Castro’s life and background in detail, but not Kennedy’s or Khrushchev’s (his portraits are still vivid and judicious, though). Castro comes off as a radical true believer who was simply too stupid to understand the gravity of the situation. Khrushchev comes off as a bully who realizes he’s outmatched so instead tries to gain advantage by confusing the Americans. Some readers might feel that the inclusion of MacMillan and the British government in the narrative doesn’t add much to the story, given their lack of impact on events (in the introduction Hastings admits that he gives more space to MacMillan than his role justifies) There could have been more coverage of Kennedy’s back-channel negotiations with Khrushchev via the GRU, or on the role of Congress and the media. At one point a nuclear submarine is described as a “diesel” one. Elsewhere Major Chuck Maultsby is called a “captain.” He also mentions the Washington-Moscow “hotline,” even though it didn’t exist at the time.
When covering the Bay of Pigs, Hastings portrays Kennedy a helpless victim, boxed in and let down by the CIA, but doesn’t really cover the extent of his fingerprints over that particular disaster (publicly Kennedy assumed responsibility for it, but not privately) Hastings also doesn’t really make the connections between the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev’s low opinion of Kennedy, and Khrushchev’s decision to then deploy forces to Cuba. Hastings also seems to sometimes depict Kennedy as an honest, simple, honorable gentleman, and his generals as hawkish warmongers, which some readers may find one-dimensional. Also, when describing Kennedy’s decision to keep secret the removal of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, Hastings describes Kennedy’s wish to maintain good relations with US allies, but for some reason downplays the political reasons for the decision, like avoiding the appearance of weakness in an election season.
A well-written, well-researched and very readable work.
Since there are so many books about this, Hastings’ work isn’t always all that original. Hastings often adopts new interpretations in his books, so I was wondering if this book had any, but it doesn’t really have any. Hastings wrote this book during the Covid pandemic, and he notes that much of his research was done online rather than archives.
It is riveting, though, and he does a good job describing the experience of some overlooked figures like the Soviet military personnel in Cuba, the people of Cuba, and the British and German governments. Hastings also does a good job explaining the psychological dimension of deploying missiles on the island, pointing out that it did nothing to really change the strategic balance, given the existence of ICBMs and nuclear-armed submarines. American alarm at having missiles so close to shore was not shared by America’s allies in Europe, for instance; Europeans feared the American reaction more than they feared the Soviet presence in Cuba. Hastings also explains how the technology of the era slowed communication between policymakers, diplomats, military commanders, and all parties involved in the crisis. He also notes the broad authorities and discretion that were delegated to military commanders in that day regarding the decision to deploy nuclear weapons. Hastings does a great job explaining decisions in context, no matter how reckless or stupid they seem in retrospect. He’s also pretty critical of Kennedy’s military advisors (LeMay is called “idiotic”), though he does note that Kennedy exploited their bellicosity to threaten the Soviets when he felt it necessary.
Hastings also describes Castro’s life and background in detail, but not Kennedy’s or Khrushchev’s (his portraits are still vivid and judicious, though). Castro comes off as a radical true believer who was simply too stupid to understand the gravity of the situation. Khrushchev comes off as a bully who realizes he’s outmatched so instead tries to gain advantage by confusing the Americans. Some readers might feel that the inclusion of MacMillan and the British government in the narrative doesn’t add much to the story, given their lack of impact on events (in the introduction Hastings admits that he gives more space to MacMillan than his role justifies) There could have been more coverage of Kennedy’s back-channel negotiations with Khrushchev via the GRU, or on the role of Congress and the media. At one point a nuclear submarine is described as a “diesel” one. Elsewhere Major Chuck Maultsby is called a “captain.” He also mentions the Washington-Moscow “hotline,” even though it didn’t exist at the time.
When covering the Bay of Pigs, Hastings portrays Kennedy a helpless victim, boxed in and let down by the CIA, but doesn’t really cover the extent of his fingerprints over that particular disaster (publicly Kennedy assumed responsibility for it, but not privately) Hastings also doesn’t really make the connections between the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev’s low opinion of Kennedy, and Khrushchev’s decision to then deploy forces to Cuba. Hastings also seems to sometimes depict Kennedy as an honest, simple, honorable gentleman, and his generals as hawkish warmongers, which some readers may find one-dimensional. Also, when describing Kennedy’s decision to keep secret the removal of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, Hastings describes Kennedy’s wish to maintain good relations with US allies, but for some reason downplays the political reasons for the decision, like avoiding the appearance of weakness in an election season.
A well-written, well-researched and very readable work.
December 11, 2023
An excellent political/historical read. Amidst this dumpster fire of a year 2023, I guess it pays to remind ourselves that 61 years ago the world was on the brink of something really big- that is, total destruction. Hastings sets the scene by describing Cuba's, the USSR's, and the USA's place in the geo-political context of the time, and then makes a strong case that if it wasn't for JFK's restraint and sense of consequences (to some extent showed by Krushchev too), then most of us would have been charred embers. Frightening to think of the slowness of communication back then, and the discretionary powers of commanders at the local level. Recommended, and one that will leave you pondering.
December 31, 2022
The last word on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then some.
January 16, 2023
An excellent narrative of a crucial geopolitical event. What I liked most about this extremely well researched & written book is the fearlessness with which the author shares his personal perspectives and assessments of events and characters all through the book. Hastings doesnt shy away from making informed judgements which I found a useful guide in understanding the why behind the what.
The story told is made even more powerful by weaving in it the diversity of opinions held during the crisis and afterwards, not just in the USA and Russia but also Cuba and the rest of the world. Sensible parallels and cautions are drawn between then and now. An important read! I look forward to Hastings' next book!
The story told is made even more powerful by weaving in it the diversity of opinions held during the crisis and afterwards, not just in the USA and Russia but also Cuba and the rest of the world. Sensible parallels and cautions are drawn between then and now. An important read! I look forward to Hastings' next book!
December 24, 2022
An in-depth look at the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis that occurred in the fall of 1962. Full of journalistic details, well researched easy to read and worth the time investment.
October 30, 2022
I was at school when the Cuban missile crisis blew up in 1962. At the time it seemed simple. The bad guys, Cuban and Russian, were arming Cuba with nuclear weapons. The good guys, the USA, were trying to stop them. Eventually, the US navy blockaded Cuba and Russian ships carrying nuclear weapons were sent packing. Crisis over. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But, of course, it wasn’t and Max Hastings enthralling book tells how the world almost ended sixty years ago.
Hastings is one of the world’s leading military historians and in THE ABYSS he gives a blow by blow account of those dreadful days. Hampered by being unable to visit important sites during the pandemic, the author has still created a diary of events which clearly demonstrated just how close the earth came to self-destruction in October 1962. Had there been a pandemic just after the crisis in 1962, it would have been impossible to recreate the events a accurately because, of course, there was no internet. But today there is and this has enabled Sir Max Hastings to write an account of those events from which governments the world over can learn a lesson so that’s those times when the world came close to incineration can never be repeated.
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen, Two Families at War and The Summer of ‘39, all published by Sacristy Press.
But, of course, it wasn’t and Max Hastings enthralling book tells how the world almost ended sixty years ago.
Hastings is one of the world’s leading military historians and in THE ABYSS he gives a blow by blow account of those dreadful days. Hampered by being unable to visit important sites during the pandemic, the author has still created a diary of events which clearly demonstrated just how close the earth came to self-destruction in October 1962. Had there been a pandemic just after the crisis in 1962, it would have been impossible to recreate the events a accurately because, of course, there was no internet. But today there is and this has enabled Sir Max Hastings to write an account of those events from which governments the world over can learn a lesson so that’s those times when the world came close to incineration can never be repeated.
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen, Two Families at War and The Summer of ‘39, all published by Sacristy Press.
October 31, 2022
Eminent historian Max Hastings published this excellent re-look at the hottest era of the ~45 years of the Cold War during the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this 528-page tome we see in-depth discussions and behind the scenes discussions of what President Kennedy, Soviet Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro and their advisors. Contextually, Hastings builds each major storyline’s historical timeline in building up to the crisis to include the Cuban Revolution (great history!); race relations/missile gap and the tussle between the the politicos and military brass in the US; and in the USSR, the paranoia and deception of trying to match US capability but falling short. The tensions and heightened fears manifest as the U.S. shipping quarantine is established, culminating when the Soviets ‘blinked.’ The timing of this volume is perfect and the application and lessons of a current day Cold War should be studied closely. A great read!
October 19, 2022
This is an excellent narrative account of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is written in Max Hastings' usual style, with a clear, comprehensive account of events, using sources from all angles, and with shrewd judgments. I especially like the way in which Hastings considers the Cuban perspective, and how out-of-sync Castro was with both the USSR and the USA in the resolution of the crisis. The book concludes with some well-made points about the parallels with today's multiple global crises, especially the conduct of the current leader of the Russian Federation. I highly recommend this book.
December 25, 2022
Well-written, but I suspect that the average reader might find the effort too laborious. The background on the actors was fascinating, but even by page 170, he still had not started covering the Crisis.
January 29, 2024
Enjoyed this entertaining overview of the crisis. Max gave good context the era in the US, Russia and Cuba. He also firmly gives his perspective on how this era should be interpreted based on his evaluation of history.
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