One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

The captain of the Lowry tried a new approach. He assembled the destroyer’s jazz band on deck, and told them to play some music. Strains of Yankee Doodle floated across the ocean, followed by a boogie-woogie number. The Americans thought they could see a smile on the face of one of the sailors. They asked if there was any particular tune he would like to hear. The Soviet sailor did not respond. The

The most enduring lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is that, in a world with nuclear weapons, a classic military victory is an illusion. Communism was not defeated militarily; it was defeated economically, culturally, and ideologically. Khrushchev’s successors were unable to provide their own people with a basic level of material prosperity and spiritual fulfillment. They lost the war of ideas. In the end, as I have argued in Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, communism defeated itself.

JFK's great virtue, and the essential difference between him and George W. Bush, was that he had an instinctive appreciation for the chaotic forces of history.

Bismarck defined political intuition as the ability to hear, before anybody else, “the distant hoofbeats of history.

The closest contact they had with the enemy was a playful sign that boasted: “Worldwide delivery in 30 minutes or less—or your next one is free.” Nuclear apocalypse was as mundane as delivering pizza.

Khrushchev had been ready to settle for a