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

Frankel, Max

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345465059 ISBN 13: 9780345465054

Publisher: Presidio Press, 2004

Synopsis

High Noon in the Cold War is a thorough and concise history of one of the most important events in modern American history. In 1962, when Nikita Krushchev tried to secretly install 60 medium range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads on Cuba (along with 40,000 soldiers, 40 MiG fighter jets, and no less than seven warehouses with a three month supply of food), he sparked the tensest and most potentially devastating stand off in American-Soviet relations; the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, Max Frankel, who covered the crisis for the New York Times before going on to run that paper, brings to vivid life the heated debates as they occurred in the White House and the Kremlin. He shows how Kennedy and Krushchev had to struggle to discern each other's true intentions as they warded off the hawkish advice of their military. Using newly declassified files as well as the audiotapes that President Kennedy secretly made at the time, Frankel brings the players - including CIA director John McCone, Secretary of State Dean Risk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara - to vivid life in their own dramatic words. Frankel shows how brothers John and Robert, then the Attorney General, built a consensus in the West Wing that kept America out of World War III.

About this title

About the Author:

Max Frankel is one of America's preeminent journalists. He worked for the New York Times for 50 years, rising from college correspondent to reporter, Washington bureau chief, editorial page editor and ultimately executive editor from 1986-1994. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of President Nixon's trip to China in 1972. He wrote the nationally bestselling memoir The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times. He lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap:

One of the giants of American journalism now re-creates an unforgettable time-in which the whole world feared extinction. "High Noon in the Cold War captures the Cuban Missile Crisis in a new light, from inside the hearts and minds of the famous men who provoked and, in the nick of time, resolved the confrontation.
Using his personal memories of covering the conflict, and gathering evidence from recent records and new scholarship and testimony, Max Frankel corrects widely held misconceptions about the game of "nuclear chicken" played by John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962, when Soviet missiles were secretly planted in Cuba and aimed at the United States.
"High Noon in the Cold War portrays an embattled young American presidentnot jaunty and callow as widely believed, but increasingly calm and statesmanlikeand a Russian ruler who was not only a "wily old peasant" but an insecure belligerent desperate to achieve credibility. Here, too, are forgotten heroes like John McCone, the conservative Republican CIA head whose intuition made him a crucial figure in White House debates.
In detailing the disastrous miscalculations of the two superpowers (the U.S. thought the Soviets would never deploy missiles to Cuba; the Soviets thought the U.S. would have to acquiesce) and how Kennedy and Khrushchev beat back hotheads in their own councils, this fascinating book re-creates the "whole story of the scariest encounter of the Cold War, as told by a master reporter.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0345465059
• ISBN 13: 9780345465054
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224