I will start this book review by declaring a fascination in the complex personality of President Kennedy. I have many biographies covering his life in my library, and have made two visits to the Kennedy Library/Museum in Boston, USA. In terms of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I have only read one book on the topic – Robert Kennedy’s excellent 13 Days, although I had always harboured a suspicion that RFK had written it more to help secure the family, the Kennedy, legacy!
Now, Max Hastings has produced a superb, and timely, book on the Crisis – Abyss.
I read it both from looking to increase my knowledge of President Kennedy, but also from a desire to learn more about leadership under the most extreme pressure. The book delivered on both counts.
Hastings takes us on a journey not just about the 13 days of the crisis, but in the years leading up to the event. Moreover, he presents three distinct historical views – from Cuba, Russia and the USA. Hindsight is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, and in reading the three perspectives it is somewhat easy from my armchair to see all the problems emerging, and how they could have been solved or counted. At the time, those intense days, Kennedy did not have that luxury. His performance is all the more remarkable for it. It is still shocking to read how close we came to all out nuclear war.
Hastings brilliantly describes the intense pressure Kennedy was under, primarily from his military chiefs. Their arrogance, their determination to be involved in the politics of the situation, their naivety about the threats posed by Russia, is truly terrifying. We should also remember that Kennedy secretly recorded many of the key conversations in his office and the Cabinet Room, enabling historians to not just assess the narrative, but listen to the tone of voice, the stress levels beginning to grow. Hastings uses this superbly.
Kennedy displayed grace under pressure, he knew when to walk away from being boxed in by his advisers. He had, importantly, learnt vital lessons from his poor handling before of the Bay of Pigs fiasco (“Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan…”) – clear evidence of his powers of reflection and his drive for excellence in his administration.
At the end of this book, I felt exhausted. So powerful is the narrative, how real is seems now with the situation in Ukraine, I felt I was in the Oval Office during the 13 days in October 1962.
If 1940 was Churchill’s finest hour, then October 1962 was Kennedy’s. I suggest without him as President at that time there would have been a nuclear war, a holocaust. We owe him a great debt for his inspirational leadership.
I am also left pondering whether today’s politicians could have measured up against him. I think back to the early days of the recent pandemic, when, confronted by varying and contradictory opinions, our political leaders in the UK panicked and threw away any sense of responsibility by ‘following the science’. What would have happened in 1962 if Kennedy had believed, and not robustly challenged, his military advisers and ‘followed the military experts’? An interesting thought to end on.
Mark Hollingsworth 
Reading today’s press, it looks like fact, fiction and history are all meeting to end the world as we know it! In 1983 the USSR reckoned that NATO’s Able Archer exercise was a smokescreen and that NATO was planning to deliver a genuine nuclear first strike. So we have to ask, was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis “the most perilous event in history”? When compared with NATO’s Able Archer Exercise in 1983, we doubt the Cuban Missile crisis was “the most perilous event in history” but such a comparison may be splitting hairs as both events came perilously close to starting a nuclear war and today with Putin on edge matters might be even worse.
As to be expected though, Max Hastings certainly did his chosen non-fiction topic justice in his book about the Abyss we all faced in 1962. Mind you the subject matter would be riveting had you not read about it beforehand. The extent to which John F Kennedy took his NATO partners into his confidence during the Cuban crisis remains debatable. In 1962, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, colloquially known as SuperMac, was supposedly JFK’s chief confidant and adviser throughout the crisis. What were the consequences of that?
For starters it meant that anything JFK (via the CIA) and/or SuperMac shared with MI6 about how best to manage the crisis may have been shared with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro via Kim Philby (or others unknown in his circle) who was then still of importance to the USSR albeit no longer in MI6. In addition, Dr Richard Alan Fairclough (ex MI1 and a leading British scientist) was a close confidant of SuperMac. Since then Richard Fairclough (aka Roger Burlington) featured in The Burlington Files series of fact based spy novels which were centred on the life and times of his son Bill Fairclough (aka Edward Burlington, MI6 codename JJ).
The absence of some of the forgoing information in any book of note about the Cuban missile crisis might raise questions as to its completeness. On the other hand, one could ask were the Fairclough family involved in the seventies in the Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs? Who knows but just because someone claims they know the truth is never the whole story! Before it’s too late we had all best read Beyond Enkription, the only novel published to date in The Burlington Files series, to find out what has been disclosed to date on all these issues. As for today’s concerns, hopefully in 50 years from now we can read about today’s Kim Philby and Oleg Penkovsky. In the meantime, if you think you know all there is to know about these things, have a look at a brief but intriguing news article dated 31 October 2022 about Pemberton’s People in MI6 in TheBurlingtonFiles website.
LikeLike