A review by thomasroche
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

4.0

This book did not feel overly coherent, but I still enjoyed it. It consists of too many disparate anecdotes to feel like an incisive analysis or history of the crisis. Nonetheless, many of its pieces parts are GREAT. Most interesting is the author's takedown of Kennedy-as-Messiah theories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end of the book. I am a big admirer of Kennedy in many respects, but his handling of the Crisis was not above reproach. The author takes the view that reason prevailed on both sides, and that there was no eye-to-eye stand-off, but a more complicated interaction of clusterfuck and close call. Dobbs is not quite a proponent of the "sheer dumb luck" view that Robert McNamara took in later years, but he certainly gives that idea a fair hearing, in a compelling and chilling way. I also very much enjoyed the very vivid vignettes about front-line pilots and ship crews interacting. The Russian side of the conflict is not as well represented as the American, but there is more info about the Russian perception than in previous English-language books on the subject.

Overall, a decent read and an interesting take on the Crisis and the cold war.