Maximum Danger: Kennedy, the Missiles, and the Crisis of American Confidence

In the early 1960s, as a youthful President Kennedy entered the White House, Americans braced for a period of "maximum danger" from the Soviet Union. This nearly universal alarm sprang from rising Soviet missile strength, Communist challenges around the world, and the shoe-thumping bluster of Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Yet popular fears also fed on exaggerated estimates of Russian military prowess, global ambitions, and readiness to risk or even begin a nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the gravest collision of the cold war, occurred as these alarms were sounding loudest, generating pressures for bolder action to blunt Soviet advances. Historians and other observers persist in explaining President Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis in merely personal terms, as revealing either unique valor and resourcefulness or reckless machismo.