Excerpted from the "afterword" of what I thought was a very interesting book.

......The focus on the test of wills between Kennedy and Khrushchev at the expense of the chaotic vagaries of history was unfortunate.  The missile crisis came to be viewed as an exemplary example of international crisis management......According to Bartlett and Aslop, the peaceful outcome of the Cuban crisis inspired "an inner sense of confidence among the handful of men with the next-to-ultimate responsibility."  The president's men began to believe their own version of history.  Confidence turned into hubris.  JFK had ignored the advice of his own military experts, by but had nevertheless won a great victory by sending carefully calibrated signals to the leader of the rival superpower.  It did not occur to anybody that many of the these messages were misinterpreted in Moscow, or that Khrushchev responded to imaginary signals, such as the mistaken believe that Kennedy would shortly go on television to announce an attack on Cuba...

The most pernicious consequences of the new foreign policy mind-set--the notion that the United States could force the rest of the world to do its bidding through a finely calibrated combination of  "toughness and restraint"--- played out in Vietnam.  The whiz kids around McNamara came up with a policy of "progressive squeeze-and-talk" to bring the North Vietnamese Communists to their senses.  The objective was not to defeat the North but to use American airpower to send signals of intent to Hanoi, much as JFK had used the quarantine of Cuba to send a signal of determination to Khrushchev.   ....but the North Vietnamese leaders were unfamiliar with game theory as taught at Harvard and promoted by the RAND Corporation.   They failed to behave in a "logical" manner...

A somewhat different- but equally mistaken- lesson from the Cuban missile crisis was drawn by modern-day neoconservatives.  In planning for the war in Iraq, they shared the conceit that the political will of the president of the United States trumps all other considerations.  They were fervent believers in the " eyeball to eyeball" version of history.   But they took th argument one step further.  In a speech in Cincinnati in October 20o2 shortly before the Iraq war, President George W. Bush praised JFK for being willintg to resort to force to eliminate a new kind of peril (the "mushroom cloud") to the American homeland.   He cited with approval Kennedy's statement on Oct. 22, 1962, the "we no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of nuclear wepons represents a sufficient challenge to a nations security to constitute maximum peril."  In effect, Bush was crediting JFK as the authority for junking the Cold War strategy of "containment" that had been in effect for more than half a century.  What he omitted to say was that his predecessor stubbornly resisted calls from some of his closest advisors for a military solution....

.....From today's persective, the key moment of the missile crisis is not the largely mythical "eyebal to eyeball" confrontation of Oct. 24.  It turns out the the two great adversaries- Kennedy and Khrushchev-- were both looking for a way out.   They were rational, intelligent, decent men seperated by an ocean of misunderstanding, fear, and ideological suspiciion.   Despite everything that divided them, they had a sneaking sympathy for each other, and idea expressed most poignantly by Jackie Kennedy in a private, handwritten letter she sent to Khrushchev following her husband's assassination:
                    
                 You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up.  The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones.  While big men know the need for self-control and restraint, little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride.

...Prior to October 1962, an influential group of generals headed by Curtis LeMay had favored a first strike against the Soviet Union.   After the missile crisis, even the generals had to rethink the notion of Cold War victory.     The United States and the Soviet Union would never again become involved in a direct military confrontation......there would be many proxy wars....but no wars or even near wars pitting American troops directly against Soviet troops.

And there was this pleasent reafirmation, concerning my hero, and often ridiculed, president....

   Ronald Reagan.  (This picture was taken in Mexico of me reading a book "borrowed" from a community clubhouse one week earlier, on the  first leg of trip,  while visiting my friend Sam Shabrin and his father in Arizona.   Thanks, one day I'll return it.)  Ronald Reagan who pumped up  defense budgets in the 1980's and put the last nail in the Soviet coffin. Again, as excerpted from "One Minute to Midnight," by Michael Dobbs, p. 349.

As the years wnt by, it became clear that Kennedy's missile crisis victory had produced many unintended consequences.  One was an escalation in the Cold War arms race as Soviet leaeers sought to erase the memory of the Cugan humiliation.  "You got away with it this time, but you will never get away with it again," the Soviet dputy foreign minister, Vasily Kuznetsov, told a senior American official shortly after the removal of the Soviet missiles.  The Soviet Union would never again allow itself to be in a position of strategic inferiority.   In order to achieve military parity with the United States, Khrushchev's successors embarked on a vast intercontinental ballistic missile program.

In yet another twist to history, this huge military buildup was one of the principal reasons for the Soviet Union's ultimate demise.  Even a fabulously rich country, with huge natural resources, could not sustain the burden of ever-increasing military budgets.   The free world led by the United States eventually won a victory over the totalitarian world of Soviet communism- but it came about in a different manner than many people expected.