The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963

Rating:
Summary: Compelling and fascinating
Review: I just happened to read this book right after I read The Charm School by Nelson DeMille, which is an exciting book. But reading the Years of Crisis made me realize how much more worthwhile non-fiction is than is fiction. The Years of Crisis was an exciting book about things that really happened, filled with tension and all plausible. The Charm School is, on reflection, far-fetched and improbable. The Years of Crisis has various judgments, and if one is a Kennedy admirer, as I was during the years involved (1960-1963), some of them make one uneasy about the rightness of one's view in that long ago time. But it is comforting that he, Kennedy, did do the right thing, and that 300,000,000 million people did not die in atomic war. This book is full of the tension of the years involved, and was more tense to read than living thru the time!

Rating:
Summary: Useful
Review: Interesting to note that Castro came to the UN after the Cuban revolution in the hope of normalising relations with the US but was rebuffed. There then followed the Bay of Pigs. If cooler heads had prevailed and approachement made at that point, we may have been living in a totally different world today. A banal observation, admitedly. Certainly, US intransigence led to a more absolutist and repressive Castro.
Kennedy indeed felt that Khrushchev had outclassed him when it came to discussing political ideology on first meeting, but Kennedy did focus on the crux of the whole matter. The nation that could provide best materially for it's people would be the winner of the cold war. Krushchev ended up in a hut in the country somewhere, an 'expendable hero' as Harry Palmer once joked to an old Bolschevic in the film 'Funeral In Berlin'.

Rating:
Summary: Complex period in history made "readable"...
Review: Michael Beschloss has done what every history writer should aspire to...make complex history telling "readable". Even though this book is very long, it flows very smoothly without missing any of the details of that "Crisis" era. I love books on the Cuban Missile Crisis and have found very few that would be characterized above the "textbook" level, but this one surely meets that tough standard. This book should be included in every "Crisis" historians library.

Rating:
Summary: Complex period in history made "readable"...
Review: Michael Beschloss has done what every history writer should aspire to...make complex history telling "readable". Even though this book is very long, it flows very smoothly without missing any of the details of that "Crisis" era. I love books on the Cuban Missile Crisis and have found very few that would be characterized above the "textbook" level, but this one surely meets that tough standard. This book should be included in every "Crisis" historians library.

Rating:
Summary: As engrossing as any Clancy novel!
Review: Michael R. Beschloss' 1991 book, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khruschev 1960-1963, is a literary rarity: a history book about a complex and critical period in the 20th Century that is so well-written that it reads like a novel.

Beschloss describes the dramatic events of the period that began shortly before the Presidential election of 1960 and ended with the dreadful events of November 22, 1963, focusing on the interplay between President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita S. Khruschev. These two men from vastly different worlds -- one the son of a self-made millionaire from Boston, the other the son of Russian peasants who had been semiliterate until his thirties -- held the fate of the world in their hands.

The Crisis Years discusses in great detail the most dramatic events of the Cold War, including JFK's first meeting with the Soviet leader in Vienna, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the building of the Berlin Wall (including a photo capturing the only time American tanks and Soviet tanks faced off), the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that marked the first thaw in the frosty relations between the superpowers.

This book is sadly out of print, but it's definitely a must-read for readers who want to know more about this critical period in world history.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive Study of the Kennedy-Khrushchev Relationship
Review: This is a massive (700 page), comprehensive, if not especially analytic, study of the United States' relationship with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, told from the perspectives of the superpowers' leaders, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. At the beginning of his administration, Kennedy may have had sincere desire to improve relations with the Soviets, but his famous inaugural address was interpreted by many as a committed cold warrior's call to arms, and, as Beschloss's title implies, a series of foreign policy crises followed. Often in minute detail, Beschloss discusses the disastrous invasion of Cuba by opponents of Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the Cuban missile crisis. For those who enjoy narrative history liberally sprinkled with portraits of colorful personalities, this is a fascinating book.

There is little in this book which is new, but much of it bears repeating, especially for readers too young to remember the early 1960s. However odious Castro's dictatorship was to become, the attempt to topple it in the spring of 1961 was destined to fail. According to Beschloss, one of Kennedy's advisers warned him that "he could not recall a single case in history when refugees returned and successfully overthrew a revolutionary regime." The Berlin crisis that summer did not escalate into a nuclear confrontation because, as Kennedy observed: "A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war." And Beschloss writes about the missile crisis that the 39 hours' warning of the naval quarantine that Kennedy gave Khrushchev "demonstrated the President's wisdom in starting his response not with an irreversible air strike but with milder pressures that gave Khrushchev time to ponder his move."

Some of Beschloss's observations about the leaders border on gossip. He lends credence to reports that Khrushchev could be a buffoon who occasionally drank too much and that Kennedy's enthusiastic womanizing continued while he was president. But personal traits and predilections often could not be separated from matters of substance. For instance, the author reports that Kennedy was regularly treated by a medical practitioner with "vitamin shots" which "also contained amphetamines, steroids, hormones, and animal organ cells." Beschloss proceeds to explain the importance of this revelation: "Even in small doses, amphetamines cause side effects such as nervousness, garrulousness, impaired judgment, overconfidence, and, when the drug wears off, depression." Beschloss implies that Kennedy may have been under the influence of amphetamines at his summit meeting with Khrushchev in the spring of 1961, when the Soviet leader, by Kennedy's own admission, "just beat hell out of me." Beschloss concludes that Kennedy "should have been vastly more careful in pursuing his medical experimentation than he had been as a Senator. The stakes now were not one political career but literally the fate of the world."

This book is not without its limitations. As I implied above, it is much stronger on narrative than analysis, and some passages give the impression that Beschloss was more interested in the personalities of Kennedy and Khrushchev than in the substance of the policies they devised and pursued. Beschloss's discussion of Kennedy's approach to the growing conflict in Vietnam is brief and generally superficial. The book's organization is quirky: The role of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the development of Kennedy's national-security policy is barely mentioned until page 400. And the index is not entirely reliable. (For instance, the index's listing for Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, inexplicably omits reference to Beschloss's description of a critical briefing Lemnitzer gave to the President in September 1961 in which the "bottom line" was that "the United States enjoyed vast nuclear superiority.")

While I was preparing this review, I discovered that this book, which was published in 1991, is already out of print, and that surprised me a bit. Some aspects of it clearly have been superceded by more recent scholarship, such as Lawrence Freedman's Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, which I reviewed here shortly after it was published last November, but I believe that Beschloss's book continues to be of value. The magnificent 19th-century English historian Thomas Carlyle once wrote: "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." Few eras provide more validation for Carlyle's perspective than the crisis years of 1961 and 1962, dominated as they were by the intensely personal diplomacy of Kennedy and Khrushchev. Beschloss's coverage of that aspect of U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations during this period is superb.