Hot Spell in The Cold War

By BRUCE VAN VOORST

THE CRISIS YEARS

by Michael R. Beschloss

HarperCollins; 816 pages; $29.95

As Mikhail Gorbachev panhandles the U.S. and McDonald's draws longer lines in Moscow than Lenin's tomb, it is difficult to believe that less than three decades ago, Washington and Moscow were on the steely edge of war. The drama and tension of those years are vividly recaptured in Michael Beschloss's The Crisis Years. But this is no simple rehash of John Kennedy's sparring with Nikita Khrushchev. Beschloss casts new light on topics ranging from the Cuban missile crisis to the security risks of J.F.K.'s sexual dalliances.

Kennedy was still shaken from the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion when he met Khrushchev at the Vienna summit in June 1961. The Soviet Premier ended discussions on nuclear testing and Laos with a stunning demand for a separate German peace treaty, turning over Soviet responsibilities for access to Berlin to East German authorities. Kennedy rightly viewed this as a violation of four-power agreements and warned that any tampering with access would be met with force, including nuclear weapons. Soviet sources judged the President "scared," and Kennedy conceded later that Khrushchev had "just beat hell out of me."

Disastrous economic conditions in East Germany were propelling thousands of refugees a day into West Berlin, so Khrushchev decided to let East German Communist Party chief Walter Ulbricht build the Wall. Beschloss provides convincing new evidence that Kennedy recognized that erecting a wall through the city was the only way to prevent a collapse of East Germany and never seriously considered armed intervention over that issue. Nonetheless, in Beschloss's judgment, the U.S. was never closer to war with the U.S.S.R. than throughout the Berlin crisis.

The following year, convinced that Kennedy would launch yet another invasion of Cuba, Khrushchev opted to deploy on Cuban soil medium- and intermediate- range Soviet missiles capable of reaching American targets. Although approving the way the White House dealt with the confrontation, Beschloss blames Kennedy for failing to make U.S. goals clear. If he had better articulated his country's interests, Beschloss insists, "it is doubtful that Khrushchev would have felt compelled to take his giant risk on Cuba." Kennedy had second thoughts as well. "Last month I should have said . . . that we don't care" about the missile deployment, the President told intimates in the midst of the crisis.

Beschloss's account, drawing heavily on previously unavailable secret messages between the two leaders, includes fascinating tidbits about the major actors: J.F.K. once boasted that he was "the first man to have sex with someone other than his spouse inside the Lincoln Bedroom"; Khrushchev, after having made life miserable for Kennedy, broke down and wept openly upon hearing of the President's assassination.

Numbering more than 800 pages (including 62 pages of footnotes), The Crisis Years is a compelling piece of historical research that benefits from post- perestroika access to Soviet sources. Its attraction as a scholarly work, however, should not detract from its appeal to the casual reader, who can easily become immersed in this captivating description of how the U.S. and the Soviet Union almost blundered into World War III.