Book Review - Abyss by Max Hastings

I remember going to bed one night in October 1962 not sure whether I would wake up in the morning. The Russian ships were approaching the Quarantine line around Cuba, and we lived only thirteen miles from Trafalgar Square. It was obvious that, should nuclear war break out, we would be obliterated.

Many years later I saw the film Thirteen Days, which tells the story of the Missile Crisis, and it brought back the feelings of dread we had at the time.

Now that excellent historian Max Hastings has written this account of the events, and reveals the details, including a great deal of background on the individuals most concerned, and the way that the crisis unfolded, in a manner that a film does not have time to cover.

The protagonists emerge as very different characters from the way that they were regarded at the time.

In the rebellious era of the 1960s Castro was a hero to the hippie generation, seen as the working class revolutionary, who led his people to freedom from the despotic, and corrupt rule of Baptista. While it was true that the latter was a deplorable enemy of democracy the actions, and attitudes, of Castro during, and after the crisis, showed him to be another Latin American despot, who morphed into a genuine megalomaniac. He was someone who took himself to be a a permanent revolutionary, but was completely incapable of ruling once in power, as was his close confederate Che Guevara. Worse, he was actually enthusiastic about a nuclear war being fought over Cuba, and eventually became a liability to the Russians.

Khrushchev was often taken to be a bit of a clown in the West, based on events such as bashing his shoe on the desk at a meeting of the UN General Assembly, but of course he had risen to the top of a police state, and had used murderous force against those who rebelled, so was no joke. He was more human than Stalin, the ultimate cynical despot, but was not someone to take lightly. However it is clear from Max Hasting's descriptions that he was also a gambler, and, while he recognised that Russia was much weaker than the USA, he took a chance that he could install offensive missiles in Cuba. Once he was forced to face reality he was not looking to start a nuclear war, but to extricate the Soviet Union from the situation.

Possibly the most belligerent of those involved were the American military chiefs, particularly Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, who constantly pressed the President to take military action, and went out of their way to obstruct the latter's attempts to find a negotiated solution.

Their fate at the hands of assassins conferred on John and Robert Kennedy an aura of martyrdom, and indeed they were basically good men, but at the time of the missile crisis the latter was not quite the character portrayed in the film, as he was very aggressive at various points. However, despite later revelations concerning his private life, it is the President for whom we should all give thanks, for his refusal to be bounced into war, and his determination to find his way to ridding Cuba of the missiles without destroying the world meant that we survived.

This book gives a much more accurate picture of what actually happened on those fraught days in October 1962 than did the film, but both constitute a warning to humanity about how close we have come to Armageddon, and that we must never fall into that abyss