The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963

When it comes to anything presidential, Michael Beschloss simply cannot write a bad book. He's an absolute expert in this area and also a fan of diary like detail. The book is very well written but quite long because of his bias towards telling the COMPLETE story. Given that, it is a tribute to his skills as a writer and story-teller that this book became a bestseller. The same heft by another author may not have sold so well. All said, it is a very fine read indeed.

This book rescued me from the recent Taubman biography of Khruschev. Not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy Taubman...up until the point that Kennedy was assassinated. Somehow, without Kennedy to reflect off of, or react off of, or bark at, or explode at, Khruschev became rather dull. This book, winding as it does completely around the relationship between the leaders of the two superpowers, their mistrusts of each other, their odd affection for each other, their correspondence, and their dangerous, global risk-taking flare-ups, proves far more interesting. Beschloss creates characters full of life and vigor, sympathetic and sometimes frightening, as when Khruschev threatens war over Berlin, or when we learn the details of the narcotics the President required to manage his back pain. The book also manages to set the stage for years and years of politics to come, in space policy, in cold war strategy, and in the Vietnam war.

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.

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'.

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.