High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Kruschchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis - Tapa dura

High Noon in the Cold War is a thorough and concise history of one of the most important events in modern American history. In 1962, when Nikita Krushchev tried to secretly install 60 medium range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads on Cuba (along with 40,000 soldiers, 40 MiG fighter jets, and no less than seven warehouses with a three month supply of food), he sparked the tensest and most potentially devastating stand off in American-Soviet relations; the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, Max Frankel, who covered the crisis for the New York Times before going on to run that paper, brings to vivid life the heated debates as they occurred in the White House and the Kremlin. He shows how Kennedy and Krushchev had to struggle to discern each other's true intentions as they warded off the hawkish advice of their military. Using newly declassified files as well as the audiotapes that President Kennedy secretly made at the time, Frankel brings the players - including CIA director John McCone, Secretary of State Dean Risk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara - to vivid life in their own dramatic words. Frankel shows how brothers John and Robert, then the Attorney General, built a consensus in the West Wing that kept America out of World War III.

Max Frankel is one of America's preeminent journalists. He worked for the New York Times for 50 years, rising from college correspondent to reporter, Washington bureau chief, editorial page editor and ultimately executive editor from 1986-1994. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of President Nixon's trip to China in 1972. He wrote the nationally bestselling memoir The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times. He lives in New York City.