Missile Crisis

What if you took once-bitter Cold War rivals -- former Soviet generals, a CIA intelligence expert, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Cuban President Fidel Castro -- and put them in the same room to discuss the anxious days in the fall of 1962 when the world was just a blink away from nuclear war?That is essentially the premise behind an extraordinary meeting that took place in Havana in January 1992. Organizers of the event that brought together policy makers and missile-crisis scholars knew discussions could break down into finger pointing and accusations.

It has been 50 years this month since the Cuban missile crisis, but I remember the terror of it. We were hours away from six missiles, each with the strength of eighty Hiroshima bombs, being launched against the eastern seaboard before Nikita Khrushchev called them back to Russia. Jack Kennedy was our President, and we will evermore be grateful for his handling of it. If there were ever again a crisis of such magnitude, which of the two presidential candidates would we want to make decisions: Barack Obama, who seems to carefully deliberate in his decision making ("leading from behind")

"The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis," edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. Harvard University Press. 715 pages. $35.On Oct. 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy saw, for the first time, U-2 aerial reconnaissance photographs showing the Soviets setting up nuclear-armed ballastic missiles in Cuba targeted on American cities. The ensuing crisis brought the world the closest it has ever come to thermonuclear destruction. During the next 13 days, as Kennedy's inner circle debated what to do, the President secretly tape-recorded the discussions.

Worked for Howard Hughes Frank William Gay, a senior corporate officer for Howard Hughes and the recent target of a renewed claim on the billionaire's fortune, has died. Mr. Gay, who lived in Humble, Texas, died Monday in a hospital in Kingwood, Texas, according to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase. The cause was not released. He ran Hughes' holding company, Summa Corp., and was on the executive committee that ran his medical institute. Mr. Gay also served as chairman of Hughes Air Corp.

CHICAGO - The showdown with Iraq coincides with the 40th anniversary of another confrontation that even today has the power to induce chills. The Cuban missile crisis was the one time during the Cold War that the United States and the Soviet Union strode right up to the brink of nuclear holocaust. We are told it holds a valuable lesson for how we approach Saddam Hussein, though not everyone agrees on what the lesson is. Conservatives pay homage to President John F. Kennedy for acting forcefully to eliminate a nuclear threat rather than sitting by while an enemy proceeded to arm for our destruction.

Justin F. Gleichauf, a former CIA agent who helped monitor Cuba in the years before the Cuban missile crisis, died Monday at his home in Columbia after a series of falls. He was 91. "He was a waterboy for the Notre Dame football team because he was so skinny," said a daughter, Patricia Davis-Bradford, also of Columbia. "But, oh, what an exciting life he led." In addition to his role monitoring Cuba, Mr. Gleichauf helped gather information on the Hungarian revolution, according to his written accounts in a journal on the CIA Web site and his daughter.

Bah! The problem with "Matinee" is that there's no despair, destruction or death! There's entirely too much simplicity, idealism and glee!Why, this movie actually has the audacity to make you feel good all over on the way out! You don't want to stick up a 7-Eleven, you want to hug your loved ones and coo endearments to your children. It must be stopped!But it won't be. "Matinee" is one of those rare, unifying, movie experiences that cuts across generation groupings to provide a rich and merry experience.

Thirty-six years after President Kennedy revealed to the nation the unfolding Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, the National Security Agency has -- hesitantly and for the first time -- acknowledged the behind-the-scenes spying it did in the months before the showdown.The CIA has long been credited with alerting Kennedy to the buildup of Soviet missiles on Cuba, a militarization that reached a standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union in late October 1962.

Say what you will about John F. Kennedy, but the bottom line is that, were it not for him, you probably wouldn't be reading this newspaper right now. For it was under his watch that the world stood as close to the nuclear brink as it ever should. His refusal to make a rash decision that he simply couldn't embrace is why we still get to talk about nuclear war in the abstract. That's what leadership is all about, and that's the crux of "Thirteen Days," a terrifically engrossing war film in which not a single shot is fired, a movie about shaping events rather than being shaped by them.

Bruce Greenwood has a Baltimore connection he doesn't even remember. From 1986 to 1988, he played the egotistical, self-centered Dr. Seth Griffin on NBC's "St. Elsewhere." And Dr. Griffin was a Hopkins med school grad. "That's really flipping back through the files a long way," Greenwood laughs, regarding his interviewer at Washington's St. Regis Hotel with a look that says, "You've got way too much free time on your hands." Of course, he's too polite to come out and say something so cruel.

Elie Abel, 83, a longtime print and broadcast journalist who later led the school of journalism at Columbia University, died Thursday in Rockville of a stroke and Alzheimer's disease. He was probably best known from his years at NBC, where he worked from 1961 to 1969, appearing regularly on the evening news with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. After serving as State Department correspondent, he was NBC's bureau chief in London from 1965 to 1967 and then returned to Washington as diplomatic correspondent.

The Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959 was a watershed event whose repercussions were felt throughout the Americas. Photojournalist Burt Glinn was celebrating New Year's Eve at a party in New York when, on an inspired hunch, he hopped a plane for Havana and landed early the next day just as Castro's forces were triumphantly marching across the island toward the capital. For the next nine days, Glinn photographed the rebels' progress and the ecstatic crowds that greeted them everywhere along their march.

Twenty years ago this fall, as the Orioles triumphed in the World Series, baby boomers flocked to The Big Chill and radios played Michael Jackson's Thriller, the superpowers drifted obliviously to the brink of nuclear war. That is the disturbing conclusion of a number of historians who have studied the bellicose rhetoric and mutual incomprehension of the United States and the Soviet Union, which then had more than 20,000 nuclear warheads between them....

Justin F. Gleichauf, a former CIA agent who helped monitor Cuba in the years before the Cuban missile crisis, died Monday at his home in Columbia after a series of falls. He was 91. "He was a waterboy for the Notre Dame football team because he was so skinny," said a daughter, Patricia Davis-Bradford, also of Columbia. "But, oh, what an exciting life he led." In addition to his role monitoring Cuba, Mr. Gleichauf helped gather information on the Hungarian revolution, according to his written accounts in a journal on the CIA Web site and his daughter.

Pundits are calling it a Stevenson moment: On Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will address the United Nations Security Council, hoping to persuade its members that war against Iraq is justified. The Stevenson moment occurred Oct. 25, 1962, when Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the Security Council during the Cuban missile crisis, when the world faced the very real prospect of nuclear war. Three days earlier, a somber President John F. Kennedy had addressed the nation, saying spy planes had discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba that could reach the United States.

WASHINGTON - The first thorough examination of President John F. Kennedy's medical records, conducted by an independent presidential historian with a medical consultant, has found that Kennedy suffered from more ailments, was in far greater pain and was taking many more medications than the public knew at the time or biographers have since described. As president, he was famous for having a bad back. Since his death, biographers have pieced together details of other illnesses, including persistent digestive problems and Addison's disease, a life-threatening lack of adrenal function.

As the American government mobilizes to attack Iraq, it's worth comparing the dangers, objectives, means of action and possible results with that other great crisis: the Cuban Missile Crisis 40 years ago this month. Having been a member of the "Crisis Management Committee" on the Missile Crisis and having studied the Middle East for a half-century and helped to design American policy toward it, I suggest the following perspectives: First, how real and how urgent is the danger? In the Missile Crisis, America faced a superpower of roughly its size and strength, run by an experienced, capable and centrally controlled military and civil bureaucracy with a huge and well-equipped armed force that had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Pundits are calling it a Stevenson moment: On Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will address the United Nations Security Council, hoping to persuade its members that war against Iraq is justified. The Stevenson moment occurred Oct. 25, 1962, when Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the Security Council during the Cuban missile crisis, when the world faced the very real prospect of nuclear war. Three days earlier, a somber President John F. Kennedy had addressed the nation, saying spy planes had discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba that could reach the United States.

CHICAGO - The showdown with Iraq coincides with the 40th anniversary of another confrontation that even today has the power to induce chills. The Cuban missile crisis was the one time during the Cold War that the United States and the Soviet Union strode right up to the brink of nuclear holocaust. We are told it holds a valuable lesson for how we approach Saddam Hussein, though not everyone agrees on what the lesson is. Conservatives pay homage to President John F. Kennedy for acting forcefully to eliminate a nuclear threat rather than sitting by while an enemy proceeded to arm for our destruction.

As the American government mobilizes to attack Iraq, it's worth comparing the dangers, objectives, means of action and possible results with that other great crisis: the Cuban Missile Crisis 40 years ago this month. Having been a member of the "Crisis Management Committee" on the Missile Crisis and having studied the Middle East for a half-century and helped to design American policy toward it, I suggest the following perspectives: First, how real and how urgent is the danger? In the Missile Crisis, America faced a superpower of roughly its size and strength, run by an experienced, capable and centrally controlled military and civil bureaucracy with a huge and well-equipped armed force that had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.