The Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 Years Later

Timothy McKeown, Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sheldon Stern, Author of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality and The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis

Host: Craig Cohen

Fifty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and after exhaustive analysis of the events that transpired during a tense 13 day period in the fall of 1962, questions linger about precisely how those events played out. We have the published accounts of many key players, including then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brother of the President, who recounted his experience in the book Thirteen Days. And a narrative has been woven from that and other accounts – one that presents the Kennedy White House and the military alternately working together and – at times – battling one another, as they sought to address the Cuban and Soviet governments’ secret development of nuclear missile bases in Cuba, which could have been used to strike much of the continental U.S.

We’ll review the events of October 1962 with Political Science Professor Timothy McKeown from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Sheldon Stern, author of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality.