(In one of history’s greatest “what if?” moments, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president’s senior circle of military advisors unanimously recommended bombing Cuba, and Kennedy might well have followed their counsel if he hadn’t recently read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book about the events that led up to World War I. Kennedy became convinced that launching air strikes would provoke a Soviet response and cause a domino effect resulting in another world war.
