One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

Nuclear apocalypse was as mundane as delivering pizza.

As Khrushchev saw it, “We are not struggling against imperialism in order to die” but to achieve the long-term “victory of communism.” To be Red and dead was to miss the point.

In order to save his revolution, Fidel was willing to make the supreme sacrifice: he would swallow his pride.

Convinced of America’s unchallengeable military superiority, Rumsfeld had little patience with the notion that everything can be screwed up by “some sonofabitch.”

In his own mind, Castro won a great victory over the yanqui enemy merely by remaining in power for so long. In reality, he transformed the most prosperous island in the Caribbean into a defeated, impoverished country stuck in a fifties time warp.

JFK’s great virtue, and the essential difference between him and George W. Bush, was that he had an instinctive appreciation for the chaotic forces of history.