One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

In Moscow, the official government newspaper Izvestia was rolling off the presses. The editors had remade the front page at the last moment to include Khrushchev’s latest message to Kennedy acknowledging the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and offering to withdraw them, if the United States withdrew its missiles from Turkey. “Keeping the peace is the main goal of the government of the USSR,” the newspaper declared. Unfortunately for Izvestia’s credibility, there was nothing to be done about the commentary on page two, which had gone to press many hours in advance. The writer accused the United States of concocting stories about Soviet missile bases in Cuba. He poured scorn on the notion of a Turkey-Cuba missile swap as a cynical public relations initiative by the “Pentagon propaganda machine.”

Ha