One of Kennedy’s favorite passages was a scene in which two German statesmen are analyzing the reasons for the most destructive military confrontation up until that time. “How did it all happen?” the younger man wanted to know. “Ah, if only one knew.” As Kennedy tried to imagine a war with the Soviet Union over the missiles in Cuba, one thought kept returning to trouble him. He imagined a planet ravaged by “fire, poison, chaos, and catastrophe.” Whatever else he did as president of the United States, he was determined to avoid an outcome in which one survivor of a nuclear war asked another,
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