One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

Nor was the day-to-day diplomacy as “brilliantly controlled” as the Kennedy camp would have us believe. In their desire to claim credit for Khrushchev’s sudden about-face on the morning of Sunday, October 28, Kennedy aides came up with the notion of the “Trollope ploy” to describe the American diplomatic strategy on Black Saturday. The gambit was named after a recurring scene in novels by Anthony Trollope, in which a lovesick Victorian maiden chooses to interpret an innocent squeeze on the hand as an offer of marriage. By this account, accepted for many years by missile crisis scholars, it was Bobby who came up with the idea of the ploy. He suggested that his brother simply ignore Khrushchev’s call on Saturday morning for a Turkey-Cuba missile swap and instead accept his ambiguously worded offer of Friday night to dismantle the missile sites in return for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba. It was, wrote Schlesinger, “a thought of breathtaking ingenuity and simplicity.”