One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

Although Khrushchev initially preferred the Democrat Kennedy to the Republican Eisenhower, he had come to regard the two presidents as made from “the same shit.”

If he had learned anything from his exhaustive study of revolutionary movements and his own experiences as a revolutionary, it was that it was suicidal to wait for the enemy to attack. From the capture of the Bastille onward, fortune had always favored the bold. “A force that remains in its barracks is lost,” Castro had concluded, after witnessing the failure of an antigovernment insurrection

After a lifetime of excitement, he was reminded of a line in a book by André Malraux, quoting a disillusioned revolutionary: “When you have only one life, you should not try too hard to change the world.”

“Berlin is the testicles of the West,” Nikita Khrushchev liked to say. “Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”