Tempers of the Moment

About the Book

The year 1962 brought the world closer to a nuclear war than ever before. President John Kennedy and the Premier Nikita Khrushchev faced off over the Soviet Union’s right to station nuclear missiles in Cuba. For the first time, there were nuclear missiles in the Western Hemisphere that did not belong to the United States; in fact, they were 90 miles off the coast of Florida and the entire continental U. S. was within range. Finding this change in the status quo unacceptable, Kennedy enforced a naval blockade of Cuba preventing additional missiles from reaching the Caribbean nation. But, this did not deal with the missiles that were already in Cuba that were rapidly approaching operational status. This is where the crisis management skills off both leaders were tested and as both countries seemed destined for the first superpower war, an agreement was reached and tensions were eases.

When it was released in 1968, Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days provided unique insight into how President Kennedy and his administration handled the Cuban missile crisis. It was a text of great historical significance and it added to the Camelot legacy as the two Kennedy brothers worked to save the world. But as the Cold War ended and scores of classified documents from both the United States and the Soviet Union were released, the real story behind the crisis was revealed. Every teacher of American history, whether in high school or college, will do a unit on the Cuban missile crisis and most of them will use Thirteen Days; but, as scholarly texts have emerged within the last few years, teachers all over the country are realizing that Kennedy’s memoir is insufficient in explaining both sides of the crisis in accurate detail.

Tempers of the Moment tells the real story behind the Cuban missile crisis, using the most recent declassified information from both Soviet and American sources. Tempers of the Moment takes the intimate details from Thirteen Days, data and insight from the most recent research from the Soviet Union, and the best information provided in the Kennedy Tapes to tell the story of two countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, two men (Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy) and the back channels that they used to get their two countries out of the most dangerous superpower crisis the world has seen.

About the Author

Andrew Carter was born in Louisville, Kentucky and, as a child he spent most of his free time hanging around his father’s college football teams. Besides for his love of football, he also inherited from his father a love of American History. The defining moment in his prep school education was when he read Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days and found out, during class the next day that Kennedy’s portrayal of the crisis was not entirely accurate. His parents emphasized the importance of both athletics and academics and subsequently, he chose a college where he could pursue both interests equally. His adult life has been a combination of these two passions–he coaches football at the college level and writes on American history in his free time. He is single and currently resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.