Word: beschloss
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...Michael R. Beschloss...
...Gorbachev panhandles the U.S. and McDonald's draws longer lines in Moscow than Lenin's tomb, it is difficult to believe that less than three decades ago, Washington and Moscow were on the steely edge of war. The drama and tension of those years are vividly recaptured in Michael Beschloss's The Crisis Years. But this is no simple rehash of John Kennedy's sparring with Nikita Khrushchev. Beschloss casts new light on topics ranging from the Cuban missile crisis to the security risks of J.F.K.'s sexual dalliances...
Disastrous economic conditions in East Germany were propelling thousands of refugees a day into West Berlin, so Khrushchev decided to let East German Communist Party chief Walter Ulbricht build the Wall. Beschloss provides convincing new evidence that Kennedy recognized that erecting a wall through the city was the only way to prevent a collapse of East Germany and never seriously considered armed intervention over that issue. Nonetheless, in Beschloss's judgment, the U.S. was never closer to war with the U.S.S.R. than throughout the Berlin crisis...
Despite their cliffhanging confrontations, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were faithful pen pals. The Crisis Years (HarperCollins), a new book on the Kennedy Administration by historian Michael Beschloss, discloses the contents of 80 secret messages between the U.S. and Soviet leaders on subjects ranging from the Berlin Wall to Vietnam. In his research, Beschloss discovered why the correspondence came to an abrupt end six weeks before Kennedy's death: because of a bureaucratic misunderstanding, the State Department failed to send a crucial Kennedy response to Khrushchev's peace proposals...
...elaborate White House taping system. Secret Service agents put microphones in the mansion's library, presidential bedroom telephone, Oval Office and Cabinet Room. The author provides excerpts from now public transcripts of meetings during the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy's tentative behavior on the tapes of initial meetings, writes Beschloss, does "not quite bear out later claims . . . that this was a President superbly in command of the crisis from the start...