Recounts Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America against the backdrop of the Cold War and a capitalist America living under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb.

Oct. 1962, for thirteen extraordinary days the world stood on the brink of destruction. Krushchev wouldn't back down, President Kennedy wouldn't give in. Inspired by the real-life events that took place in the Kennedy White House.

On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba. Conventional wisdom has marked that day as the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a seminal moment in American history. As President Kennedy's secretly recorded White House tapes now reveal, the reality was not so simple. Nuclear missiles were still in Cuba, as were nuclear bombers, short-range missiles, and thousands of Soviet troops. From October 29, Kennedy had to walk a very fine line--push hard enough to get as much nuclear weaponry out of Cuba as possible, yet avoid forcing the volatile Khrushchev into a combative stance. On the domestic front, an election loomed and the press was bristling at White House "news management." Using new material from the tapes, historian David G. Coleman puts readers in the Oval Office during one of the most highly charged, and in the end most highly regarded, moments in American history.--From publisher description.

"High Noon in the Cold War captures the Cuban Missile Crisis in a new light, from inside the hearts and minds of the famous men who provoked and, in the nick of time, resolved the confrontation." "Using his personal memories of covering the conflict, and gathering evidence from recent records and new scholarship and testimony, Max Frankel corrects widely held misconceptions about the game of "nuclear chicken" played by John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962, when Soviet missiles were secretly planted in Cuba and aimed at the United States." "High Noon in the Cold War portrays an embattled young American president - not jaunty and callow as widely believed, but increasingly calm and statesmanlike - and a Russian ruler who was not only a "wily old peasant" but an insecure belligerent desperate to achieve credibility. Here, too, are forgotten heroes like John McCone, the conservative Republican CIA head whose intuition made him a crucial figure in White House debates." "In detailing the disastrous miscalculations of the two superpowers (the United States thought the Soviets would never deploy missiles to Cuba; the Soviets thought the United States would have to acquiesce) and how Kennedy and Khrushchev beat back hotheads in their own councils, this book chronicles the whole story of the scariest encounter of the Cold War."--Jacket.