Soviet documents that were revealed after the USSR imploded show how this all went down – and how we all would have "gone down," literally, were it not for the statesmanlike behavior of both leaders and their acute realization of the stakes involved.

Some of what I include below is drawn from a book by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali that is based on those documents. They called it One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book is one hell of a book. US officials now dealing with the war in Ukraine would profit immensely by reading chapters 12 to 14.

On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy:

"I thank you for the sense of proportion you have displayed. … The Soviet Government has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you describe as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union."

And so, we all got to live another 60 years – so far. The authors of One Hell of a Gamble, called particular attention to one exceedingly important fact; namely, that most of Khrushchev's advisers had had personal experience of war – WWII, which left 26,000,000 Soviets dead. Neither Joe Biden (5 deferments during Vietnam), national security adviser Jake Sullivan, nor Secretary of State Antony Blinken have had such experience.