One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war by Michael Dobbs

Sagua la Grande.
    A tall, imposing man, Sidorov wasted no time making clear who was in charge. "Just remember one thing," the colonel would tell new arrivals in his welcome speech, his hands sweating profusely in the intense Cuban heat. "I am the commander of the regiment. That means I am the representative of Soviet power--the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and the judge, all in one person. So get to work."
    SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2:30 P.M.
    JFK was on the second day of a long-scheduled campaign trip through the Midwest. Seeking to deflect attention from the international crisis brewing behind the scenes, he had been making a brave show of keeping his public engagements when he received a call from Bobby: he was needed in Washington. His brother urged him to return to the White House to settle a deadlock among his advisers. The time for decision had arrived.
    The reporters were climbing aboard buses outside the Hotel Sheraton-Blackstone in Chicago to take them to the next political meeting when they heard that the event had been canceled. "The president has a cold and is returning to Washington," White House press secretary Pierre Salinger announced without further explanation.
    Once they were aboard Air Force One, Salinger asked the president what was really going on. Kennedy did not want to tell him. Not just yet anyway. Instead, he teased him. "The minute you get back in Washington, you are going to find out what it is. And when you do, grab your balls."
    After four days of agonized debate, the options had boiled down to two: air strike or blockade. Each course of action had its advantages and disadvantages. A surprise air strike would greatly reduce the immediate threat from Cuba. On the other hand, it might not be 100 percent effective and could provoke Khrushchev into firing the remaining missiles or taking action elsewhere. The eight hundred individual sorties planned by the Pentagon might result in such chaos in Cuba that an invasion would become inevitable. A blockade would open the way for negotiations, but might give the Soviets an opportunity to prevaricate while they hurriedly completed work on the missile sites.
    The air strike option was known as the "Bundy plan" after its principal author, who was supported by the uniformed military. CIA director McCone and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon also favored air strikes, but wanted to give the Soviets a seventy-two-hour ultimatum to remove the missiles before beginning the bombing. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson, and presidential speechwriter Theodore Sorensen all supported a blockade. Bobby had belatedly come round to the blockade option, but feared this might be "the last chance we will have to destroy Castro and the Soviet missiles on Cuba."
    "Gentlemen, today we're going to earn our pay," said Kennedy, as he joined his advisers in his private Oval Sitting Room on the second floor of the executive mansion. "You should all hope that your plan isn't the one that will be accepted."
    For the last couple of days, two rival drafts had been circulating within the White House of a presidential address to the nation announcing the discovery of Soviet missiles. One of the two drafts--the "air attack" speech presented to the president by Bundy--would remain locked away in the files for four decades:
     
My fellow Americans:
With a heavy heart, and in necessary fulfillment of my oath of office, I have ordered--and the United States Air Force has now carried out--military operations, with conventional weapons only, to remove a major nuclear weapons build-up from the soil of Cuba.... Every other course of action involved risk of delay and of obfuscation which were wholly unacceptable--and with no prospect of real progress in removing this intolerable communist nuclear intrusion into the Americas.... Prolonged delay would have meant enormously increased danger, and immediate warning would have greatly enlarged the