THE FOURTEENTH DAY

A fly-on-the-wall narrative of the Oval Office in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using JFK’s secret White House tapes.

On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba. Popular history 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. David Coleman has been working with and writing about secret White House tapes for 13 years. He directs the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. He's an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and teaches classes in the History Department on American political history, Cold War history, and nuclear history. Coleman has published widely on U.S. politics, nuclear strategy, and the Cold War. His most recent book is Real-World Nuclear Deterrence: The Making of International Strategy (2006), co-authored with Joseph M. Siracusa. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Cold War Studies, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He has been interviewed by, appeared on, or been quoted by many media outlets, including NPR, Time Magazine, the History Channel, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC Radio, Reuters TV, CTV, WTOP Radio, and C-Span's Washington Journal.