MAXIMUM DANGER: KENNEDY, THE MISSILES, AND THE CRISIS OF AMERICAN CONFIDENCE, by Robert Weisbrot, Ivan R. Dee, Publisher; Chicago, 2001, $27.50.

Being the good academic that he is, Robert Weisbrot (American history professor at Colby College) begins his lively history of the 1962 Cuban missile confrontation by defining his thesis and then spending the next 200 or so pages proving it. But don’t be put off; this is not a volume of labored academic prose. It is a well and rigorously documented history, but history reported with a sense of drama and the importance of maintaining the reader’s interest.

First, the professor’s thesis:

“The belief that President Kennedy’s actions during the missile crisis reflected his singular character, judgement and leadership may be the last great myth surrounding this clash of superpowers,” he writes very early on. “For more than three decades writers have variously highlighted Kennedy’s efforts to rid Cuba of Soviet nuclear weapons as a triumph of heroic statesmanship, a near tragic indulgence in machismo, or, increasingly, a mixture of the two. … On closer inspection, however, one finds that Kennedy explored no new policy frontiers, but rather etched a mainstream profile in caution, bounded securely by diplomatic precedent, partisan pressure, and the values of American political culture during the cold war.”

Disarmingly, and much further along, Weisbrot quotes McGeorge Bundy, who acknowledges that “Forests have been felled to print the reflections and conclusions of participants, observers and scholars” on the Cuban missile crisis. So why knock down another several acres of trees for yet another book? Because, as the author reminds us several times, Jack Kennedy was neither inept, charged with bravado, nor anywhere near being ready to march to the brink of nuclear destruction in response to the arrival of Russian nuclear missiles 90 miles from Key West. What provoked Nikita Khrushchev to transport those missiles from the Soviet Union to Cuba is a question asked since 1962, and Weisbrot also takes this opportunity to give us well-reasoned and well-researched answers.

Like Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassinations, each of us who was beyond early childhood at the time will never forget where we were or what we doing when we heard the news. For almost as many of us, the late October day Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the Cuban missiles is also an indelible memory. I, for example, was walking up the steps to the Moulton Union at Bowdoin College when my friend Norman burst out the doors to tell me what he had just seen on television. “Whew,” he exclaimed, “I don’t want us to ever come that close again.”

What he, and so many Americans, had feared was the planet’s first (and probably last) nuclear war. That level of anxiety is not easily forgotten, and one of the pleasures of the professor’s book is being able to be present at the scores of tense discussions in Washington that had to deal with nuclear destruction as a distinct possibility of the decisions that were taken. Putting the reader at those tables as a listener to history’s dialogues and debates is one of this book’s finest virtues. Thanks to long and diligent research (all sources are cited in detail) we hear the spoken words of Jack and Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk, Dean Acheson, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and scores more of each of the principals on the national and international stage in the early 1960s.

Much of this is new material and much of it has never before been so well organized, conversational and therefore eminently readable. Which is what all good history should be, and what so much history is not. We can thank the Colby professor for setting a laudable standard well worth all those missing trees.

Consider this exchange between U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor George McBundy.

“When Bundy asked on Tuesday, Oct. 16, the first day of deliberations, “How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara replied, “Mac, I asked the [Joint] Chiefs that this afternoon, in effect. And they said: ‘Substantially.’ My own personal view is: Not at all.”

Bundy agreed that the Cuban buildup “doesn’t improve anything in the strategic balance.” Which, Weisbrot tells us, was 5,000 U.S. nuclear warheads to 300 for the U.S.S.R. There is, for this reader at least, something quite chilling about these sorts of informal conversations about the fate of our world. Especially when you know the same sorts of dialogues are going every day in Washington even as you read a history of 1962.