Tsar

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The end of the world was in plain sight. Missiles sprouted in the cane fields of Cuba, American and Soviet battleships squared off in the South Atlantic. America’s young president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had had himself one hell of a week.

The Kremlin’s angry salvos continued night and day, as events spun rapidly out of control. Bellicose communiqués volleyed and thundered between Moscow and Washington; frayed nerves snapped and sizzled like live wires at either end. Diplomacy was long past the tipping point, and the old, tried-and-true Cold War rules of engagement no longer applied.

There were no rules, none at all, not now. Not since Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev had started declaring “We will bury you!” to Western ambassadors and banging his shoe on the table at the UN. And certainly not since Castro’s imported Russian ICBMs had been discovered ninety miles from Miami.

The once rock-solid fortress of Camelot, the cherished, peaceful realm of the handsome young king and his beautiful queen, Jacqueline, had begun to crumble and crack. And through that ever-widening fissure, Jack Kennedy knew, lay a doorway straight to hell.

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