JACK BE NIMBLE : THE CRISIS YEARS: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, <i> By Michael R. Beschloss (Edward Burlingame Books/HarperCollins: $29.95; 816 pp.)</i>

The legend of John F. Kennedy is one of glamour, grace and cool mastery: the glamour of Camelot, the grace of his encounters with press and public, the mastery of the Cuban missile crisis. It is all suffused in a warm glow of sentiment and nostalgia. The reality, however, as it is reconstructed in this impressively researched and engrossingly narrated study of Kennedy’s foreign policy, is both more complex and more troubling. Here we see an appealing but duplicitous man in full command neither of himself nor of events, one who provoked some of the confrontations he was obliged to resolve, and whose foreign policy sometimes reflected his domestic political needs. The Kennedy we see here is obsessed by sexual promiscuity, by Castro’s Cuba, by the need to convey resolve, by posturing and image-making. He came into office on a tide of martial drum beating, warning of a nonexistent “missile gap” and telling his countrymen that they faced the “hour of maximum danger.” Under him the military budget was dramatically increased; American and Soviet tanks faced off nose-to-nose on the streets of Berlin; children were taught to hide under their desks during air-raid drills; families were urged to build backyard bomb shelters, and the nation was marched to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba to show its resolve. Yet under him, too, the Cold War took a more hopeful turn with the signing of the partial nuclear test-ban treaty.

These were indeed “The Crisis Years” as Michael Beschloss fittingly entitles this very long and detailed, but balanced and absorbing reconstruction of Kennedy’s diplomacy. Since Kennedy himself was little concerned with domestic policy (“Who gives a shit about the minimum wage?” he once privately asked), the focus is on foreign issues and particularly on the highly personalized contest with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Unearthing a wealth of newly declassified material and employing extensive interviews and research, Beschloss has made a major contribution to our understanding of the Kennedy presidency. Even better, he has put it in the form of a page-turning narrative that is both dramatically gripping and intellectually engaging.

This study makes strikingly clear the way in which two issues dominated the U.S.-Soviet contest during this period: Berlin and Cuba. Now that the Wall is gone, it is strange to reflect that the periodic Berlin crises of the late 1950s and early 1960 more than once threatened to go out of control. Khrushchev was determined to stabilize the East German state through a long-deferred peace treaty that would reduce Allied occupation rights in Berlin. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his disastrous encounter with Khrushchev at Vienna, dramatically called for a large military buildup--including a civilian fall-out-shelter program--”to show the Chairman that he was not a pushover.” Beschloss gives Kennedy no points for this ploy, suggesting that his “insistence that Khrushchev simply like or lump the existing Berlin situation left the Chairman with few choices other than to ignite a major confrontation.” Though Kennedy made it clear to the Soviets that the Allies could not be driven from West Berlin, he knew that he could not also prevent them from sealing off East Berlin. Indeed the Wall offered a useful solution to the Berlin problem and ended the incessant crisis over that city. Where Beschloss faults Kennedy is not on the Wall issue, but on contriving a sense of alarm that allowed him to push through a military buildup that would have been unnecessary had he handled the situation better at the beginning.

Kennedy clearly had a fascination with danger. This is apparent in his relationships with women--particularly his affairs with a suspected Nazi spy and a Mafia moll. In these liaisons, which continued in the White House, he displayed a recklessness that seems to suggest a desire to be discovered. J. Edgar Hoover of course knew of these adulteries and used this knowledge to protect his own hold over the FBI. Kennedy’s Mafia connection, through his mistress, Judith Campbell Exner, linked him directly with the underworld figures employed by the CIA and the secret operation to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Cuba was, of course, an obsession of the Kennedy Administration. Even today it is not entirely clear why getting rid of Castro was, in Robert Kennedy’s words, “the top priority in the U.S. government.” The Kennedys seemed to take the Cuban dictator as a personal affront. Their efforts to destroy him included not only a Mafia-CIA assassination plot but also the far-flung Operation Mongoose program in which sabotage was conducted with 3,000 Cuban exiles secretly operating under CIA direction.

In the face of this operation, Khrushchev, Beschloss argues persuasively, “considered it almost certain that the U.S. would launch a full-fledged invasion of Cuba.” Here, of course, is where Cuba and the missile crisis come together. The Soviet leader, humiliated by Kennedy’s earlier revelation of Soviet missile inferiority, and alarmed by intimations that the United States might launch a surprise nuclear attack, was emboldened to do something drastic to restore Soviet prestige and his own. A risk-taker, like Kennedy, he recklessly decided to deal ith two problems by one master stroke. Deploying Soviet missiles in Cuba would defend the island from attack and help redress overwhelming U.S. nuclear superiority.

Beschloss emphasizes Kennedy’s own responsibility for the missile crisis by failing to warn Khrushchev in the early spring (before the Soviet decision was made) against putting missiles on the island and by failing to alleviate Soviet convictions that the United States was planning a full-scale invasion. He had “almost no understanding of the extent to which his allusions to American nuclear superiority and a possible first strike had made Khrushchev feel trapped and deeply insecure,” Beschloss states. “As with Berlin, Kennedy proved himself better able to manage the missile crisis than to avoid it.”

Drawing on newly released material, including transcripts of Kennedy’s secret tapes (he, too, bugged the Oval Office), Beschloss effectively re-creates the harrowing 13 days when the United States and Soviet Union faced the real risk of an uncontrolled escalation to nuclear war. He makes a convincing case that Kennedy locked himself into this deadly confrontation by his own carelessness and loose rhetoric, that he was not, despite the perception of some admirers, always superbly in command, and that his alarming speech announcing the discovery of the Soviet missiles was “designed to divert attention from his private belief that the missiles did not seriously increase the Soviet military danger and the fact that he had not warned Khrushchev against them until it was too late.”

During his lifetime, Kennedy was spared careful scrutiny of the missile crisis. It won him a tremendous victory in the court of public opinion as a firm and judicious leader. The close encounter with war helped prepare the ground for the partial nuclear test-ban treaty and for Kennedy’s own willingness a year later to call for a re-examination of Cold War attitudes. But the missile crisis also served to undermine Khrushchev’s position in the Kremlin and to stimulate a huge missile-building drive so that Soviet generals would never again be in a position of such humiliating inferiority.

Beschloss’s study is invaluable to historians and fascinating to a general reader. The book would be even better had it benefited from an editor’s judicious pencil. If it were 200 pages shorter the argument would have been tighter and stronger. Also the notes (on which the author must be commended for their impressive thoroughness) would be easier to decipher were they numbered. This aside, “The Crisis Years” gives us a new understanding of both John F. Kennedy and the most dangerous time of the Cold War.