In 1961, President John F. Kennedy inherited an ill-conceived, poorly executed invasion of Cuba that failed miserably and set in motion the events that put the U.S. and the Soviet Union on a collision course that nearly started a war that would have enveloped much of the world. Newt talks with best-selling author Jeff Shaara about his new book, "The Shadow of War," which focuses on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Shaara explains his approach to writing historical novels, emphasizing the importance of character development and extensive research. He also discusses the potential consequences of a nuclear war, highlighting the devastating impact it could have on all of civilization.
On this episode of Newts World. In nineteen sixty one, the new President John F. Kennedy inherited an ill conceived, poorly executed invasion of Cuba that failed miserably and set in motion the events that put the US and the Sivie Union on a collision course that nearly started a war that would have enveloped and destroyed much of the world. In his new book The Shadow of War, a novel of the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York Times bestselling author Jeff Sherah brings to life the many threads that lead to the building crisis between the Soviet Union and the United States, from the Russian engineer with the near impossible task of building the missilane facilities, to the US Navy commanders whose ships are sent to quarantine Cuba, to the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, desperately trying to maintain a balancing act between the conflicting demands of powerful forces. To the Kennedy brothers, Bobby and JFK who can't allow Russia to put nuclear missiles in Cuba or appear weak in confronting Krushchev, but keenly understand how close they are dancing to the Edge of War here to discuss his new book. I am really pleased to welcome my guest, Jeff Sheriff. He is the award winning New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly best selling author of seventeen novels, including Rise to Rebellion and The Rising Tide, as well as Gods in Generals and The Last Full Measure. Jeff, welcome and thank you for joining me on Newtsworld.
It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Before we get into the book, I want to ask one general question you've brilliantly covered his Hols series. Was what led you to become such a focused novelist and in many ways to capture the chronology the stories that really become a remarkable introduction to American history just by reading the sequencing of your books. What led you to do that?
Well, it started with my father has started with a book called The Killer Angels, which a lot of people are familiar with. It's a book that is fifty years old this year. It's the story of the Battle of Gettysburg. What The Killer Angels is not is the history of the Battle of Gettysburg. It's a story told from four different points of view, so it's a novel by definition. The book won a Pulitzerprise. It was never successful in my father's lifetime. It's enormously successful now. But that template what he invented with the idea of moving you through the timeline through the points of view of different characters. I mean, nobody had ever done that before because he's putting you in the heads of real people and significant real people Robert E. Lee and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and so forth, and saw on that you better get it right because people care about these characters. But he took that chance. It worked, and you know, because he died early. He died young, he was only fifty nine. I sort of stepped into that and really had no idea how this would turn out. But I think more than the event, it's not just about war. I mean, I'm not a war author. I've tried to actually move away from that a little bit. It's about the characters. It's about the people and when you find interesting characters. I mean, I went back after doing Civil War, I went back to the American Revolution having no idea. Am I going to find interesting people? Is this going to be a subject that's going to be fun to write, and it was. I mean, you start talking about Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and you know, Charles Cornwallace on the other side, You've got a story there. And that's what draws me to every book I've done, is I look for the characters first. Who's going to tell this story? Who will you be interested in so you'll want to read the book. That's carried me through every book to this point.
How much research does that take?
Oh enormous. The research is the greater part of it. I mean, as I've said many times, when you're putting words in the mouths of significant historical characters, they better be the right words, because you can't say, oh, I don't want to hear oh, Dwight eisenhowerd never would have said that. George Washington never would have said that that's what I hear. That means I'm not doing my job. So the research, it actually takes more time to research the book than it does to write it than it does to write the manuscript.
Your new book, The Shadow of War, is about the Cuban missile crisis, and you know there's recently been news about a group of Russian Navy ships, including a nuclear powered submarine, arriving in Cuba. Given the background of this book, what did you make of that?
It's not a good thing. I know that I try to look at it from both points of view, from the Kennedy brothers and the American Navy officer and so forth to the other side. I've got krus Jeff's memoirs where he talks about all of this stuff, and when you look at it from both sides, you realize that these are all human beings. We were taught when I was a kid. Khrushcheff is the bad guy. He's evil, He's really not. He's a grandfather, he's got a son. He's just looking out for what he thinks is the best thing he can do for the Soviet Union. Now, what's happening today. I don't know that we can say that. Maybe in hindsight, years down the road, we can look back and say, well, you know, Putin's doing the right thing, or Putin's doing what he needs to do. It's kind of hard to think that way right now. All it is now is frightening.
When you look at all this, I think it's fascinating. That Kennedy arrives brand new young president, and the CIA had been given permission by Eisenhower to develop a program to liberate Cuba, partly based on a complete misunderstanding of where the Cuban people were, and that they had this expectation. The anti Castrow people who had fled to Miami were by definition convinced that Castro was evil and that therefore the Cuban people would want to throw him out. In a way, the CIA was developing a project which required the United States to provide air superiority and offshore naval gunfire, and required the Cuban people would actually rise up in rebellion when they saw the opportunity. Describe how wrong that was.
It is probably the biggest comedy of errors, unfortunate errors in our history. One of the things that the CIA does they act very territorial about it. This is their plan and they don't want anybody interfering, especially the US military. So the military could have provided them with all kinds of information, logistics power. I mean, they could have done all sorts of things. But the CIA just was so secretive that when they went into this, it was like having one hand tied behind their back. They just completely fell on their face. And you've got fourteen hundred Cuban immigrats who make the invasion into the Bay of Pigs, and I think eleven hundred of them are captured, some of them are killed, some of few escape, But I mean it's about as big a disaster for the US prestige. Because this is where the phrase plausible deniability comes from. You know, Kennedy is told by the CIA that if anything happens, don't worry about it, because there's so many layers of secrecy that he won't be blamed for any of this. The United States won't be blamed, will have plausible deniability. It doesn't work, and so Kennedy has to sort of grovel a little bit before the press on the media and say, look, you know, this was my fault. He's not happy about that leads to a lot of things after that.
Part of it is that he sort of eliminates to senior leadership with the CIA h immediately.
Oh yes, he actually makes the point was a quote in the book where he makes a point that he wants to go over to the CIA office with a board with a two x four and wreck the place. Yea he's not happy, and.
This is part of the very beginning of his administration. And then he ends up meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna and Kennedy tries to be reasonable and Khrushcheff interprets that as weakness.
Well, and Krushcheff also treats him like a little boy. Khrushcheff has very little respect for Kennedy because, first of all, the only thing he knows about Kennedy is the bay of pigs, the problem. So Khrushcheff and he's sort of the old man here and he's the one in the cat bird seat. So he dictates to Kennedy how this meeting is going to go. Kennedy's got all these grand ideas about how he's going to go there and talk about principles and ideals and all this stuff, and Khushief wants nothing to do with that. And so Kennedy feels pretty much like he's been tacked on the head like a little boy when he goes home, and he's embarrassed by that. It's not a positive experience to Kennedy, certainly, But at.
The same time, I always thought it was very striking that he had the self awareness to admit to himself that he had failed.
Oh. Absolutely, I mean, I think his ego doesn't get in the way. And when he comes home from Vienna, he very much is aware that he needs to beef up, he needs to strengthen up, that he is the new kid on the block, and he doesn't know all of the ins and outs of FIGN diplomacy and so forth, and he needs to get better at it. And a year later he does get better at it.
One of the things that's very striking in your book is the central role that Bobby Kennedy plays. You really make clear that they're almost inseparable, and that President Kennedy relies on his brother far more than anybody else.
Well, it's logical that after Bay of Pigs and after the CIA lets him down and he doesn't know who he can trust, that the one person that JFK can trust more than anybody in the world is his brother, and he takes full advantage of that. I used Bobby Kennedy as the point of view when we're dealing with the ExCom, the committee that JFK has to sort of analyze what's going on. I use Bobby because I thought, rather than being inside the JFK's head, which is complicated. There's a lot of things going on with him that make it tough to use him as a character. But Bobby's dealing with civil rights. I mean, he's the attorney general, you know, so he's got other things going on, and I wanted to give that perspective on the time we're talking about that there's a lot more happening here than just human missile crisis.
You get a sense of how much this absorbs the two of them as the crisis builds and reshapes their entire schedule and their entire focus in a way that's really remarkable.
I don't know how this would have turned out if they didn't have each other. They needed each other. And you have Bobby's take on some of the people advising the president, and that takes and sometimes conflicts with what's happening with the president. But that insight is incredibly important to JFK. He needs that other pair of eyes and the other pair of ears listening to what's happening. The other thing too. The xcom meetings, which are about fifteen guys typically, and it varies, the number varies, but they meet once a day, twice a day as the crisis gets worse, and Bobby's there. Bobby's in the middle of that. JFK is not. He purposely stays away from most of the ExCom meetings because he doesn't want to be the intimidating force. He doesn't want to be the guy who makes all the decisions sitting right they are looking at you. He wants to know everybody's point of view, So he's got Bobby sort of paying attention to that.
Who actually ran the meetings.
Most of the time it was Dean Rusk, I mean, his Secretary of State occasionally and I don't know of any time that Rusk wasn't there, But occasionally it's Robert McNamara. So it sort of makes sense. These are the senior members of the cabinet and they pretty much take charge of that.
I was impressed as a Georgian that you sort of resurrect Dean rush and somebody who's really worth respecting and who really, in his own quiet, methodical way, delivered in some very important ways.
Well. I think what has happened to Dean Rusk over the years is because as you say, he's quiet and methodical, people mistake that for being sort of a zero. I mean for just not doing anything, for having no point of view, no strength, That is not the case. He's a very important figure and actually as a Secretary of State, he's exactly what you want for a Secretary of State. You want somebody who can have intelligent conversations without streaming and yelling anywhere in the world, and I mean that definitely applies to us.
You capture a one point in here, the reach of the State Department when it's really working, and the number of countries that can touch, the amount of can get done, which it doesn't do often, but when it does is pretty dark impressive.
Well, you've got the Organization of American States, which is Latin America, and it's really important for us to get Latin America to back us up to approve what we're doing. And it's Rusk who goes and gives them a talk, sits down with the meeting of I think there's twenty one of them all together, and gets the votes. You know that he needs to approve what we're doing so that he can go to the UN and say the OAS is behind us, which is critically important. So I mean, there's a good example of what Rusk did and did well.
Why do you think Khrushchev decided on a gamble on this scale.
I think there's a scene in the book where Khrushchev's walking with his wife. She's not his wife, they're not married, but they've been together for forty years. But he's walking through his vacation home on the Black Sea, and they're just strolling along the edge of the water and he stops and he looks out across the sea and he says, you realize, over there it's Turkey, and right now there are missiles over there aimed at me. And he says, it's perfectly reasonable to the Russians that they put missiles in Cuba and return the favor, you know, and why not. I mean, it's hard to argue that that's a bad idea, but of course the Kennedy's are in a situation where they have to argue it's a bad idea. As you said before, to show strength.
This is very hypothetical, and you are judgment how would the world have been different if the US had allowed the missiles to be in Cuba.
The problem with allowing that is all it takes. And this is true on our side too. All it takes is one hothead. All it takes is the wrong guy who takes power. Unlike the United States, where we have elections every four years, in Russia, it's nothing like that. It's always a power struggle. Khrushcheff comes to power when Stalin dies because he's the most powerful guy who can garner all of that behind him. But when Krushchef is gone, who comes next? We don't know. We have no idea. The Russians don't know, and so the fear is that you get a guy who is bluster and who is a little more aggressive and maybe listens to the hawks that are in the Kremlin, because there's one in this story who wants Khrushchef pushing him. Launch the missiles. Let's go. And we have one on our side, Curtis la May and the Air Force secretary who's telling Kennedy launch the missiles. We don't need that, you know, we don't need that kind of a voice. But how do we know what's going to happen. The other variable is Castro. Who knows what Castro's going to do. The Russians can't stand him. They learn very quickly that Castro can't keep his mouth shut. You know, he shoots his mouth off about what's happening in Cuba. The Spanish language newspapers in Miami. You're picking this up, going on, what do you know about this? There's a lot of variables, and I'd like to think the world has a certain amount of sanity. Maybe this is showing, you know, it's potential that it doesn't.
One of the most important sub stories is that the Russians had decided that Bobby Kennedy could in fact be a back door to the president, and so you have a very serious effort by the Russians to reach out to Bobby and the community kate back and forth through Bobby. You capture this very very well, but it's really one of those amazing moments where if that had not worked, we might have drifted much closer to war.
Oh definitely. What Bobby Kennedy does, he's sort of no nonsense in the way he speaks, but he also understands diplomacy. He understands what you can say and if you say this, it means one thing. If you say that, it means something else. So he knows how to be cagy with the Russian ambassador. There's a Russian spy who this is all true, A Russian spy who makes contact with him as a back door to see sort of unofficially, can we talk about this in a whole different way than what JFK can do. To me, that's the most fun part of the story is to see how that negotiation played out, because it diffused the entire crisis.
You have one scene there that had never heard of, and that's where the Russian submarine commander is seriously considering using a nuclear torpedo and is ordered not to buy his flatilla commander. But it's a very tense scene. I candidly did not know that happened.
Yeah, I love that scene, and I heard about that a few years ago, and then it was like, you blow it off because it sounds too apocryphal. It sounds like that's just a little too much Hollywood there, But in fact it's true. And the commodore on the submarine with him, they're three senior officers on the submarine. All three of them have to agree before you can launch. The reason the captain wants to launch, he's not just a hotthead. They're trying to reach their home base on the radio and they get no response, and they keep trying and they get no response, and the captain convinces himself the war has started. The reason we're not hearing from them, they're gone. So that's what he makes the decision. But of course the cooler head on the ship, the commodore, says, you don't know that it's possible. If you launch on nuclear torpedo, you're going to start the war, going to start the war. We're trying to make sure it doesn't happen, and he refuses to let the captain launch the torpedo. Now, in all of this, that may be the biggest what if. What if he had launched because of what he would have done is taken out two or three American shifts at one time and started the war. That's all there is to it. So that's probably as close as we can.
Did that show up in somebody's memoir? How did that leak out?
I think the commodore himself wrote his own take on it, but it's in several comprehensive histories and some of the memoirs from that. Most of what I read in these kinds of stories are memoirs, the accounts of the people who were there, It does me very little good to read, for example, a modern biography, because you get the biographers take. I need to hear the voices. I need to get back to the character that.
One sequence was worth the entire book because I had never heard about it. And you're exactly right. If they commandant had voted the other way, they would have started a war. Now, how certain are you that had the war started, it would have gone nuclear? If the war had started, let's say that they had fired a nuclear torpedo and taken out two or three American destroyers, how certain are you that that would have escalated into a genuine nuclear exchange.
I don't think it would have been avoidable, because, first of all, the voices that are already pushing JFK to engage to start this war would have just gotten that much louder. Castro on the other side would have probably had the same exact situation. I don't think you have to respond. You have to respond in kind, or you look weak, you look helpless. That everybody on the xcom would have realized we're in it, this is it, and hopefully we're all going to survive.
You don't dig into it directly, although you create an environment for smart people to think about it. But it does strike me that all of us are living in a remarkably fragile world in which more and more countries are getting more and more nuclear weapons, and that almost nobody thinks seriously enough, how truly civilization ending such an exchange would be.
Oh, I think civilization ending is probably understating it. I think the idea of a winnable nuclear war which was floated by the Joint chiefs back then, and they actually said this is amazing. They said, well, we'll lose twenty to forty million people, but if we obliterate the enemy, then we've won the war. I mean, where that logic comes from. I have no idea, and I can't imagine anybody today is thinking that, because, as you say, there are a lot more countries and a lot more nuclear weapons around than there were before. And the frightening thing to me, I'm not as scared of somebody like Putin as I am somebody in Iran or Pakistan or someplace like that, or even Israel for that matter, who decides to solve their problems by eliminating their enemy completely. What does Washington do if Pakistan launches a nuclear missile against India. I don't know, I mean, does anybody know. I'm sure somebody's talk about it, or in.
North Korea against South Korea.
Exactly.
One last thing about this book, and I want to talk briefly about your other works, which are amazing. There's a certain deliciousness that I can use that word to the fact that the college teacher in the book is really modeled on your father, and the young boy is really modeled on you. Can you talk to us a minute about because in that sense, this becomes a very personal book about a thing you lived through.
Yeah, this is the first book I've done that. I'm a character, first of all. That's one of the reasons I wanted to write the book. In the first place I lived in, I was there and I remember JFK on TV given his speech. I remember the terror. I mean, I remember the stupidity of the duck and cover in the schools, when a teacher would tell you crawl under the desk, we'll close the curtain and that'll protect us in the case of nuclear bombs. The idiocy of that is incredible. The guy down the street building the fallout shelter, this concrete block thing box under the ground, and he's got three kids, and they're going to all five of them are going to sit in this thing that's probably ten feet square with a lot of food, don't forget the can opener. And how long do they have to sit there? I remember this. At the time, they didn't really talk about what do you do with your sewage if you survive this nuclear salt? How many years do you have to stay in that fallout shelter? Ten ten thousand? I mean, I don't know. I don't think anybody else either, But all of that's going on, and of course it just adds to the terror. And one of the reasons I wrote this book maybe the driving reason. I want young people, you know, not me, I was there. I want people who weren't there to know just how close we came and just how dangerous it can be. And as you say, it's more dangerous today than it was then. And people need to know that. I mean, people need to know that that's a part of our history.
You did a great job. I recommend this book to everybody. You've now done a whole series of introductions to the American experience of war, and many of them are just astonishing. I think your capture of the Civil War, I don't think it had fully occurred to me how gruesome and how hard the war had become by eighteen sixty four, and the degree to which it really was beginning to just grind down in terms of every level of people's behavior.
Well, it was a law of attrition. I mean, it became a war of attrition. I mean the South particularly, they're losing generals left and right. I mean you can't just replace those people. And they're losing troops. I mean Lee's army, Well it's shrinking, you know, more and more. And it's interesting to me. I'm working on a novel right now about Abraham Lincoln, and one of the things they talk about when the war starts is, well, it's gonna last six months at the most, maybe ninety days, maybe six weeks. That was the sort of consensus. Nobody had any concept that four years later, the sheer butchery of what took place, that's just not real. Nobody could predict that. Robert E. Lee thought it was going to last a year, and he was laughed at for being such a pessimist. When you look at American history, if you look at the best example of what we can do to ourselves, the savagery that we can bring to each other. Nothing exceeds the Civil War. It's horrifying, but it's a part of us and it's something we need to know.
Gone for Soldiers, your novel of the Mexican War, I thought was the best general introduction to that war I have ever read.
Thank You God for Soldiers, not the Mexican War. Most people have no idea what that is. I mean, it's not taught in the schools. And the cast of characters because it's all those familiar names from the Civil War, but they're much younger. They're all young lieutenants. They're on the same side because they're fighting under Winfield Scott and they're fighting against Santa Anna in Mexico. It's are all great characters. I had so much fun writing that book.
You did a great job, and it's a very important war for a lot of different reasons. Your point, of course, which is it both begins to train the people who will become the generals and of course, as a consequence of only became a much bigger country. One other thing, though, you've sort of diverted from your normal pattern when you wrote The Old Lion, a novel of Theodore Roosevelt. What drew you into that?
I had a conversation with my publisher that I was getting a little bit burned out on war stories because if you look at what I was working on was the Pacific at World War Two, and when you start getting into the island hopping campaign, every story sort of is the same. I mean, there's a lot of redundancy there. And I thought, you know, I want to take a break from that. I want to do something different. And again what I said before about characters, I love good characters, and there is no better character in American history than Teddy Roosevelt. Again, I had fun with that. He's complicated, he's interesting, he's not perfect, and by modern standards, some people dismiss him for his imperfections. I don't because of what he accomplished, and he changed his country. He changed so many things about this country, and he himself individually was a remarkable man. It was great fun to write.
Then you have a huge talent for that. These things I told you when we chatted before we started taping. This was a particular thrill from me to have you on. I'm such an admirer of your father's work, and I'm such an admirer of your work. I've sort of lived with you now for almost the full generation of reading everything you put out. I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, The Shadow of War, a novel a Cuban Missile Crisis, is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. This has been great fun talking with you great.
I appreciate that I enjoyed it as well.
Thank you to my guest, Jeff Chery. You can get a link to buy his new book, The Shadow of War, a Novel of the Cuban Missile Crisis on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newt World is produced by Gingers three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsei Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Nutsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.