- “Historians have scrutinized the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 far more deeply than they have the Berlin crisis that preceded it by a year. For all the attention given Cuba, however, what happened in Berlin was even more decisive in shaping the era between the end of World War II in 1945 and German unification and Soviet dissolution in 1990 and 1991. It was the Berlin Wall’s rise in August 1961 that anchored the Cold War in the mutual hostility that would last for another three decades, locking us into habits, procedures, and suspicions that would fall only with the same wall on November 9, 1989.” (p. xi)
Lesson: The Cuban Missile Crisis was ultimately of less consequence than the situation in Berlin in terms of impact on the Cold War.
Foreword to Fred Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (New York: Penguin Group, 2011)
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