James G. Blight, Joseph S. Nye Jr., and David Welch, “The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited,” Foreign Affairs 66, no. 1 (1987): 170–88. This article, in a leading publication on U.S. foreign relations and written by major contributors to missile crisis historiography, is informed by meetings held twenty-five years after the crisis by former members of President John Kennedy’s Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm). It presents more details from the U.S. side of the crisis by showing divisions between “doves” and “hawks” and arguing that “owls” won the day in October 1962. Divisions among these men, however, existed for decades later over what the U.S. government should have done and over the lessons of the missile crisis that applied later in the Cold War, if they applied at all.

Sergei Khrushchev, “How My Father and President Kennedy Saved the World: The Cuban Missile Crisis as Seen from the Kremlin,” American Heritage 53, no. 5 (2002): 66–76. This accessible article is by the son of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Sergei, who became a serious scholar of the Cold War. It is valuable because it presents Soviets’ perspectives — their evolving thinking on Cuba’s revolution, their justifications for placing missiles in Cuba, and Khrushchev’s own problems in resolving the crisis. It makes the case that Soviets, like U.S. leaders, also lacked accurate information and feared losing control over the crisis not only to Washington but also to Havana and the Soviet military in Cuba. In addition, this article offers interesting details of the back-channel diplomacy that ended the crisis.