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PREFACE
22 January 1964, Washington DC, USA President John Fitzgerald Kennedy stared at the hastily typed-out memo. It was difficult to read the words, his hands were shaking so much. The syntax was garbled, at least two words had letters transposed and the type was smeared with what seemed to be tears. Despite all this, the message contained on the single page of yellow paper was plain - the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Tens of thousands of troops were massing in East Germany ready to surge across Europe towards Great Britain. West Berlin had already fallen to the communist forces. In Eurasia, China was threatening to retaliate with a nuclear strike on Moscow unless Soviet troops withdrew in the next 72 hours from disputed border regions. The world's superpowers were at each other's throats and the United States of America was in the middle, its efforts to negotiate a truce frustrated and impotent. For three days and nights the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their advisers had been working without remission to prevent this moment arriving. Sleep was rare, taken in snatches; food merely an afterthought when the pangs of hunger became too debilitating to ignore; families forgotten as this handful of men and women tried to find some way forward, some way out of this crisis. Through it all, the President had remained in the Oval Office, calling each of the world leaders personally, desperately trying to talk sense into the key players. He had thought if he spoke to them as one human being to another, then maybe the situation could be resolved. Instead the crisis only deepened. John F. Kennedy swayed slowly back and forth in his beloved wooden rocking chair, looking to his younger brother as he asked a question. 'Jesus Christ, Bobby, are these figures accurate?' The Attorney General nodded grimly, his face ashen. 'We could be at war any minute, Jack.' The President crumpled the document in his left hand while the fingers of his right hand lightly touched the wound in his neck. It was still sore and stubbornly refused to heal, a constant reminder of the attempt on his life in Dallas, Texas just two months before. The assassin had been unsuccessful in his bid to kill Kennedy, but the attempt itself had triggered this greater crisis. The gunman killed several Dallas police before turning his rifle on himself. Beneath his street clothes the assassin wore the uniform of a Russian soldier. Of course the Russians had denied any involvement or knowledge of the attempt to kill the President of the United States, but no-one believed them. Since then international tension had escalated at an alarming rate. Now, the world was within minutes of destroying itself in a nuclear conflict no one could ever win, a holocaust of light and fury and radiation. Sometimes John Fitzgerald Kennedy wished the assassin had been successful, had killed him and escaped. Then maybe none of this would have happened... 'Doesn't Khrushchev understand that I can't back down? Didn't he learn anything from Cuba?' The President pulled himself out of the rocking chair and began to pace the Oval Office. A camp bed had been set up to one side of the room for him to grab a few hours sleep. That would not be needed now. John F. Kennedy breathed deeply and coughed on the blue haze of tobacco smoke hanging in the air. Worse than the smell of old tobacco and stale sweat was the stench of despair, clinging to everyone and everything in the Oval Office. The President stopped to rest a weary hand on his brother's shoulder. Never a heavy sleeper because of his chronic back problems, the crisis of the past days had left John F. Kennedy hardly a moment's rest. His gaze settled on the faces of two smiling infants in a framed photograph standing on his desk. 'Bobby, if the worst happens, are the children safe?' His brother managed a smile. 'Yes. The families of all the White House staff and senior Government members are already down in the shelter. John Junior's been asking after you, wanting to know when you'll join him and Caroline.' 'God knows what world they'll have left to grow up in if--' 'Mr President!' All faces turned to the doorway as the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, burst into the room. 'Sir, we've got confirmation of missile launch. The birds are in the sky!' 'How many?' asked the President, hoping against hope it was a rogue attack - something that could be sustained without retaliation. Anything to avoid full-scale war. 'Dozens of war birds already, maybe hundreds,' replied McNamara, tears in his eyes. 'Continental Army Command estimate four minutes to the first impact.' The President sagged, his last reserves of will-power and strength leaving him. His brother led him over to the desk that served so many Presidents in times of crisis, but never one so grave as this. John F. Kennedy's legs buckled beneath him as he slumped into his chair. For nearly a minute he sat there, silent, staring at a black-framed photograph of his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. She had died in his arms two months ago, murdered by an assassin's bullet meant for him. More than ever, the President wished she was here now. Despite all the infidelities and the lies and the coldness between them, he still loved her like he had loved no other woman. 'Mr. President? Mr. President, what's our reply?' asked McNamara. Jackie, thought Kennedy, why did you have to die? It still seemed unreal, like watching a car accident - something happening to somebody else. Not to her. He remembered he had been angry with her. It was a sultry day in Dallas, with the blazing sun turning early morning rain into stifling humidity. Several times in the motorcade's slow trip through the city the President had snarled at the First Lady to remove her sun-glasses, so that the throngs lining the sidewalks could see her smiling eyes: a husband berating his wife over something so trivial, all the while smiling falsely for the strangers surrounding them. Then the shots started. The first sounded just like a firecracker going off, had hardly seemed real at all. Then something slapped Kennedy in the back of the neck and he found it hard to breath, to call out a warning. Then that fatal third shot and a blur of motion - Jackie's head exploding, the blood and bone and brain showering the President in a pink spray, his wife slumping slowly over into his lap. They had rushed her to Parkland Memorial Hospital, but she was pronounced dead on arrival. The security alerts followed; a hurried trip back to Washington in case there were any further attempts on his life; not even time to wait for his wife's body to be loaded onto Air Force One, the Presidential jet. Since the funeral John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been like a ghost himself, he now realised. He had let this conflict escalate as he mourned; ignored the warning signs; been too wrapped up in his own grief. But most of all, he had been wracked with guilt: about his philandering, about his lies to her; about how he had insisted she go on that trip to Texas to bolster his popularity in a Southern state that would be crucial in the following year's presidential elections. The Texas trip was the first time Jackie had accompanied him on a political visit anywhere within America since his election back in 1960. It was also her last. 'Jack? Jack! You've got to make a decision - now!' The President snapped out of his reverie. He looked for McNamara before speaking, his voice firm and gruff. 'Get the Bagman in here.' The Secretary of Defense stepped to the door, opened it and nodded. In stepped Ira Gearhart, a dark-suited Secret Service agent carrying a small suitcase with a device not unlike a safe dial attached to its locking mechanism. He strode to the desk and placed the suitcase by the President. Kennedy nodded and Gearhart quickly flicked the dial through its complex combination sequence. The suitcase sprung open and the President looked down at the electronic mechanism inside. With this piece of equipment he could call for a retaliatory nuclear strike, make sure that America did not burn alone. Or he could pause; refuse to retaliate; let his nation die to show the world why this should never happen again. If he did that, at least there might still be a world left after today. This was a decision Kennedy prayed each night he would never have to face. Now the decision was his, and his alone. 'How long?' he asked. 'Less than two minutes,' snapped McNamara. 'You must act now, or else our war birds will be dead in the silos. We'll be wiped out!' The President looked to his brother. In a family of staunch Roman Catholic upbringing, Bobby Kennedy had always been the one of deepest beliefs and greatest faith. Jack frequently used his brother as a moral compass to guide his proper course of action in matters of the conscience. But now his brother's face was impassive. The decision had to be made and it had to be made by the President himself. It was time. John F. Kennedy closed his eyes and tapped the secret code into the machine. The code was sent to the missile silos around the nation, where soldiers stood ready to launch the deadly payload they guarded. Within sixty seconds thousands of nuclear weapons would fly forth from the ground, carrying death through the sky. The President sat back in his chair and felt curiously calm. Now the irrevocable decision had been taken, a weight had lifted from his shoulders. Perhaps this was how the suicidal felt as they fell through the air towards their deaths. Kennedy looked at the faces of those around him. Many had tears rolling down their faces; others were firm and resolute; several were praying. The President realised they were expecting him to speak; to comfort and reassure them; say this was the only course; they had had no choice; that everything would be all right really. Instead all his mind was wracked by one of those niggling, trivial questions that you know the answer to, but you just cannot remember it. What was it the director of the Manhattan Project, Doctor Robert Oppenheimer, had said when he witnessed the first explosion of an atom bomb? Something from a Hindu epic poem... Kennedy almost smiled as he remembered the answer: 'I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.' But that was not what the people in the Oval Office wanted to hear right now. Instead John Fitzgerald Kennedy bowed his head and whispered quietly as the world came to an end: 'May God have mercy on all our souls.'
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