‘After Almost Destroying the World, Our Families Became Friends’: The Thrilling Podcast from JFK and Khrushchev’s Relatives | Podcast

IIn October 1962, the world came closer to destruction than at any time in modern times. After an American surveillance plane discovered that Soviet nuclear missile sites were being built in Cuba, less than 100 miles from the US mainland, President John Kennedy responded by ordering the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet to impose a naval blockade around the island. Nearly two weeks of impossible tension followed.

The threat was clear. If Kennedy, or his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, had fired on their enemy, a chain reaction of global nuclear strikes and counterattacks would have followed, plunging humanity into total devastation.

The Cuban Missile Crisis has been covered endlessly, in books, movies, and television shows. But in its third season, the BBC World Service podcast The Bomb has added a whole new element to the story. It is co-hosted by Max Kennedy and Nina Khrushcheva, relatives of the men who held the fate of the world in their hands for 13 days.

“What was the Soviet side thinking? What was the American side thinking?” asks Khrushcheva, Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter and professor of international affairs at the New School in New York City. For her, the beauty of the show is its attempt to ask the thematic question: “How can people hate each other and conflict with each other?”

“It has never escaped me how wonderful it is that human beings can be friends or have the capacity to be complete enemies,” adds Kennedy, the son of Robert Kennedy, JFK’s nephew, and now an author and lawyer. “We see this over and over again when countries go to war, and it shows how incredibly stupid fighting is.”

What is striking about the Cuban missile crisis is that, because it was so public, people around the world could watch the crisis spiral toward disaster in almost real time. However, the threat of destruction is closer than anyone imagined. “Almost everyone in the White House wanted an air strike and an invasion,” Kennedy says. “If we had struck the Cubans with the Sixth Fleet, there is no doubt that the Russians on the ground would have launched a tactical nuclear weapon at the US Sixth Fleet, destroying our aircraft carriers and sinking our largest and most important fleet. We would have responded with massive retaliation that would have wiped out life on Earth.”

The fact that it didn’t happen is a testament to Kennedy and Khrushchev, who were able to keep their heads and negotiate calmly when everyone around them was pushing for action. As a result, Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy (although this was not reported at the time) removed the missiles from Türkiye. The relief was palpable, as was the feeling of hope. During our interview, Kennedy and Khrushchev posited that the crisis would have shaped a deeper relationship between the United States and Russia had Kennedy not been killed the following year and Khrushchev had not been removed from office the year after that.

However, throughout those thirteen days of October, everyone felt nervous. My father, then a 12-year-old boy on a farm four and a half thousand miles from Cuba, vividly remembers lying in bed worrying that World War III might break out at any moment. The bomb’s co-hosts were born shortly after the crisis broke out, and Khrushcheva learned about it through the Soviet education system, which painted a somewhat different picture of events.

“You said your father remembers it, and it was a scary day,” she says. “But in the Soviet Union, people didn’t know much about it, because it was a crisis, and in the Soviet Union we were told that things are always nice and sunny.”

But within the Khrushchev family, things were different. “They told me what a great moment it was, because it was eyeball to eyeball. They solved it, they didn’t start a war, which is great.” But in the coming years, not everyone will share this perspective. For a long time in Russian politics, this was considered a defeat for Khrushchev, because he did not blow up the United States.

The bomb is so well balanced and so well produced that Khrushcheva joked that it made her forget that she already knew the ending. This is partly due to the participation of historians Serhiy Plokhy and Michael Dobbs. But what’s actually more important is the involvement of the hosts themselves. Even within living memory, it is inconceivable that descendants of the leaders of America and the Soviet Union would appear together in public. That Max Kennedy and Nina Khrushcheva can do this, and be so warm to each other, must be a sign of hope.

“Max and I are not the first,” Khrushcheva smiles. “After 1991, when the Soviet Union ended, my cousin Sergei Khrushchev moved to the United States to become a Khrushchev scholar, and became a great friend of Dwight Eisenhower’s children.”

“But we had never met before the podcast,” Kennedy adds. “Which is unfortunate because we used to get along so well and now we’re friends, which is really cool. Finally, after almost 60 years of almost destroying the world, our families are friends, so I think the world is a little bit safer.”

Or is it? Part of the reason why “The Bombshell” seems so necessary is that we once again find ourselves living in dark times. The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than ever before, in part because of world leaders’ inability to absorb the lessons of the past.

Kennedy says frankly: “I have no confidence in the leaders of America and Russia.” “President Khrushchev organized the political defense of Stalingrad. He saw first-hand the horrors of war.” President Kennedy [who fought in the second world war] He lost two members of his crew. He saw death up close. I think this service to the country makes a huge difference. Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. Trump has no experience in service at all. Therefore, I have real concern about our future, which is left in the very limited hands of these two men.

It is this distance from the reality of war that gives Khrushcheva pause. “There was a lot of physical reality in the time of crisis,” she says. “Both Kennedy and Krushchev knew what war was. Therefore, for both of them, taking the step that would lead us into World War III was unthinkable. That is why the war ended so quickly, because both of them were afraid that someone, not them, would make a mistake.

“But half of our reality now is not physical. I mean the US president is a reality TV show guy. And because the military offensive is going reasonably well for him at the moment, we’ve seen Putin three times in uniform. And when the war wasn’t going so well, he didn’t associate himself with it so much. But look at him now. It’s all for show.”

“It’s worth noting that when Nina talks about Putin, I worry that something might happen to her when she returns to Russia, because there is a real threat of retaliation,” Kennedy adds hesitantly. “I have always felt completely safe in the United States, but now we have a president seeking revenge against his political enemies. This is deeply troubling.”

It is also worth noting that Kennedy does not condemn the Trump administration in the abstract. His brother is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who serves as the controversial health secretary in the Trump administration. Last year, Max wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times denouncing his brother, and his criticism of Trump carries with it some pain. This becomes clearer when I ask what today’s leaders can learn from the Cuban missile crisis.

“One is the importance of leaders who really seek every way to achieve peace before going to war, which you don’t see happening now in Venezuela,” he answers. “The other thing is that when you were negotiating, the very important thing that President Kennedy did was try to put himself in Khrushchev’s shoes. The military-industrial complex was putting pressure on President Kennedy, so he knew that he must also be putting pressure on Khrushchev. They were both trying to figure out what the other person needed in order to settle this crisis. And in the end, I think President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev developed an understanding of each other. There were times in the crisis where those were those times just two men standing between all these other forces and destroying Human race.

“Command responsibility is the thing we are missing,” Khrushcheva nodded. “The crisis was a great example of how to walk away from war when you’re close to war. War is something that should not happen under any circumstances. It’s actually a lesson in leadership. I wonder if leaders today are willing to learn that.”