Soon, they were lurching from one crisis to another-Laos, Vietnam, the Congo, and Berlin-until the Cuban Missile Crisis shocked them into concluding the Limited Test Ban Treaty. But the contentious Vienna summit, held only a few months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, exacerbated their personality differences-Kennedy misunderstanding the depth of the Communist's ideological fervor, and Khrushchev dismissing the American as a callow youth who could be intimidated. As JFK took office, both he and Khrushchev hoped to lift American-Soviet diplomacy from its low after the U-2 affair. Especially apropos in the wake of the recent Gulf war-a superb diplomatic history that unfolds the near-fatal miscalculations made by the cool New Frontiersman and the mercurial Soviet in the most dangerous years of the cold war.
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