For two weeks in 1962, the world held its breath

KENT — This is the 50th anniversary of the two weeks in October 1962 when it looked like the world was about to end. The standoff between Russia and the United States that came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis took place from Oct. 16 to 28 of that year. And Donald Connery is the last remaining working journalist who was in Moscow at the time.Connery, who has lived all over the world but now resides in Kent (with his wife, Leslie), has just published an electronic book that is a personal account and bird’s-eye-view of what it was like to be in Russia at the time of the colossal faceoff between the two nuclear superpowers.Surprisingly perhaps, Connery’s book (“Escape From Oblivion: A Moscow Correspondent’s Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis”) is not a high-tension drama, full of skullduggery, anxiety and sometimes-irrational world leaders.He focuses instead on what it was like to live and work in Russia shortly after the end of Stalin’s reign, during what many natives of the Soviet Union felt was a time of hope and optimism, especially about relations between the U.S. and the USSR.“Jack Kennedy was understood to be a radiant young man with a fresh outlook on world affairs,” Connery writes in the book’s prologue. “Their own reformist leader [Nikita Khrushchev], a crude but ebullient personality, was seen as a distinct improvement over Joseph Stalin and his long reign of terror and paranoia.”Unlike his predecessor, Khrushchev had traveled to the United States and toured it, from coast to coast. American celebrities ranging from Benny Goodman to composer and emigré/exile Igor Stravinsky had come to Russia — and been greeted with an enthusiasm that bordered on adulation. Connery was stationed in the Moscow bureau of Time Inc. and working for Time and Life in 1962; the publishing giant had transferred him there from the Tokyo bureau. He was there to take over the Moscow office from longtime Russia hand Edmund Stevens.“Except for Ed Stevens and the UPI’s Henry Shapiro (both legendary),” Connery explained, “most Moscow correspondents in those early Cold War days were there for two-to-three-year assignments and were pretty much stuck in Moscow and seldom able to travel at any distance, certainly not to and through Siberia, because of Soviet restrictions on their movements and the need to be always alert to Kremlin news. “I was extraordinarily fortunate in being able, in the journeys in 1961 and 1962 — which make up the central part of the book — to see far, far more of the Soviet Union and its satellites than any of my Moscow colleagues and most if not all their predecessors. “Then, just as I was in the process of taking over the Time-Life bureau, the missile crisis struck and I found myself with an audience of tens of millions, via the combination of the foremost newsmagazine, the top picture magazine and NBC radio and TV, probably greater than any other foreign correspondent had ever experienced before or since.”A few months after his arrival, while still waiting for the government to give him official permission to be there, Connery began to hear from the United States about the standoff between the two governments over Khrushchev’s clandestine gamble that installed nuclear missiles and thousands of troops in Cuba — within striking distance of American targets — as a response to the U.S. installing missiles in Turkey, near the Russian border. That decision led to what Connery describes as “the most dangerous two weeks in human history.”“Escape From Oblivion” isn’t about the terror of nuclear annihilation that arose in the United States during that time, nor is it about the political gamesmanship that finally resolved the crisis, and caused Khrushchev to turn the ships around and return home.The book is a detailed memoir about what it was like to live in Russia at that time — a time when inhabitants of that vast nation were largely unaware that at any moment their lives could end, horribly.The Russians, Connery says, “calmly sailed through the storm even as tens of millions of Americans, some verging on panic, prepared themselves for a possible nuclear assault.” In his book, Connery explores and explains what life was like in a country where the government was keeping vital information from a population that, in his experience, seemed genuinely to believe that prosperity, equality and a better life were coming their way.This is Connery’s first non-print book. “I plunged into this wonderful world of fast-track publishing because I wanted this memoir to appear prior to Oct. 16 to 28, the exact 50th anniversary of the 1962 crisis,” he said.It is available online (with a cover design that uses a political cartoon from a 1962 edition of the Daily Mail newspaper) at Amazon for $2.99 (or free for some Amazon members). And even for those who lived through that tense time and still remember it, the book offers a reassuring thought.“Everyone always asks who won, the Russian government or the American government,” Connery said. “The answer is that we all won. We’re still here.”