Everyone knew about the CIA’s spy planes. The Soviets had shot one down over Siberia two years ago, and had put the pilot on trial for espionage.

Everyone peered at the photo on the easel. It seemed blurred and grainy, and showed nothing that George could recognize except maybe trees. They needed an interpreter to tell them what they were looking at.

“This is a valley in Cuba about twenty miles inland from the port of Mariel,” the CIA man said. He pointed with a little baton. “A good-quality new road leads to a large open field. These small shapes scattered around are construction vehicles: bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks. And here”—he tapped the photo for emphasis—“here, in the middle, you see a group of shapes like planks of wood in a row. They are in fact crates eighty feet long by nine feet across. That is exactly the right size and shape to contain a Soviet R-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, designed to carry a nuclear warhead.”

George just managed to stop himself from saying Holy shit, but others were not so restrained, and for a moment the room was full of astonished curses.

Someone said: “Are you sure?”

The photointerpreter replied: “Sir, I have been studying air reconnaissance photographs for many years, and I can assure you of two things: one, this is exactly what nuclear missiles look like, and two, nothing else looks like this.”

God save us, George thought fearfully; the goddamn Cubans have nukes.

Someone said: “How the hell did they get there?”

The photointerpreter said: “Clearly the Soviets transported them to Cuba in conditions of utter secrecy.”

“Snuck them in under our fucking noses,” said the questioner.

Someone else asked: “What is the range of those missiles?”

“More than a thousand miles.”

“So they could hit . . .”

“This building, sir.”

George had to repress an impulse to get up and leave right away.

“And how long would it take?”

“To get here from Cuba? Thirteen minutes, we calculate.”

Involuntarily, George glanced at the windows, as if he might see a missile coming across the Rose Garden.

The president said: “That son of a bitch Khrushchev lied to me. He told me he would not deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba.”

Bobby added: “And the CIA told us to believe him.”

Someone else said: “This is bound to dominate the rest of the election campaign—three more weeks.”

With relief, George turned his mind to the domestic political consequences: the possibility of nuclear war was somehow too terrible to contemplate. He thought of this morning’s New York Times. How much more Eisenhower could say now! At least when he was president he had not allowed the USSR to turn Cuba into a Communist nuclear base.

This was a disaster, and not just for foreign policy. A Republican landslide in November would mean that Kennedy was hamstrung for the last two years of his presidency, and that would be the end of the civil rights agenda. With more Republicans joining Southern Democrats in opposing equality for Negroes, Kennedy would have no chance of bringing in a civil rights bill. How long would it be then before Maria’s grandfather would be allowed to register to vote without getting arrested?