Inside the Cuban Missile Crisis with new pedagogy

These days, say James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, even their best graduate students in political science know little, if anything, about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "It might as well be the Peloponnesian Wars, frankly," says Blight, a professor of foreign-policy development at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario.

Students have bought into "a fairy tale—the notion of a brief shining moment for the beautiful Kennedy family in Camelot" and of "the good guy, Kennedy," who stared down the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, "a bad guy who made Fidel Castro let him park nuclear missiles in Cuba."

Blight and Lang, a research professor of international affairs at Waterloo, have spent almost 30 years investigating how those events almost brought the world to nuclear war.

The latest result is The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis, just out from Rowman & Littlefield. Blight and Lang have created a companion "transmedia, multiplatform" Web site at armageddonletters.com....