This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Bachelorette.

The Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis isn't hand. It is October 22nd, 23rd in Moscow.

The Presidium meeting in the Kremlin, Nikita Kurshev, is the first secretary. The others

at the table are critical. I turn to Serhi Ploki, his new book Nuclear Folly, a history

of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using transcripts from the tape recordings that President

Kennedy made of his meetings in the White House. Using notes that were made at the Presidium

meeting in Moscow, these two leaders of nuclear-tipped-powered countries are unaware of what

each other is saying and their information is out of date and it's often misunderstood

by both sides. So we go now to the Presidium meeting, late on the 22nd in Moscow. It's

eight hours ahead of Washington. They take a break in the middle of the evening. At this

point, Professor Kurshev doesn't know what's going to happen, but there's a man at the

table who has an alternative all the way through these discussions about deploying missiles.

His name is McCoyan. He has a great deal of authority on his own because he's one of

the original revolutionaries. Who is he? What do we need to know about him at this point?

Anastas McCoyan is a very, very interesting figure. The one who survived at the very

top of the Soviet pyramid, power pyramid, as the member of the Presidium of Politburo from

Vladimir Lenin to Lenin-Brezion. He retired only in the 1960s. Of course, that means that he's

a very experienced politician, but most of all, he's an excellent diplomat. And Kurshev himself

stated at some point that no one understands what McCoyan says, but everyone believes that

McCoyan is a reasonable man. So that reasonable man indeed is there at the table. And he was against

the idea of putting missiles on Cuba from the very beginning. He was trying to convince

Kurshev not to do that, but he failed. The missiles were put there. McCoyan's concern was that

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