The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

On February 24, 2009 GPIA's Media & Culture Concentration hosted:

A Conversation with Michael Dobbs

What the President Doesn't Know:  Lessons from the "Most Dangerous Moment" in History

During the 2008 election campaign, Joe Biden predicted that Barack Obama would be tested by a major foreign policy crisis early on his presidency, "just like Jack Kennedy."  The October 1962 nuclear showdown offers numerous topical insights into how a U.S. president handles the ultimate national security challenge.  In a new book entitled One Minute to Midnight, former Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs argues that scholars and politicians have drawn the wrong lessons from the crisis by treating it as a case study in crisis management.  He shows that presidents--from JFK to George W.Bush--often operate on the basis of incomplete, frequently inaccurate, intelligence, unleashing chaotic forces that they are not fully able to control.   Described by Arthur Schlesinger as "the most dangerous moment in human history," the Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the limits of presidential power.

Michael Dobbs worked for The Washington Post for 25 years as a national and foreign correspondent. Dobbs spent much of the 1980s covering the collapse of communism, reporting from Poland, Eastern Europe, and Russia as well as China during the Tiananmen uprising. He was bureau chief in Moscow from 1988 to 1993. In Washington, he has worked for The Washington Post as a State Department reporter and as a foreign investigative reporter, covering foreign policy of the Bush administration and Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Dobbs's books include One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), Madeleine Albright (Henry Holt and Company, 1999).

To learn more about the Media & Culture Concentration please contact the Concentration Chair, Professor Nina L. Khrushcheva, at Room 603. Sonja Uwimana is the current Concentration Associate. Please contact her with questions, suggestions or concerns.