Cuban missile crisis: Really touch-and-go?

• Maj. Rudolf Anderson was only American to die
• He flew spy plane that proved presence of warheads
• Secret deal ended superpower standoff

GREENVILLE, S.C. — The forgotten man of the Cuban missile crisis was once its hero — the only American to perish in a conflict that could have killed millions.

Maj. Rudolf Anderson was "the martyr who died for us all," said Eric Sevareid, the CBS Evening News analyst. Future generations would lay flowers at Anderson's grave, he predicted, in thanks for the "hosts of others who did not die."

The crisis, the closest the planet has come to nuclear war, took place over 13 days — Oct. 16-28, 1962. It started after aerial photos showed the Soviet Union was deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba in order to bolster its communist ally, Fidel Castro, and its own ability to strike the United States.

Armed only with a camera, Anderson flew an unescorted U-2 spy plane over the island more times in the crisis than any other pilot. He and his comrades took the photos that the U.S. used to show the world the Soviets had nuclear missiles 90 miles from Florida.

After Anderson was shot down by a Soviet missile — without permission from leaders in the Kremlin — President Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev realized they had to end the crisis before their underlings pushed them into war. Within 24 hours, they did.

Yet 50 years later, Anderson's memory has faded, along with that of the crisis itself.

There are unforgettable moments — Kennedy on TV telling the nation about the missiles and announcing a quarantine around Cuba; U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson unveiling photos of the missile sites and offering to wait "until hell freezes over" for a Soviet response; Soviet ships in the Atlantic turning back from the quarantine line.

But the crisis that historian James Blight calls "the most dangerous moment in modern history" is hazy to young Americans and widely misunderstood by their elders.

Despite revelations since the end of the Cold War, the crisis is encrusted by myth: of a cool, hard-line Kennedy, a bellicose Khrushchev and a resolution in which the Americans stood firm and the Russians backed down.

Alice George, author of a social history of the crisis, says its memory was diminished by subsequent traumas, especially the assassination of Kennedy a year later. And the end of the Cold War two decades ago deprived the crisis of its doomsday context.

"If you were alive in 1962, you have a story about the crisis," George says. "If you weren't, you have no clear idea what happened."

Here in Anderson's hometown, however, some people want to change that. One is Jack Parillo, a retired architect who learned of Anderson only when he stumbled on his memorial. "People don't realize Rudy's importance to history," he says. "Without him, there might not be any history."

'A taste of death row'

By 9 a.m. on Oct. 27, 1962, Rudolf Anderson was 72,000 feet above Cuba, on the blue-black edge of space, snug in a pressurized flight suit, flying an aircraft that did not officially exist. In addition to the top-secret target list, he carried photos of his two sons and his wife, two months' pregnant with what he was hoping would be a girl.

The U-2 was one of the most exotic aircraft ever made. Fly too fast at this altitude (twice that of a commercial jetliner's) and the wings and tail break off; fly too slow, and the engine stalls. The difference between the two extremes: 7 mph.

It was Day 12 in the crisis. With the Soviet missiles in place, says Alice George, "everyone in America got a taste of death row." The nation's southeastern quarter, including Greenville, was in range of warheads 70 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Day and night, U.S. military forces moved toward Florida. The Strategic Air Command, which controlled the nation's nuclear arsenal, moved to DEFCON2, one alert level short of war. It dispersed 183 B-47 bombers to 33 civilian and military airfields and kept 60 B-52 bombers, most carrying atomic bombs, aloft at all times. About 130 long-range nuclear missiles were ready to be fired; their silo hatches were open, and the Soviets could see it.

Americans reacted with a mixture of anxiety and resignation. Some hoarded canned food and built fallout shelters. Millions of city dwellers decided it was a good time for a trip to the country. In Memphis, a man told police who found him lifting a manhole cover that he was seeking a bomb shelter for his family.

Bunkers outside Washington were readied for government officials, and federal agencies made plans for emergency wage-price controls, rationing and censorship.

Anderson's hometown was jittery, especially after the state civil defense director told local officials there was emergency shelter space for only 7% of the population.

A 16-year-old called the Marine recruiter in Greenville to ask whether the president had lowered the enlistment age. Ed Smith, American Legion district commander, said he had volunteered for World War I and was ready again.

No one knew that Greenville already was represented by Rudy Anderson.

He'd always wanted to fly. As a kid, he built model airplanes, and once got in trouble in school for using his pencil to trace in the air the flight of a fly.

He was something of a daredevil. At Clemson, he was so intent on catching a pigeon that had gotten loose in his dorm that he chased it down a hallway and out a second-story window, breaking a few bones in the fall. Later, his buddies would call it "Rudy's first flight."

As an officer, he was both top gun and by-the-book, a pilot's pilot who was selected to evaluate his peers. All agreed he'd make general. "He wanted to keep climbing the wall to be the leader," recalls Jim Black, a fellow Korean War reconnaissance pilot. "He was strong-headed. It was his way or no way."

He wanted as many flights as he could get, even if it created jealousy in the competitive U-2 brotherhood. "Hot to go all the time," Black says. "He was bent on being in the middle of whatever was going on."

He'd jockeyed for this flight over Cuba, his sixth in the crisis, even though two days earlier another pilot reported being fired on by Soviet surface-to-air missiles — the first time any of the U-2 flights had drawn fire.

He didn't seem worried. The night before, he called his mother in Greenville and told her not to worry, he was doing what he loved.

After 10 a.m., Anderson completed his pass over the eastern end of Cuba — his plane's camera clicking, Soviet radar watching — and turned toward Florida. But a Soviet general, absent his commander and for reasons still unclear, ordered two surface-to-air missiles fired at the U-2.

One exploded behind Anderson, sending shrapnel into the cockpit and through his pressurized suit. He probably was dead before the plane hit the ground, 13 miles below. He was 35.

'The first shot'

The executive committee of the National Security Council was meeting in the White House Cabinet Room when word arrived. "You can hear the tension in their voices," says Sheldon Stern, former historian at the Kennedy Presidential Library, who has studied the tapes on which the president secretly recorded the deliberations.

"This is much of an escalation by them, isn't it?" Kennedy said.

"They've fired the first shot," said Paul Nitze, an assistant secretary of Defense.

Later, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president's brother, would write, "There was the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us."

To most in the room, Anderson was merely "that U-2 boy," as Vice President Lyndon Johnson called him. But the president seemed to see a father with a son not much older than his John-John.

Later, in the Oval Office, the president told his brother that "the politicians and officials sit home pontificating about great principles and issues, make the decisions and dine with their wives and families, while the brave and the young die." As RFK left, the president was writing a letter to Anderson's widow.

A U.S. invasion of Cuba now seemed likely, and an attack on the anti-aircraft missile site that hit Anderson almost certain. The military waited for Kennedy's order.

He never gave it, even though he could not have known that either move probably would have led to all-out nuclear war. Unknown to the U.S., Soviet troops in Cuba (there were 40,000, not the 8,000 the CIA estimated) had tactical nuclear weapons to use against a U.S. invasion, and Soviet nuclear cruise missiles were pointed at the Guantanamo naval base in case of a U.S. invasion or attack on Soviet anti-missile sites.

Instead, Kennedy offered Khrushchev a final compromise.

On Sunday morning, they had a deal: The Soviets would pull their missiles out of Cuba; the U.S. promised not to invade Cuba and to secretly remove its own nuclear missiles from Turkey.

Two days later, Maj. Steve Heyser, Anderson's comrade and rival in the U-2 squadron, went to the White House to receive Kennedy's thanks for taking the first photos of the Soviet missile installations.

Afterward, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the cigar-chomping Air Force chief of staff, told Heyser that because Anderson was dead and he was alive, Anderson was going to be the hero of the crisis. Did the major have a problem with that?

LeMay had four stars on his shoulder. Heyser had no choice. "No, sir," he replied.

Air Force accounts at the time gave both Heyser and Anderson credit for the first photos. Anderson received the first Air Force Cross, the service's highest decoration short of the Medal of Honor. Heyser and the nine other U-2 pilots who flew over Cuba got only the Distinguished Flying Cross, even though they'd all taken the same risks.

Some thought it unfair; Heyser, who died in 2008, told the LeMay story many times.

Being the hero's wife was no consolation to Jane Anderson. Seven months earlier, she'd been traumatized by a false report of Rudy's death in an air crash. Now, when the casualty notification team arrived at her door at Laughlin AFB in Texas, she ran into the bathroom and locked the door.

"She said, 'I don't want to live without Rudy,' " recalls Marlene Powell, wife of another U-2 pilot.

At Rudy's funeral in Greenville, Jane recoiled at the site of an Air Force staff car like the one used by the notification team. Jerry McIlmoyle, a U-2 pilot, was a pallbearer. "His death blew her mind," he recalls. "She was down, I mean really down."

Although Jane Anderson eventually remarried, "I don't think she ever got over it," McIlmoyle says. "We couldn't do anything for her. She didn't want anything to do with the Air Force." She died in 1981.

Jane couldn't come to Greenville the following year for the dedication of her husband's memorial. A plane like the one he flew in Korea was placed in a park where he'd played as a boy. The plane seemed to be landing, "as if it was coming home," his sister said.

The next month, Jane gave birth to the daughter Rudy always wanted. People said her name, Robyn, evoked her father's love of flight.

Camera as weapon

Decades later, Jack Parillo was driving past Greenville's Cleveland Park when he stopped to check out the F-86 fighter behind the fence. A marker said Maj. Rudolf Anderson died in 1962, but nothing about how or why.

Parillo, an Air Force veteran, was intrigued. The more he learned about Anderson, the more he felt he had been overlooked. He hit upon a remedy: the Medal of Honor.

The area's congressional representatives were receptive, and the local American Legion post endorsed the idea. But Parillo ran into an unexpected obstacle — Anderson's fellow pilots.

Today, four of the 11 U-2 pilots who flew over Cuba in the crisis are alive. In interviews with USA TODAY, three said Anderson did not deserve the Medal of Honor, because he was simply doing his duty — as they all were — and did not go "above and beyond" it.

"I respect Andy, but that was not a Medal of Honor action," says Buddy Brown, 83, using his fellow pilot's nickname. "You haven't saved anybody, you're not coming out of a foxhole. You just happened to be in a spot and got hit.'' Were Anderson alive, he adds, he'd feel the same way.

On Oct. 27, Greenville will unveil a redesigned Anderson memorial that will explain all about him and the missile crisis. And, as Sevareid predicted, his old friends will lay flowers on his grave, as they have every year since 1962.

At one such ceremony, Steve Lorys, husband of the daughter Anderson never knew, spoke of his father-in-law as a warrior in a new kind of war that couldn't actually be fought, at least not with a winner.

For all the warheads and missiles that October, Anderson's "camera was the only weapon that would have worked," he said, "because it showed the world."