Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 Years Ago, Had the City and the World Worried

Uli Seit for The New York Times Vladimir Edelman, left, was a Russian soldier and Jack R. Hayne was an American soldier during the Cuban missile crisis. They stood in front of an old Russian jet fighter recently at the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, N.Y.

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. - Eyeball to eyeball in a hangar jammed with old warplanes, they embraced, two men in crisp colonel uniforms - one who had been in the United States Army, the other in the Soviet Army during those 13 days when a nervou s world waited and worried.

They are long retired now. Fifty years ago, as the United States and the Soviet Union edged toward a catastrophic confrontation, one was stationed in Germany teaching NATO officers what to do if the order came to fire nuclear missiles at the Soviets. The other monitored air traffic at a Soviet air base in Uzbekistan and awaited the order to fire nuclear missiles at the Americans or their allies in Europe.

“He was a professional soldier, and I was a professional soldier,” said the American, Col. Jack R. Hayne, as the former Soviet colonel, Vladimir Edelman, stood a few feet away. “Unfortunately he worked for a regime that I didn't care for.”

Now the two men live about 30 miles apart, Colonel Hayne in Old Bethpage, N.Y., where he is the commander of a Jewish War Veterans' post, and Colonel Edelman in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. That puts them close to the bases that were supposed to protect N ew York against a Soviet attack, for while the two colonels were on the front lines in Europe and Central Asia, more than 60 missiles stood at the ready in the Rockaways, next to a beach where people splashed in the ocean and worked on their tans.

And those missiles were at just one base - the one at Fort Tilden, now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. In all, nearly two dozen Nike antiaircraft missile bases guarded the New York area along the trajectory that Soviet missiles would have followed to close in on New York. In addition to the battery at Fort Tilden, one with 20 missiles occupied a stretch of Hart Island in the East River, and there was a missile maintenance shop on Staten Island. The Nike missiles could be armed with a nuclear weapon.

Five more bases lined Long Island, and 12 more were in New Jersey.

“Because New York is so important, you've got it ringed with missiles, more Nike missiles than anywhere else, more than Washington, D .C.,” said Steven H. Jaffe, a historian and the author of “New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham.”

“And yet it's New York City, where protesters are going to be pouring out of the Village, so you get everything on top of each other: the protests that were a dress rehearsal for what came later in the Vietnam War, and the missiles down at the beach, or in places in the suburbs, at the end of the street.”

In Greenwich Village on the night the Cuban missile crisis began, he said, the folk singer John Cohen appeared with Bob Dylan at the Gaslight Café. Together they sang “You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone.”

“Cohen says, ‘Who is going to miss us? We're all going to be gone,' ” Mr. Jaffe said. “You got the sense that even there, people in New York were scared.”

Uli Seit for The New York Times A Nike antiaircraft missile at the American Airpower Museum. During the Cuban missile crisis, the Nike missiles were deployed around New York to protect the city from a possible air attack.

Mayor Robert F. Wagner called for a recruiting campaign for civil defense volunteers, and schoolchildren practiced duck-and-cover drills.

“You had bomb shelters, you had alerts and you had buildings which were clearly marked civil defense,” said Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor who in 1962 was a 10th grader at Forest Hills High School in Queens. “Nelson Rockefeller, when he was governor, was one of the largest champions of bomb sh elters and civil defense, and the Cuban missile crisis reinforced a set of existing tensions that already had a real-world presence.”

The two retired colonels said things were no less tense where they were stationed. They met recently at the American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in Farmingdale, N.Y., which occupies a hangar that was once an aircraft plant. Rolling off the assembly line there in the 1960s were F-105 Thunderchiefs - supersonic fighter-bombers flown by the Air Force, capable of carrying nuclear missiles.

Colonel Hayne said that in October 1962, he was teaching NATO officers the ins and outs of guided missile systems when the Cuban missile crisis began. He was a captain at the time, 13 years out of West Point. He had grown up in Brooklyn - “the only Jewish kid on a block of Italian kids” - and had graduated from New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst.

Colonel Edelman's wife, Kamilla, who did the talking for her husband because her English was better, used the word “tense” to describe the 13 days in October. She said he was the commander of a Soviet air defense regiment in Uzbekistan.

“I tell you what he told me: he controlled the airspace,” she said. “It was his responsibility, the responsibility of his regiment. It stretched a long distance, and the readiness number was one.” One, she added, was the highest possible threat level.