From the moment the United States discovered that the Soviet missile emplacement was underway, the odds that President Kennedy could face down Nikita Khrushchev and force him to withdraw the weapons were overwhelmingly in Kennedy’s favor. This is not just a hindsight conclusion. You need to examine the facts that were available to both sides, either explicitly or implicitly, overtly or subliminally, at the time.

At the outset, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and some of the key military men offered assurance that Soviet missiles in Cuba would, as the president’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, reported, ““make no decisive difference in the strategic balance.’’ This did not make the missiles in Cuba acceptable, but it surely defined the threat as essentially psychological, a potential blow to America’s psyche and a probable inconvenience to future conduct of American foreign policy. Something to worry about, of course. But to go to nuclear war over? Well, that was for Khrushchev to worry about.

The first recommendation of a majority of the president’s advisers (the so-called Excomm of the National Security Council) was to blast out the missiles and their emplacements with airstrikes. This plainly implied a mind-set of confidence that such resort to force could be applied with probable impunity; why else would so many responsible men urge it on the reluctant president as the best way to deal with Khrushchev’s folly?

The president wondered whether any American action, either an airstrike or blockade, might precipitate yet another Soviet action against the Western presence in Berlin. But it was as evident to the Soviets as to the Americans that any act that sought to depose the West and threatened to set overwhelming Soviet land forces against the 200,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Europe would leave the president with only two alternatives–to surrender those forces or retaliate with nuclear weapons. Could any president surrender in those circumstances? None had more reason to face that question than Khrushchev. And he knew the answer.

The Soviet Union possessed at that time as few as 75, and no more than 300, strategic missiles. The United States could target and deliver perhaps as many as 5,000 nuclear warheads. To some American theorists this passed for a ““parity’’ of sorts, but surely it could not look like that to Moscow, even without factoring in Soviet paranoia. If Khrushchev were so lunatic as to launch a first strike and kill thousands of Americans, it would be but a terrible prelude to having his country wiped off the face of the earth. ““Khrushchev knows that we have a substantial nuclear superiority,’’ McGeorge Bundy was to write later, ““but he also knows that we don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent he has to live under fear of ours.''

Khrushchev was impetuous, bombastic, reckless; he was also a bluffer, as Eisenhower discovered when he faced him down over Berlin in the 1950s. But in my several years of experiences in and out of government I never heard anyone, not even CIA analysts, suggest that he was insane. Indeed, in the most crucial of the messages he exchanged with Kennedy during the Cuba confrontation, he said ““only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy the whole world before they die,’’ would push the confrontation to conflict. ““I’m not crazy,’’ he was saying. There was no other way to translate that message except as a plea from a man who knew he’d gone too far. And keep in mind that he was dealing with the one country that had already demonstrated a willingness to use the nuclear weapon against human beings.

It seemed to me during those 13 days, as it does today, that all those factors dictated a peaceful settlement. Of course there was suspense and concern, dramatically documented in the new book ““The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.’’ There can be miscalculation of even the most carefully calculated risk. But was this situation, as favorable as it was to the United States, really more dangerous than the Berlin situation had been for many years? Or the ceaseless circlings of nuclear-loaded SAC bombers and flotillas of nuclear-armed U.S. and Soviet submarines prowling the seas, when the possibilities of human missteps or twisted communications were numberless?

In the 35 years since, the participants on both sides of the confrontation have continued to say that it was. They have held three conferences at which they exchanged information, traded theories and canonized each other for having saved the world from cremation. At each conclave the mythologizing process has accelerated. At the most recent one in Havana, in 1992, a Russian general went so far as to say that Soviet troops in Cuba had been given authority by Moscow to fire nuclear missiles at the United States if they felt the need to. The general was a pompous windbag, and his claim proved to be patently untrue, but former defense secretary McNamara returned to the mainland to state that we had come ““even closer’’ to nuclear war than he had believed in October of 1962.

Which brings me to Manning’s Maxim: Even selfless participants in a dangerous confrontation can come to see it as more threatening than it was, thereby making the defusing of it more heroic.

Anyway, it’s nice that the cold war is over.