There is a long history of alternate history volumes
which are written as textbooks, with no reference to our own world.
The most famous is Robert Sobel’s 1973 classic For
Want of a Nail. More
recently, Eric G. Swedin, like Sobel a professor, has published When
Angels Wept. While the
earlier work focused on a two-hundred year span of history, When
Angels Wept focuses on the period between the attempted Bay of Pigs
invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis just over a year later.
Swedin begins his work by taking a close look at the
Cuban revolution, Bay of Pigs fiasco, Sergei Khrushchev, and John F.
Kennedy. In fact, the first four
chapters of the volume could be a straight history text with the exception
of a few small details regarding the space program and the Fire. The text
diverges from the history of our own world when cloud cover delays the
overflight of Cuba which revealed the installation of missile silos in Cuba
by the Soviets for a week. Although
a week may not seem like a long time, it allowed the silos to become more
complete and raised the states of brinksmanship between Kennedy and
Khrushchev.
In the chapters outlining the two leaders, Swedin
paints portraits of men who want to do the right thing for their countries
and the world, but are stymied by their own weaknesses.
In Khrushchev’s case, this weakness manifests in his belief in the
lessons of Communism and his own mixture of paranoia and inferiority.
Kennedy is shown as a stronger individual, wracked by medical
problems but also in a position of having advisors who are more hawkish than
Kennedy and who he doesn’t fully trust, but can’t completely ignore.
While Khrushchev and Kennedy are really the only
“characters” in When Angels Wept,
although Swedin does draw a series of sketches of other (often fictitious)
individuals and their role in events or how the events effected them. These
quick sketches, whether of the German immigrant to Chicago who must deal
with the destruction of her world for the second time, or the Soviet pilot
who finds himself cut off from his superiors in a world which resembles his
worst fears, provides a sense of verisimilitude to the history Swedin is
inventing.
The two halves of the book, the factual and the
fictitious, are woven together nearly seamlessly, and readers who are
unfamiliar with the timeline of the Cuban Missile Crisis may not be able to
put their finger on the moment when Swedin deviates from Kennedy and
Khrushchev’s actual actions. That ambiguity is part of the strength of the
volume since it helps paint a picture of how precarious the situation really
was. Furthermore, it
demonstrates that any and every moment of history can be important, not
simply the ones that appear to be.
Unlike Sobel, Swedin’s book is not entirely separated
from our own world. In an
introduction and an afterword the author explains what he is doing and why
he made some of the choices he made. Furthermore,
while Sobel invented his entire bibliographic apparatus, Swedin uses real
sources (and footnotes them) to demonstrate to the reader that his version
of history was a distinct possibility based on what was actually happening
in the 1960s.
When Angels Wept
provides a chilling alternate history of a time in our own not too distant
past. Swedin sweeps away the
gauze of nostalgia that portrays it as a simpler time and reminds us that
there are dangers in every period, whether offered by global rivals,
terrorists, or misunderstandings and how we respond to those events color
who we will become and what our future will be.
