By Kathryn Boughton, Litchfield County Times

KENTFifty years ago, many Americans trembled at the thought of imminent nuclear war. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stood nose to pugnacious nose in a stare down over the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Neither seemed prepared to blink.

For 13 days, from Oct. 16 to Oct. 28, civilization stood on the brink of annihilation as the two superpowers vied for dominance. So real was the peril that First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy reportedly begged her husband, Please dont send me anywhere. I just want to be with you and die with you.

Related - Photos: The Cuban Missile Crisis

The First Ladys fear was reflected throughout a land that had grown accustomed to the thought of nuclear peril. During the chilliest years of the Cold War, children were schooled in undoubtedly ineffectual responses to nuclear explosions, while prosperous families resorted to building and stocking bomb shelters in their back yards. Suddenly, it appeared, those precautions might be needed. The world held its breath as missile-bearing Russian ships steamed toward Cuba.

The story of the confrontation and its denouement has been told many times, but never from the personal perspective that former international reporter Donald S. Connery of Kent brings to his latest book, Escape from Oblivion, A Moscow Correspondents Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The account, recently released as an e-book and available on Amazon.com, traces Mr. Connerys experiences in reporting from Moscowa much-coveted experience truncated by his frank reporting of the crisis for Time and Life magazines.

Those were the two weeks that might have ended human history. Whole forests have been felled for books about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but what has been missing is that no one has written about their personal experience in covering it. I think this is uniqueand it may stay unique because everyone who was there is dead or dying, said the octogenarian author this week. I am one of the last standing veterans of the Depression, World War II and the Cold War.

Related - Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis at Fifty

Mr. Connery had been in Moscow for only a matter of weeks when the crisis erupted. He had won the coveted assignment after making an unprecedented Trans-Siberian rail trip with photojournalist John Launois in 1961. Taken during one of the most dangerous years of the Cold World, when the Soviets were bent on forcing the U.S., Great Britain and France out of their occupation zones in West Berlin, the trip gave ordinary Americans insight into the Russian people.

I hope the thing that comes across in this book is my affection for the Russian people, a people that has suffered perhaps more than any other [in Europe] said Mr. Connery this week. When we made the Trans-Siberian trip we found them to be big-hearted, big country people. After we got past the initial suspicions, we found them to be just so friendlyand these were supposed to be our enemies.

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Kent man's book recounts personal experience of Cuban Missile Crisis 50 years later