Bonus Episode: Mid-Season 1 Recap and Explainer

04/18/21 • 13 min

In this bonus episode, we provide a brief recap of the story from Episodes 1 through 5, as well as some commentary on the real history it departs from and is based on. The purpose of this episode is to bring listeners up to speed on the storyline, if they did not start with Episode 1, and also put the story in the context of actual history.

These bonus episodes will come out twice a season: once at mid-season (between episodes 5 and 6), and again in the gap between seasons.

Length: 13:29

Next Episode: April 25, 2021

These bonus episodes will come out twice a season: once at mid-season (between episodes 5 and 6), and again in the gap between seasons.

Length: 13:29

Next Episode: April 25, 2021

Previous Episode

Episode 5: Stilettos in Moscow

In this episode, the focus shifts to Moscow and a look at changes in the Communist world. Nikita Khrushchev, reviled in the Soviet Communist Party for buckling under to Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, is blissfully unaware of the threat to his power bubbling up in the ranks of the Party leadership. A coup is clearly afoot, but the competition for which bureaucratic apparatchik will replace him—Brezhnev, Suslov, Malenkov of somebody else—becomes unexpectedly fierce. Waiting in the shadows, Alexander Shelepin, former head of the KGB, is sitting on a “dictatorship coach” and a cache of secret documents that he hopes will give him the edge in the power struggle that breaks out in the Kremlin in the fall of 1964.

Length: 26:02

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode (Bonus, Recap & Explainer): April 18, 2021

Next Regular Episode: April 25, 2021

Next Episode

Episode 6: Decision on Vietnam

President John F. Kennedy, re-elected with a narrower margin of victory than he expected in 1964, has spent most of the last year deferring the big decision on policy in Southeast Asia: commit U.S. forces directly, which seems to be the only way to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, or give up and go home. In spring 1965 he finally makes a decision. As American combat boots start to touch the soil of Vietnam, Kennedy finds himself boxed in by further difficulties on civil rights and the dissatisfaction of his most trusted adviser: his own brother.

Length: 25:01

Show Notes For This Episode

Next Episode: May 9, 2021