The historic news was buried in a routine Tass broadcast servicing newspapers in Central Asia. Picked up by an alert U.S. monitor in the Middle East, it was flashed to Washington, arrived at the White House just as President John Kennedy was leaving for a press conference in the auditorium of the new
State Department Building. At 4:50 o'clock that afternoon. President Kennedy was back in his oval office, talking to aides, when Foreign Policy Adviser McGeorge Bundy walked in with a yellow-slip of Teletype paper bearing the report, which had just been verified by the Central Intelligence Agency. Then, still two...