ON NOVEMBER 5, the Cubans released the body of Rudy Anderson, still in his flight suit, to the Swiss ambassador in Cuba, and a Swiss pilot flew the remains to Florida.1 The US Air Force conducted an autopsy and determined that missile fragments had penetrated his flight suit, triggering instant decompression, and death likely occurred within seconds. Major Anderson’s body was next flown to Donaldson Air Force Base and transported to his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, for interment on November 6.
Anderson was buried with full military honors. Jet fighter planes soared over the 1,800 mourners at Woodlawn Memorial Park, with one spot in the unit’s formation left open in Rudy’s honor. General Thomas Power represented the air force at the funeral. “It is because of men like Major Anderson, that this country has been able to act with determination during these fateful days,” he said.2
Jane attended her husband’s funeral escorted by an air force doctor and a nurse, who feared for the health of the unborn baby. She was inconsolable and wept openly over her husband’s casket as it was lowered into the cold ground. The president and First Lady did not attend the funeral but did send a large floral arrangement. Jane Anderson quietly accepted the sentiment, but deep down she was angry. When John F. Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, tried to set up a meeting between Jane and the president, she forcefully declined. After Rudy’s death, a pregnant Jane desperately tried to get some answers and gain some insight into what had happened, but the air force stonewalled her: Rudy’s military life and death were classified information. Jane blamed President Kennedy for that.
“My mother admired President Kennedy right up until my father was killed,” their son James Anderson said. “All that changed after my father’s death.… She was in the depths of despair, grieving my father’s death and she was pregnant and hormonal. She took out all her frustration and anger on JFK as Commander in Chief.”3
Rudy Anderson’s family was ordered to move out of their home at Laughlin Air Force Base almost immediately. The cold treatment was customary on all military bases as the presence of a lost soldier or pilot’s family was thought to lower morale. Jane and her boys moved back in with her parents in Georgia. Eight months later, Jane gave birth to a redheaded baby girl, whom she named Robyn—the daughter that she and Rudy had always dreamed of. Jane was a good mother and later became a social worker. She even remarried. But her son Tripp believes that she never got over the death of her beloved Rudy. Jane died in 1981. She was just forty-six years old. Pieces of the wreckage of Rudy Anderson’s U-2 are now on display at three sites in Cuba, including the Museum of the Revolution in Havana.
STEVE HEYSER WAS invited to the White House to receive the president’s thanks for taking the first crucial photos of the Soviet missile installations. But he would not meet with the president one-on-one. General Curtis LeMay accompanied him, and as they drove to the White House, he informed Steve that he had a spin on the story of who took the first photos. He said that because Anderson was dead, Rudy should be the major hero of the crisis, and the four-star general asked Major Heyser if he had a problem with that.4 Heyser, of course, could only answer, “No, sir.” Subsequently, the early air force accounts of the U-2 spy plane involvement in the crisis attributed the initial photos to both Heyser and Anderson.
When LeMay and Heyser entered the Oval Office, Kennedy sat in his comfortable rocking chair, and LeMay made sure he sat on the couch closest to the president, keeping himself between Heyser and JFK. The cigar-chomping general would control the conversation between the U-2 pilot and his commander in chief, and of course LeMay did most of the talking.5
CHUCK MAULTSBY BRISTLED for years over President Kennedy’s offhand remark calling him a “son of a bitch,” but he continued piloting the U-2 and later earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. Chuck gave up the spy plane and returned to the skies as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, where he flew 216 missions, including 70 over North Vietnam.
He returned to the United States as a lieutenant colonel with a total of 233 combat missions under his belt, including those he flew in Korea. He had also earned a Silver Star, but his time in Vietnam had changed him.
“My dad had the utmost respect for the military, but his views changed during Vietnam,” Chuck Maultsby II told the authors of this book. “When it came time for me to join the fight, my dad said no. He didn’t want me to go to Vietnam. In fact he told me that he’d drive me to Canada himself if that’s what it took to keep me out of it.”6
Chuck Maultsby stayed in the military and eventually served as an officer for North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Italy. He retired in 1977 and purchased a fifteen-acre ranch in the Texas hill country with his wife, Jeanne.
“There will always be the reminders of yesteryear; when a white contrail streaks the sky,” he later wrote in his memoir. “I see the silvery swept wing reflections high above me in that bright wonderful blue.… [But] I still look toward tomorrow. Tomorrow is the first day of something.… Tomorrow is and will always be toward the unknown.”7
Colonel Chuck Maultsby died of lung cancer in 1998. He was seventy-two years old. His wife, Jeanne, survived him by almost fourteen years before she passed away at the age of seventy-eight in 2012.
IN 1963, PRESIDENT Kennedy gave the commencement address at the American University in Washington, DC. The Cuban Missile Crisis had forced him to reexamine the Cold War and his onetime foe Nikita Khrushchev. Those tense thirteen days in October 1962 had brought both leaders closer together as the world itself drew perilously close to nuclear war. Since the crisis, JFK had pushed for direct contact with his Soviet counterpart and had a special hotline installed between the White House and the Kremlin. He had a second hotline put in the basement of his home on Cape Cod so that the leaders could discuss future issues themselves without the dangers of misinterpretation.
On this day in early June, the world seemed a warmer and brighter place than it had been that previous October, during the darkest and coldest days of the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union were now working toward a treaty that would outlaw nuclear weapons testing, an outcome inconceivable just months before. It was indeed the dawn of a new era, something the president had promised during his inauguration in 1961. Now, two years later, he was about to give what Nikita Khrushchev called “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”8 President Kennedy stepped to the podium, the sun of late spring splashed across his face, and spoke not only to the graduating students but to all people across the world.
I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is rarely perceived.… [I]t is the most important topic on earth: world peace.… I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces.… And even in the cold war, which brings many burdens to so many nations… our two countries [the United States and the Soviet Union] bear the heaviest burdens.… So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also draw attention to our common interests.… [O]ur most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.9