It was, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote long afterward, “the most dangerous moment in human history.” On the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy had reviewed photographic evidence of the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off America’s shores. Thus began 13 days of existential crisis. The whole nature of life, the shape and future of humanity, was at stake. The Cuban missile crisis is a thrilling tale — but it is also a chilling one, for the showdown could easily have gone another, darker way, and none of us would be here to learn its lessons.

But we are here, and we are facing another crisis, and we are hungry for whatever the past can teach us about how to survive moments of great stress and strain. President Kennedy was cool, rational, careful and willing to compromise. He convened Ex Comm, a gathering of top officials, as well as opening private channels to Moscow. His view was informed by the writing of Basil Liddell Hart, the British military authority, who had advised leaders in crisis to “keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. … Avoid self-righteousness like the Devil — nothing is so self-blinding.” As Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows us, the key point is that a president should be driven by facts, not preconceptions; by the larger good, not by pride. For pride, as the Bible taught us long ago, goeth before a fall.

The literature of crisis is rich, and in our own hour of slow-motion but indisputably real panic, there’s utility in re-engaging with the stories of how leaders and citizens have reacted amid tension and tumult. The vicissitudes of history always challenge us in new and often confounding ways; that’s in the nature of things. Still, as Winston Churchill once remarked, “The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope” — the hope that human ingenuity, reason and character can combine to save us from the abyss and keep us on a path, in another phrase of Churchill’s, to broad, sunlit uplands.

Robert Kennedy’s account of the Cuban missile crisis is brief, bracing and revealing. I recommend the 1999 edition from W. W. Norton with a foreword by Schlesinger and an afterword by Richard E. Neustadt and Graham T. Allison. The book gives us a realistic, sober, almost unemotional understanding of how a president and his advisers should act in a crisis. “President Kennedy,” Robert Kennedy wrote, “wanted people who raised questions, who criticized, on whose judgment he could rely, who presented an intelligent point of view, regardless of their rank or viewpoint.” And, when it was time to go public, the president trusted the people. There was no happy talk, no mixed messages, no self-pity. “My fellow citizens,” Kennedy told the nation six days into the crisis, “let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead — months in which both our patience and our will will be tested, months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers.”