How long have we known the truth about the Cuban missile crisis?

I "agree" with the reader cited below by James Fallows in his continuing series on threat inflation and ensuing U.S. military engagements:

I said that nearly all the major official "threats" of the modern era proved in retrospect to have been hyped. Missile gap, Tonkin Gulf, WMD, etc. Reader JA immediately replied, "You left out terrorism." And reader AS wrote:

It's true that we came close to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. But according to a well documented article in the Atlantic [plus others],  the missiles themselves were an inflated threat, i.e., according to US generals at the time did not materially hurt US security and could easily be traded, as they eventually secretly were, for US missiles in Turkey. 

Better dead than red, revisited

Please excuse my flipping this post forward; it got buried...

Early this year, in a 'come to it cold' look at John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, I was struck by its beleaguered tone -- its somber sense that freedom and even human life itself were on a double knife's edge of communist domination or nuclear war.

In Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, I just happened on a smidgeon of context:

In 1961 Americans were asked whether the country should "fight an all-out nuclear war rather than live under communist rule." Eighty-seven percent of men said yes, while "only 75 percent of the women felt that way -- proof that women are pacifist only in comparison to men of the same time and society (location 11629).