There is one line in a Joint Chiefs file that has kept me at the dining room table three nights this week. My wife Marilyn says the scanner will still be there in the morning. At a 9 a.m. meeting on Sunday, October 28, 1962, General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force told the other chiefs, “Monday will be the last time to attack the missiles before they become fully operational.”

LeMay lost that argument. The other four chiefs chose to wait for the day’s photographs, and Kennedy sent no bombers.

By about 9:30, a tickertape of Moscow Radio was going around the room. Khrushchev had ordered his officers to stop building the bases and bring the missiles home.

If you were alive that week, you remember how close it felt. These notes show you how close it got inside the Joint Chiefs’ own meeting.

To see why LeMay wanted Monday, you have to go back one day, to Saturday, October 27.

That afternoon, the Joint Staff put a paper on the table calling for “early and timely execution” of the air strike plan. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara asked what that meant. LeMay told him, “Attacking Sunday or Monday.”

At 2:03, Colonel Steakley of the Joint Reconnaissance Group walked in. A U-2 flying over Cuba was 30 to 40 minutes overdue…

Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. was the pilot. He had been shot down and killed over Cuba.

Later that afternoon, General Maxwell Taylor, the chairman, took the Joint Chiefs’ memo to the White House and read it to Kennedy’s advisers. At 6:30 he reported back to the chiefs that the memo said “we should attack no later than 29 October.”

Monday, October 29, was the deadline the Joint Chiefs had set for themselves. When LeMay asked for Monday the next morning, he was holding them to it.

You already know how that Sunday went.

Curtis LeMay died on October 1, 1990. The State Department put his Sunday morning in front of the public on December 31, 1998, on microfiche, eight years after his death.

I was thirteen that Sunday, in Dayton, Ohio. LeMay was born up the road in Columbus.

Dad kept the kitchen radio on all weekend. My brother Denny, three years older than me, did his homework beside it with the sound turned low…

Six years later Denny was in Vietnam. He came home in 1969 and talked Cardinals baseball with me for fifty-two years. Vietnam stayed outside every one of those talks.

I read files about how men like Denny ended up over there. This one is about a Monday that came and went with the bombers still parked.

The other four chiefs wanted to see Sunday’s pictures before they backed a strike. Rudolf Anderson had died taking pictures over Cuba one day earlier.

The plan for Sunday sent six low-level planes over Cuba, routed away from the sites with antiaircraft guns. Waiting for those pictures bought the morning, and Khrushchev’s message used it.

Where were you on Sunday, October 28, 1962? Hit reply and tell me. I read the letters at the dining room table, next to the two file boxes Marilyn wants moved.

Marilyn came out at midnight and read the line over my shoulder. She said, “Monday came anyway, Ray.”

It did. I went to school in Dayton that Monday with my lunch in a paper sack.