Mayday.

• Author: Peters, Charles

Mayday.

Michael Beschloss. Harper & Row, $19.95. This is an absorbing account of the shooting down of the U-2 in 1960 and of the impact of the event on Soviet-American relations. It, and not the Cuban missile crisis, Beschloss suggests, was the beginning of Khrushchev's decline in the Kremlin power game and of the rise of those who believed only military force counted in relations with Washington. Why did Eisenhower agree to send the U-2 on its fatal flight just days before the summit conference that was scheduled to take place in Paris...