William Devane President John F. Kennedy Martin Sheen Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Howard Da Silva Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev Ralph Bellamy U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson James Hong U.N. Secretary-General U Thant Michael Lerner White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger James T. Callahan David Powers, Special Assistant to the President Keene Curtis John McCone, Director CIA Charles Cyphers Press Photographer Nehemiah Persoff Soviet Foreign Secretary Andrei Gromyko Albert Paulsen Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin Clifford David Theodore Sorensen, Special Counsel Dana Elcar US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara John Dehner Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson Larry Gates US Secretary of State Dean Rusk Peter Donat David Ormsby-Gore, British Ambassador to U.S. Andrew Duggan Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Army Chief of Staff James Olson Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy Richard Eastham Gen. David M. Shoup, USMC Commandant Kenneth Tobey Chief of Naval Operations George W. Anderson Jr. John Randolph Under Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs George Ball Ron Feinberg French President Charles de Gaulle Paul Lambert ABC News reporter John Scali Harris Yulin KGB Agent Alexander Fomin Thayer David uncredited narrator