On Dec. 13, 2003, the U.S. military caught up with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein who had been in hiding since the beginning of the U.S. invasion. Here, NBC's Richard Engel remembers his tour of Saddam's "spider hole" and the tiny farmhouse where he lived in squalor.

I looked down into the hole through its tiny entrance, a square no bigger than a placemat. It felt like I was looking into an underground cave that had been accidentally discovered by a child who slipped in and was now trapped. I was on my knees, peering into the opening, my head below ground. It was dark, musty and damp, and the air didn’t circulate. It seemed like the kind of a place where spiders would live.

I'll admit it: I was excited.  I was about to descend into the final place where Saddam Hussein took refuge, take pictures and show them to the world.  I felt a bit like Jacques Cousteau.  I stood up, brushed off the dust and pulled off my flak jacket, ripping back the velcro straps somewhat excitedly.  There was no way to fit inside with the bulky Kevlar jacket lined with ceramic 'strike plates.' Jacket off, I put both feet into the hole and lowered myself into the depths. 

My feet quickly landed on the floor of 'the room' below me.  I switched on my flashlight and painted the walls with dim yellow light.  It looked like a subterranean tomb: rectangular, 10 feet long, four feet high, and three feet wide.  All that was missing was a sarcophagus. 

The walls were covered in rough concrete.  The floor was lined with a few boards, and a single light bulb hung from the ceiling.  A fan sat in the corner, attached to a plastic hose that exited the chamber the wall to the outside.  The hose and fan let Saddam breath when the tomb was plugged, like it was when U.S. forces arrived without preamble, unexpected and uninvited.

"When we opened the hole, Saddam popped his head out," explained the colonel, encircled by a knot of about a dozen reporters.  The colonel was relaxed, smiling, joking and swapping persiflage with the journalists.  It was a 'good news' day and this was the military's chance to play show and tell.

"Saddam put his hands up and said, 'I am Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq and I am ready to negotiate,'" the colonel said.  The scribblers frantically scratched notes into pads, cameramen marked time codes, and the snappers shot every angle, their big black cameras clicking like crickets. 

"And what did the soldiers say to him?" one of us asked.

"One of the soldiers said, 'President Bush sends his regards.'"  We all chuckled.

Saddam's cave, or 'spider hole' as some U.S. military commanders and American commentators started calling it, wasn't isolated in the center of a field.  It was in the backyard of a tiny farmhouse, surrounded by a fence, pomegranates and wildflowers.  According to the military, Saddam spent most of his time in the farmhouse, and only slipped into his underground bunker when danger was close.  The colonel gave us a half hour to explore the house before the Blackhawks would fly us back to base.  Ironically, the base was one of Saddam's main palaces just a few miles away in Tirkrit.  While Saddam was living in squalor, and sometimes like a mole, the U.S. troops hunting him were down the street in his palace.  It must have annoyed Saddam more than just a little a bit.

The farmhouse had only one room, appointed with a twin bed and wooden dining table. It had the feel of a poor-man's bachelor pad, inhabited by someone clearly not used to cooking, cleaning or taking care of himself.  The bed was unmade.  The sheets were dirty.  Broken eggs were rotting on the floor.  Saddam apparently gave up cooking.  A half-eaten candy bar sat on his bedside stand, along with a tube of face moisturizer.

Saddam often compared himself to Baghdad's ancient caliphs, the leaders of the Islamic empire who governed with a mix of cruelty and beneficience, striving to be both loved and feared.  In the fabled accounts of their exploits like the epic "Tales of 1,001 Nights" the caliphs would often dress as commoners and walk the streets in disguise to gage the public's opinion of their rule.  Standing in Saddam's farm house, I couldn't help but think that he was like a caliph who'd fled his palace with only the clothes on his back, abandoned by all but a few of his servants and totally unable to function on his own.

After we filmed, photographed and documented every corner of the farmhouse and the 'spider hole' out back, we loaded into the choppers and returned to base.  As far as I know it was the only tour the U.S. military gave to reporters.  The military said it would destroy the spider hole, filling it in, so it wouldn't become a tourist attraction, or shrine for Saddam loyalists.

Saddam is now on trial, ironically again in a courthouse close to one of his former palaces occupied by the U.S. military.  He lives in a cell not much bigger than the farmhouse where he hid.  His visitors tell me the cell has a small, enclosed pen where Saddam reads, smokes, writes poems and tends a few plants.  In November, Saddam was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity.  Although few doubt Saddam's guilt or overall responsibility for the deaths and oppression of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, many human rights groups said his trial lacked necessary judicial standards.  Saddam is expected to be hanged sometime between January and March.

Click here to watch the NBC Nightly News coverage of Saddam Hussein's capture.

On Dec. 4, 1992, President George Bush announced that he was sending troops into Somalia on a humanitarian relief effort. Here, NBC News Pentagon Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski recalls that announcement and the ensuing conflict that resulted in the now infamous "Black Hawk Down" battle.

In the final weeks of 1992, I like most White House correspondents, was focused on the transition to President-elect Bill Clinton who had just defeated President George Bush. The last thing on our minds was the possibility that the lame-duck President Bush would order U.S. military forces into a high-risk mission overseas. Somalia? It sent most of us reporters scrambling for a world atlas.

On Dec. 4, President Bush delivered an oval office address to the nation in which he announced Operation Restore Hope, a mission designed to ensure that vital relief reached more than 1 million starving refugees caught in the middle of a violent civil war in the East African nation of Somalia.  80 percent of desperately-needed food and medical relief was stolen by armed militias.  500,000 Somali civilians had already been killed or starved to death.  It was a human disaster.

The day after President Bush announced Restore Hope, 1,300 U.S. Marines and Navy SEALS hit the beaches at the capital city Mogadishu.  Backed by a United Nations resolution authorizing the use of military force, their mission was to provide armed protection for the international relief shipments.

While President Bush's decision gained widespread support, it also drew a fair amount of criticism.  Political critics and skeptical reporters suggested the President was engaged in a little political grandstanding, playing the humanitarian in an effort to enhance his legacy.  Some Clinton aides claimed Bush had dumped Somalia into the incoming President's lap.  But Bill Clinton issued a written statement supporting the decision and praising Bush's leadership.

As one who covered President Bush for four years, I personally found him to be an honorable and decent man who would presumably commit U.S. forces to a dangerous mission for what may at the time seem all the right reasons.  Nevertheless, it was hard to imagine that this humanitarian gesture would go so horribly wrong, drag American forces into the middle of a civil war and end in a costly retreat.
                                                                                                    
While the relief operations initially proved successful, U.S. military forces were inexorably being sucked into "mission creep."  By March 1993, the U.N. Security Council ramped up the mission.  International "peacekeepers," including the Americans, would now become "peacemakers."  American forces were now expected to take on the armed militias.  The war was on and Bill Clinton was now the Commander in Chief.

During the Presidential campaign, Clinton was accused of being a draft dodger. Questions were raised about his ability to lead the military.  At the White House all reporters watched closely for any sign of weakness.  For nearly a year, Clinton hung tough, until "Black Hawk Down."

On Oct. 3, 1993, U.S. special operations forces launched a combined air and ground operation in Mogadishu, aimed at capturing two top lieutenants of the most notorious warlord, Mohammed Aidid.  During the operation, two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in a ferocious 15-hour battle that killed 18 American soldiers and wounded 79 more.  The battle, dramatically documented in Mark Bowden's bestseller, Black Hawk Down, was the beginning of the end for the U.S. military mission in Somalia.

By December, Clinton's Secretary of Defense Les Aspin resigned over Somalia. Within six months after the bloody battle of Mogadishu, President Clinton had cut the losses and pulled all American combat forces out of Somalia.  Today, 13 years after Black Hawk Down, a shaky Somalia government is under threat from Islamist terrorists believed to be backed by al-Qaida.

As a Pentagon correspondent for NBC News years later, I talked with U.S. military commanders involved in or familiar with the Somalia relief effort.  To this day they insist that operation was a success. U.S. forces had captured the two targets they were after and killed a large number of enemy forces.  The commanders believe President Clinton withdrew from Somalia strictly for political reasons and are convinced the overall mission still had a chance to succeed.

It sounds much like the argument we heard 30 years ago about Vietnam.  It sounds much like the argument we hear today about Iraq.

Click here to watch the 1992 NBC report on troops into Somalia.

On. Nov. 28, 1994, the notorious necrophiliac and cannibalistic murderer Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered by another inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wis.

Dahmer was found guilty in 1991 of 15 counts of murder and sentenced to 15 life terms - one of the harshest sentences ever imposed in Wisconsin's legal history. Dahmer met his fate along with inmate Jesse Anderson at the hands of Christopher Scarver, who beat both of the men to death while they were on unsupervised work detail.

Dahmer's remains were cremated and, because of an argument between his parents, were divided in half between his birth mother Joyce, and his father and stepmother, Lionel and Shari.

Many of Dahmer's haunts had become as infamous as the murders he committed, making a return to normalcy very difficult, particularly for the families of his victims. In fact, the Oxford Apartments, where Dahmer had lived and committed the murders, were ultimately demolished because of the great notoriety surrounding the case.

Here, NBC Correspondent Dawn Fratangelo recalls covering Dahmer's murder and the sense of hope it seemed to instill in the community scarred by his infamy:

Jeffrey Dahmer's macabre murder spree shook the country, the world even, and especially the folks of the Midwest.  The neighborhood where he lived in Milwaukee and the bars where he would prey on young boys and men became notorious landmarks.  I remember the NBC News crew going out of its way to show me the landmarks the first time I traveled with the crew to Milwaukee. 

"That's where Jeffrey Dahmer used to hang out," the cameraman said.

I was with that same crew as we drove to Portage, Wis., to cover the breaking news that Jeffrey Dahmer had been killed in prison. The crew had covered his trial and sentencing.  I had not since they took place before I became the correspondent in our Midwest bureau in Chicago.  But during the few hours it took to get to the prison, local talk radio made it clear how the Midwest felt about Dahmer's fateful ending.  Maybe -- they were saying on the radio -- the infamy would end.

The atmosphere around the prison did not reflect the frenzy surrounding Dahmer's murder or the ones he had committed.  In fact, the landscape was bucolic almost -- rolling, rural hills and a pretty, white clapboard house were just across the road from the neatly structured brick prison.  How odd, I remember thinking.  What a long way from the hell that Dahmer had created in his apartment-turned-dungeon. 

Information soon trickled out that an inmate had killed Dahmer and another notorious convict housed in the maximum-security prison.  The three had been part of a work crew apparently left unmonitored by guards for 20 minutes.  That raised eyebrows, leading some to believe the killing was allowed to happen.  The inmate accused was a black man. Many of Dahmer's victims had been minorities or the underprivileged.  The other convict killed had falsely accused a black man of the murder he was actually responsible for.  And so it seemed "prison justice" had prevailed inside the walls.

Some of the family members of Dahmer's victims voiced vindication, satisfaction and relief.  After a few days -- the talk radio chatter about Dahmer grew fainter.  And I kept thinking about that atmosphere and landscape surrounding the prison:  quiet, calm, peaceful.  It seemed to reflect what the Midwest so wanted to return to.  The nightmarish reign of Jeffrey Dahmer was over.

Watch Dawn's Nov. 28, 1994 report

On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. It is difficult if not impossible to offer new information on this historic incident -- a behind-the-scenes glimpse of one the most notorious assassinations in modern history. Yet, in spite of the depth and breadth of knowledge surrounding Kennedy's death, the intrigue remains.

Perhaps it is due to conspiracy theories that still abound; perhaps it is the pondering over the years about what could have been had Kennedy survived. More than four decades later, one thing is certain: Kennedy's assassination was a defining moment -- a tragedy experienced on a scale, and received at a speed, previously unknown.

Here, NBC News Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss offers his reflections upon the assassination and the days that followed, and discusses how Kennedy's murder became not just an infamous moment in history, but a turning point for the way news is delivered and consumed:

I was a 7-year-old at Western Avenue School in Flossmoor, Ill., that Friday afternoon when our teacher, Mrs. Larocca, astonishingly crying, announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Through the long weekend at home, my 5-year-old brother and I were glued to the television screen -- three days of funeral music, still photos of JFK as a childhood football player and Navy hero, the late President's two children, Caroline and John, who were almost the same age we were, beside their father's flag-adorned casket.

On Sunday morning, Nov. 24, I was watching NBC, the only one of the three networks that broadcast live Jack Ruby's attack on the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. (NBC's correspondent, the late Tom Pettit, was there at the Dallas jail.)

Walking into the next room, I told my mother that Oswald had just been shot. She said, "I'm going to turn off that television. You've been watching too much. Now you're making things up!"

TV was still so primitive that when NBC News first broke into the soap operas on Friday, correspondent Frank McGee had to repeat into the microphone what he was hearing by telephone from NBC's reporter in Dallas, Robert MacNeil (who later founded PBS' MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour). 

(Watch the clip of McGee and MacNeil trying to overcome technical difficulties)

MacNeil had just asked a slight young man outside the Texas School Book Depository to direct him to the nearest telephone. He later suspected that the man was Oswald himself, making his getaway.

With the retrospect of history, we can fully understand what a milestone that brutal televised weekend was. 1963 was the first year more Americans got their news from TV than newspapers, and JFK's murder hastened that process. 

It was also the first time that Americans were full participants in a national ordeal. When George Washington died in 1799, many Americans did not know it for weeks. When Lincoln was murdered in 1865, the new invention of the telegraph allowed them to learn the news almost simultaneously.

But thanks to the cathode ray tube, Americans experienced John Kennedy's murder in a far more primal way than earlier national tragedies like the Johnstown Flood or President McKinley's assassination. 

Americans too young to remember that day in 1963 might find John Kennedy an interesting or admirable historical figure. But having lacked the experience of living through our first truly national funeral on that long, televised, ugly weekend, most can't quite comprehend why many of us who did are still so affected by the trauma of his death.

Watch the NBC announcement of JFK's death

Watch Michael Beschloss on the Today show talk about tapes of Lyndon Johnson and Jacqueline Kennedy shortly after JFK's death

Michael Beschloss is the author of several books, including:

• The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945
• Taking Charge (1997) and Reaching for Glory (2001), both about Lyndon Johnson
• Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1980)

Michael's newest title, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789 - 1989, is to be published by Simon and Schuster in May, 2007.

Our blog series looking at past news events will not appear today as it normally does on Mondays. Instead, we will offer a special Real to Reel package on Wednesday, Nov. 22, the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Our piece will reflect on the assassination and how it changed news reporting.

As you step off the elevators on the third floor of 30 Rockefeller, the home of Nightly News, you can't help but see the large, glass display case that fills the center of the foyer.

Inside are numerous photos, pages of notes, a flak jacket, cameras, a helmet and other items that once belonged to NBC correspondents, cameramen and crew -- those who lost their lives while covering the news.

Among these items is a memorial for cameraman Bob Brown, 36, and Correspondent Don Harris, 42 -- both of whom were murder victims in Jonestown, Guyana, on Nov. 18, 1978.

Those old enough to remember what became one of, if not the most notorious mass murder-suicide in history, likely remembers that these two NBC staffers were gunned down along with California Congressman Leo Ryan. Brown and Harris were covering Ryan's trip to Jonestown to investigate troubling reports from the "People's Temple." They were killed on an airstrip as they were about to leave and just hours before 900 residents of Jonestown drank cyanide-laced fruit punch.

"Showing extraordinary bravery, cameraman Bob Brown recorded the attack, perhaps even the shot that killed him. Rep. Ryan and Correspondent Don Harris were wounded. The gunmen then approached and fired execution-style into each victim's head," the NBC memorial reads.

NBC Correspondent Fred Francis wasn't with Brown and Harris, but he arrived in Guyana shortly after news of their deaths and the mass suicide surfaced. Here, he shares his memories of covering this grisly story and how it has affected him in the years since:

The evil of Jim Jones and the macabre ending of more than 900 lives in his horrid Jonestown enclave called The People’s Temple deep in the Guyana jungle is the single most traumatic story of my 40 years as a journalist.

For me, it began in Miami where I was based as an NBC News correspondent, largely responsible for covering South America. I was home with my 9-year-old son, Chris, watching early evening television when we heard the bulletin interrupt programming that an American congressman, Leo Ryan and an NBC News correspondent, Don Harris, had been killed in Guyana.

Hundreds of our family and friends heard the same announcement. While Chris answered one telephone line repeating for all callers, "Dad is not dead. He is here but heading to Guyana," I was on another line renting a Lear Jet to take me there.

It took me two full days to get Guyanese government permission to fly into a dirt strip deep in the jungle where bodies had been rotting in the sun for three days. I was the only television journalist to make it to that unbelievable scene. But to this day it was one exclusive I would gladly give up. That killing field has remained burned into my memory, both the scene of the dead piled on top of one another and the stench of rotting flesh, these past three decades.

That day, famed photographer David Hume Kennerly, then working for Time, was one of my companions into that nightmare. Kennerly and my NBC News crew begged a ride into Jonestown with U.S Army medical examiners. The price of the flight was that we had to do the official body count. The Guyanese had said there were about 400 dead. Our count was roughly 650. Days later, the Army raised the number to over 900.

Kennerly and I were stunned. How had we missed 250 bodies? The Army pathologist's answer: there was a gully behind the main building where suicide victims were piled three and four deep.

For the next three decades as an NBC News correspondent covering the world, Jonestown was the metric I used to measure all the wars and natural disasters. Nothing ever compared, bothered me as much or was as impossible to forget.

Watch the broadcast coverage

This week's Real to Reel takes a look at how production of the Nightly News broadcast has changed over the years, and how much of it has remained the same.

Here, Nightly News Director Brett Holey offers his take on production of the Nov. 9, 1977 broadcast anchored by John Chancellor and David Brinkley, and offers some behind-the-scenes tidbits and trivia:

Twenty-nine years later, so much has changed, and yet so much is the same.

OK, the look and the sound is a time warp.

The music is such a mid-70s sound you can almost smell the polyester. It was composed by Henry Mancini and its rhythm and orchestration  (a little techno, a little smooth jazz, very movie of the week) were imitated in local news themes for years. Yet it was a relatively brief 8 years after this newscast that John Williams composed "The Mission," the theme that we use to this day.

Watch the broadcast montage

(If you find old news theme music interesting you may want to check out http://www.geocities.com/netnewsmusic/nbc.html )

The scenic design is extremely simple and understated by today's standards (with the possible exception of the new Today set).

I can hear the pitch meeting: "Their sets will be identical, but opposite. Warm 'Earth tones' for Chancellor in New York. Cool blues for Brinkley in DC. They'll both stand next to a big projection screen, but on opposite sides."

This set made use of a production technique that was popular around this time, the "gobo" -- creating a fake ceiling for your news set by hanging a small plastic ceiling just above and in front of the lens on your opening shot. The result was an optical illusion of a hi-tech room while masking out the studio lighting grid.

I bet producing graphics for those big screens was a bear. I don't know if the visuals were 35mm slides or one of the other techniques like "Vizmo" that were popular at the time. Any of them would have required a lot more physical labor and chemical processes than are used in today's PhotoShop- and AfterEffects-dominated graphics operations.

Broadcast graphics departments of the 60s, 70s and early 80s were virtual toxic-waste repositories filled with photo chemicals, volatile adhesives and all manner of dyes, papers and films. There were large rooms filled with file cabinets full of "art cards" and Associated Press photos to be used in photographic and electronic compositing of graphics.

Computerized graphics and animation were in their infancy. Electronic character generators were around, but generally did one or two typestyles, in one color. Their production features were quite limited. The first electronic "still store" devices were becoming available but the look of this broadcast would suggest that it was a combination of early electronic graphics and optical sources like 16mm film and 35mm slides.

The animated titles at the top of the broadcast look rudimentary today, but were very likely a big investment and big achievement at the time. Star Wars had been released earlier that year and the "echo trails" on this type were just one of the big influences of that film. (Remember the slanted-back type rolls and star field backgrounds that appeared on everything for the next 5 years?)

Yes, this broadcast is a time warp yet there are basic, underlying principals that are the same.

The director of Nightly News at the time was a gentleman by the name of Norman Cook. Julian Finkelstein took over directing duties in 1983. I replaced Julian in 1997.

The times and technology we have worked through are very different yet our goals have been similar -- to create a broadcast that is visually fresh and interesting. To help the anchor and editorial staff illustrate the news in a way that helps the audience understand while always remaining editorially responsible and in good taste.

The big screens next to Brinkley and Chancellor were pretty basic, yet helped the viewer grasp the topic quickly.  A picture of a dollar and a line of text told viewers this was a story about Fed Chairman Arthur Burns. A stock photo of croissant and coffee for the closer let you know it had something to do with pastry. This is essentially what we've been doing with moving video and large projection screens since 1996.

The format is vastly different and the pace of today's Nightly is considerably more up-tempo. There are days we do more graphics in the first 2 minutes of the broadcast than this broadcast had in half an hour.  Yet the things that leave the strongest impression on me are the good writing, story choice and the personality of the anchors.

I had the pleasure of working a bit with David Brinkley toward the end of his career and there was something about the way he would crack himself up while telling a story that was sure to make me laugh as well. It was just a small part of what made him a giant in our industry, but I think it was among his most endearing qualities. (It was also a hazard to a director. Try cutting a fast-paced Brinkley "roundtable" while giggling.)

Chancellor takes a dignified swipe at the French in his intro to the closer and leaves you wishing you'd seen that croissant piece. (Qu'est-ce que c'est la margarine?)

While outstanding reporting and responsible journalism will always be our main business, it's lighter moments like these that many viewers remember most and help make a connection with an anchor. It's as true today as it was then.

Today's "viewers" have the added advantage of avenues like the Daily Nightly and Early Nightly to get that glimpse of Brian and our correspondents outside the broadcast, and e-mail makes it even more of a two-way conversation.

I bet David Brinkley would have had one helluva a blog, but I just can't imagine buying the Henry Mancini theme as a ringtone.

Final thoughts:

This Brinkley/Chancellor broadcast was probably the second-highest rated at the time. Walter Cronkite was a solid No. 1 from his blue-gray, round Formica desk in front of a simple, wire frame mercator projection of the earth.
On ABC the strained duo of Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters was a year into their 18-month, ratings-challenged run.   

In November 1977 I was a senior in high school, living in southern Michigan. I was interested in broadcast journalism so I convinced the anchor of WTOL-TV in Toledo, Ohio, to allow me and two friends to watch the eleven o'clock news from the station. I remember thinking that the anchor was a blow-hard but my friends and I, watching from the control room, were fascinated by the fast-talking young man who was telling everyone what to do. We found out later he was the director. Both my friends said right then that they wanted to be a director of a newscast. I didn't.

Watch the broadcast montage

On Oct. 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the American public on national television, announcing that U.S. spy planes had discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba, just 90 miles off the U.S. coastline. The sites were nearing completion when discovered and housed missiles that could have hit numerous major cities in the Southeast and Central United States.In his address, Kennedy announced that he had ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and that he would remedy the situation through military force if necessary.

Watch the opening of President Kennedy's speech

Watch NBC's special coverage of the crisis

NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell was still a teenager when the crisis took place, but remembers it clearly and covered the 40th anniversary of the event from Cuba in 2002.
Here, Andrea shares her recollections:

I arrived in Havana in October, 2002, to cover an unusual reunion: the first gathering of American, Cuban and Soviet survivors of the missile crisis, along with journalists and historians eager to see how they would confront each other four decades later. Fidel Castro had arranged the retrospective. The idea was to have the participants share their personal notes, in the interest of better understanding an episode that had brought the superpowers so close to the brink.

When the crisis took place, I was in high school. Having been raised during the Cold War years of "duck and cover" civil defense drills, I should have been psychologically prepared for the showdown.  But the missile crisis was a powerful shadow over my high school years.  We were just kids, and for a while, we thought our nation was truly going to war.

Forty years after the showdown, I found myself in Cuba, studying newly uncovered documents that showed just how close the Kennedy administration and the Soviets had come to nuclear war. According to one of the participants, Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, Kennedy was determined to get the missiles out, and do it peacefully.  But Castro, assuming the Americans would invade, urged the Soviets to attack the U.S. first. He wrote a letter to Khrushchev saying that the Americans would invade within 24 to 48 hours. And that the Russians would be next.  Castro's message: Don't let them do it to you. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy's speechwriter, told me that he had even written a speech to use in case the president ordered an attack against Cuba.

Sitting around a large table, Castro showed previously classified documents to Kennedy's Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara. McNamara said: "At the end, we avoided nuclear war, nuclear catastrophe, by the narrowest of margins." And Castro listened as newly disclosed documents described wild CIA plans to kill the Cuban leader by planting a bomb in his SCUBA diving suit. Castro joked that it was a different time, and had to be taken with a sense of humor. A far cry from the revolutionary who rashly argued with the Russians that if they wouldn't fight the Americans, "We will resist by ourselves." As the stories were told, the former Soviet generals - some still wearing their musty uniforms from that earlier era - sat stonily.  Clearly, they were not enjoying reminiscenses about an episode that could only be viewed as a humiliating retreat for the former superpower.   

On a brutally hot day, I sat in a garden behind the Cuban conference center with Sergo Mikoyan, then an aide to his father, a top Soviet official who was sent to tell Castro the Russians would not launch a nuclear war for him.

"How close did we come to nuclear war?" I asked.

Mikoyan pinched his fingers together. Very close indeed.

In fact, he told me, his father's secret cables from Havana to Moscow revealed that in November 1962 - a month after the missile crisis was supposedly over - Castro still wanted to keep smaller tactical nuclear weapons the Russians still had in Cuba. Only after Castro ordered his troops to fire on any low-flying U.S. planes did the Russians get really worried and insist on removing all their weapons - even those Kennedy never knew were there.

As the histories of the crisis were being reopened and rewritten, attention also focused on two little-known men who played important roles in first spotting the missiles: Dino Bruggiano, a former CIA analyst who interpreted the images taken by U.S. reconaissance planes, and William Ecker, the U-2 pilot who dared to enter Cuban air space to record the critical evidence.    

At the end of the conference, Castro, whom I had interviewed during previous visits, invited me to his office to share thoughts about the conference. In a telling sign that relations with the U.S. had improved somewhat, at least back then, he offered a glass of merlot from California, from a vintage that had been featured at a recent trade show in Havana. (This was before the Bush administration tightened the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba two years ago.) I told him I had to rush to catch my flight home, which led him to offer me a faster way to the airport - a ride in his car. On the way to the airport, I asked Castro for his impressions of the former Soviet generals whom he had just seen for the first time in forty years. He shook his head and said, "They have no sense of humor, those Russians!"  It was remarkable that anyone, especially Castro, could find humor in the missile crisis - even after four decades. 

As he now lies in his hospital bed, according to some reports, fatally ill, I wonder if the Cuban leader still thinks about his showdown with Kennedy, and if so, what it now means to him.

On Oct. 17, 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced it would cut exports of oil to the United States and other nations providing military aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur war. At the time, OPEC said exports would be reduced by 5 percent each month until Israel evacuated the occupied territories from the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

VIDEO: Watch the Oct. 17, 1973 broadcast report anchored by John Chancellor

A full embargo was imposed in December, creating a serious energy crisis in the United States. NBC's George Lewis recalls what it was like to cover the embargo announcement and the subsequent fuel shortage: 

I vividly remember the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 because I had just been assigned to the brand new NBC News bureau in Houston when the story broke. Since Houston prides itself as the "energy capital" of America, we were in the thick of the action, talking to oil experts, energy moguls and consumer groups on a daily basis.With the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war, the OPEC countries halted oil shipments to the United States and other countries that supported Israel. Soon, gasoline stations here were running on empty, with long lines of customers waiting for their turn at the pumps.In many places, officials instituted "odd-even" rationing systems where motorists with odd numbered license plates could buy gasoline only on odd numbered days and those with even numbered plates could buy only on even numbered days. The crisis spurred calls for conservation, with the Nixon administration pushing the slogan, "don't be fuelish." Congress enacted a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour. By the time the embargo was over, the price of a barrel of Saudi crude had quadrupled, from $2.41 to $10.73; and gasoline, which had sold for an average price of 38.5 cents a gallon before the embargo, was headed toward the dollar-a-gallon mark.Now, 33 years later, we hear many of the same things we heard back then: we're too dependent on foreign supplies of crude oil, we need to conserve more, we need to drive more efficient automobiles, we need to find alternate sources of renewable energy. But those warnings I first heard in Houston in 1973 have gone largely ignored. Today, the U.S. is more dependent on foreign oil than it was in 1973--importing up to 60% of its supply, most of it from volatile places like the Middle East, Venezuela and Nigeria. We have not broken our addiction to foreign oil, something that leaves us highly vulnerable to future supply interruptions. And like most addicts, we continue living in denial.

As Brian promised in his blog on Friday, here is the first of many installments in our new blog series "Real to Reel," taking a look at news events in recent history. Each week, we'll offer you a glimpse of a different historical event, how NBC covered it (with video straight from the broadcast when our archives allow) and a brief explainer from a producer or correspondent on what it was like to cover the event, how it affected them as journalists, and what significance it might have to the world today.

We hope you enjoy this series, and, as always, we welcome your comments and discussions.

Oct. 10, 1985 -- Achille Lauro hijacking ends

Video: Watch Nightly News coverage of the hijacking

The hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro ended after nearly four days when U.S. Navy F-14 fighters intercepted an Egyptian airliner attempting to fly the Palestinian hijackers to freedom.

The jet was forced to land at a NATO base in Sigonella, Sicily, and American and Italian troops surrounded the plane, taking the terrorists into Italian custody.

It was a dramatic end to the October 7 hijacking that started when four heavily-armed terrorists attacked the cruise liner off the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea. Some 320 crewmembers and 80 passengers, including 11 Americans, were taken hostage.  One, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, was killed.

On July 10, 1986, an Italian court convicted three of the terrorists for the hijacking, as well as three others in absentia, including mastermind Mohammed Abbas, who was convicted but not captured and went on to orchestrate several other terror attacks. He was finally captured by U.S. forces in a raid in Iraq on April 15, 2003. He died on March 9, 2004, at the age of 56 of natural causes in U.S. custody in Iraq.

Here, NBC News Investigative Producer Robert Windrem shares his recollections of covering the Achille Lauro hijacking, and how the news events played out, even as the broadcast was taking place, and how the story has affected him since:

"You report what you know, not what you don't know...or couldn't know.  That was the case on  Oct. 10, 1985 . Even as Nightly News was being broadcast, U.S.  fighter jets were forcing down an Egyptian Air jet containing the hijackers of the Achille Lauro. 

"We didn't have a clue during the 6:30 p.m. broadcast where the hijackers were or that President Reagan had ordered the U.S.  Navy to bring the plane down, preventing them from reaching Tunisia and PLO headquarters.  When our correspondents at the Pentagon and White House learned the plane had landed at a NATO base in Sicily, we went into overtime updating the program and feeding out bulletins.  It was one of the more dramatic nights ever for Nightly News, made even more dramatic by the boldness of the stroke. (Later, we learned the idea for the operation came from a then-obscure Marine lieutenant colonel in the NSC named Oliver North.)

"Probably the most interesting part of the story now, looking back, was President Reagan dismissing the idea of invading a country because it harbored terrorists who had killed Americans.   For better or worse, the current administration has now done that...twice.

"Personally, I think of the story often.  Leon Klinghoffer is buried about a mile from my house and I pass by it several times a week, never failing to recall that night."   

Video: Watch Nightly News coverage of the hijacking