WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fifty years ago, Steven Greengold, then a 15-year-old high school student, watched as the United States engaged the Soviet Union in a standoff that threatened to ignite nuclear warfare.

Like the rest of the country, the now-65-year-old Wilmington, Del., resident was gripped with fear during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it wasn't until Saturday that he understood just how grave the situation was.

"Being alive during that time I remember watching everything on TV," he said. "You don't realize what actually went on behind the scenes. We were a lot closer to the end of the world than anyone really thought."

Greengold was among the first spectators to walk through a new exhibit at the National Archives commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis withe previously unreleased documents and recordings of the top secret meetings between President John F. Kennedy and his team of advisors.

To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis opened to the public on Friday and tells the story of the 13-day standoff between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as the Soviets funneled nuclear missiles into Cuba and within striking distance of almost every major American city outside of the Pacific Northwest.

Greeted by Kennedy's televised announcement of the standoff, spectators relive the president's deliberation process through a series of six stations, each with a different recorded excerpt from Kennedy's meetings with the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or "Ex Comm" as it was called.

CIA reports on Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro are among the dozens of once-classified documents displayed in glass cases throughout the exhibit.

Other historical items are on display including Kennedy's notepads that he doodled on during meetings and the chairs that he and Khrushchev sat in during their first meeting on June 3, 1961 in Vienna, Austria.

Carolyn Riley, 64, of Richmond, Va., took her granddaughter to the exhibit to share an experience from her childhood that she described as "traumatic."

Too young at the time to understand the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Riley said the exhibit helped her develop a new understanding of the standoff, pointing out a 1959 televised interview between Khrushchev and then Vice President Richard Nixon that was played on a loop in the exhibit.

"The most interesting thing I saw was that (Kennedy) said he should have known better than to trust 'the experts,'" she said. "I think a lot of (politicians) do that, they listen to the experts without trusting their own instincts."

The recordings reveal the pressures that Kennedy was put under by his advisors to take immediate military action. Timelines were laid out for troop deployments and contingency plans were discussed in the case of a nuclear strike by either side.

Among the documents on display was a speech prepared for the president in case the U.S. did make a preemptive strike on the Soviets stationed on Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast Florida.

"This morning I reluctantly ordered the armed forces to attack and destroy the nuclear build-up in Cuba," the statement begins. "Faced with this situation, action became necessary both to remove the immediate offensive threat to the Americas and to make crystal clear to the Soviet Union that the United States means what it says and is prepared to defend liberty with all the means at its disposal."

The secrecy of the president's actions was made explicitly clear through the documents on display. In one hand-written note Kennedy formulates a plan to fake sickness in order to halt a tour of the Midwest so he could meet on the crisis.

The exhibit runs through Feb. 4 in Washington, D.C. and will reopen April 12-Nov. 11, 2013 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.