The Cuban Missile Crisis in American memory : myths versus reality

209 Pages·2012·1.877 MB·English

by  Stern, Sheldon M

The Cuban Missile Crisis
in aMeriC an MeMory
Stanford Nuclear Age Series
General Editor, Martin Sherwin
advisory board
Barton J. Bernstein and David Holloway
T h e C u b a n M i s s i l e C r i s i s
i n a M e r i C a n M e M o r y
Myths versus Reality
sheldon M. stern
sTanford universiTy Press
stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stern, Sheldon M., author.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in American memory : myths versus reality /
Sheldon M. Stern.
pages cm. — (Stanford nuclear age series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8047-8376-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isbn 978-0-8047-8377-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962—Historiography. 2. National Security Council
(U.S.). Executive Committee. 3. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union.
4. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States. 5. United States—Foreign
relations—1961–1963. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford nuclear age series.
e841.s7575 2012
972.9106'4—dc23 2012014300
Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion
Contents
Foreword, vii
1 History: From Reel to Real 1
2 The Template: Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days 32
3 The Real Robert Kennedy 40
4 The Mythmaking of Robert McNamara 54
5 The Forgotten Voice of Dean Rusk 68
6 The Erratic Expertise of Llewellyn Thompson 99
7 The Selective Memory of McGeorge Bundy 109
8 The Determined Diplomacy of Adlai Stevenson 129
9 The Trollope Ploy Myth 134
10 Lyndon Johnson and the Missile Crisis:
An Unanticipated Consequence? 148
Conclusion: Leadership Matters 155
Epilogue: What If? 159
Notes, 175    Bibliography, 184    Index, 189
(Photographs appear on pages 91–98)

foreword
i
T has now been More Than eighT years since the publication
of Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban
Missile Crisis Meetings (2003) and more than six since The Week the World
Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (2005), both in the Stanford
University Press Nuclear Age Series. During that time, in many discussions
about the missile crisis, I have often been asked about the historical reliability
of Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days as well as the published recollections of
other key participants in the Executive Committee of the National Security
Council (ExComm), such as Robert McNamara, Ted Sorensen, and others.
Unfortunately, it became apparent as the decade progressed that many his-
torians writing about those participants’ accounts were unwilling to make the
commitment of time required to listen to the missile crisis recordings of the
ExComm. Some chose instead to rely on the extremely flawed 1997 Harvard
Press transcripts or the more reliable 2001 Miller Center/Norton transcripts.
Nonetheless, despite the availability of the often revelatory and incontrovert-
ible evidence on the tapes, many of the myths that had taken root before the
recordings became available continued to flourish. No myth is more resil-
ient than the notion that RFK saved the peace by persuading the president
to accept the terms in Khrushchev’s private offer to remove the missiles for
a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba, and later to ignore the terms of the Soviet
leader’s public offer to remove the missiles in Cuba if the U.S. withdrew its
missiles from Turkey.
This book builds on my own narrative account of the ExComm meet-
viii foreword
ings to expose the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies that have
shaped the still dominant but largely mythical version of what happened in
the White House during those harrowing two weeks of secret deliberations.
A half century after the event, it is surely time to document, once and for all,
that RFK’s Thirteen Days cannot be taken seriously as a historical account of
the ExComm meetings.
It is equally essential to explore the specific role of key individuals (Dean
Rusk, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Llewellyn Thompson, etc.) in those
meetings, the details of which often conflict directly with RFK’s memoir, and
with their own published recollections. Finally, it is necessary to make clear
that only one person at the ExComm meetings consistently and persistently
resisted the advocates of military escalation from the ExComm, the Joint
Chiefs, and the Congress: President Kennedy himself.
I am especially indebted to my son, Dr. Jeremy A. Stern, a historian in his
own right, for urging me to write this book in order to close a critical gap in
the historiographical record about the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War
era. Special thanks as well to my wife Helen and my daughter Jennifer, and for
the memory of my brother Marty (1935–2012).
Sheldon M. Stern
Newton, Massachusetts
March 1
The Cuban Missile Crisis
in aMeriC an MeMory