The story of what the Americans call the Cuban missile crisis, the Cubans call the October crisis, and the Russians call the Caribbean crisis has been told many times. The most influential account, which was also one of the earliest, was written by Robert F. Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General.
R.F.K. was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm, which was swiftly assembled to advise the President during the crisis. In his memoir, eventually titled “Thirteen Days,” he plays a leading role in the deliberations—so much so that one White House aide, who read a manuscript version of the book in 1964, a few months after J.F.K.’s assassination, is said to have remarked, “I thought Jack was President during the missile crisis.” (Bobby, who was by then campaigning for the U.S. Senate, reportedly replied, “He’s not running, and I am.”)
In “Thirteen Days,” R.F.K. portrays himself as levelheaded and high-minded. When other members of ExComm press for a surprise attack on Cuba, he counters that such an attack could not be launched without undermining the United States’ “moral position at home and around the globe.” “Thirteen Days” was published in 1969, a year after its author’s assassination; it has never been out of print since.
In the nineteen-seventies, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, it was revealed that J.F.K. had secretly taped most of ExComm’s deliberations. He’d had a recorder installed in the basement of the West Wing that could be discreetly activated by flipping a switch under the table in the Cabinet Room. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the tapes were gradually declassified and released. Meanwhile, the breakup of the Soviet Union gave historians access to documents and other materials that had previously been off limits. As a result, just about everything anyone has claimed about his own conduct during the crisis has been called into question.
In “Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis” (Knopf), Martin J. Sherwin summarizes the “official” narrative of the “thirteen days” as follows. Members of ExComm, through “their careful consideration of the challenge, their firmness in the face of terrifying danger, and their wise counsel,” steered the world to a peaceful resolution of a potentially civilization-ending conflict. Nothing, he writes, “could be further from the truth.” The guidance J.F.K. received was, for the most part, lousy. Some of it was loony. Had he heeded ExComm’s “wise counsel,” chances are I would not be writing this, or you reading it. As the President told a friend not long after the crisis ended, “You have no idea how much bad advice I had in those days.”