Journal of Cold War Studies

Herring, George C., 1936-
The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (review)
Journal of Cold War Studies - Volume 6, Number 3, Summer 2004, pp. 168-170

The MIT Press

George C. Herring - The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (review) - Journal of Cold War Studies 6:3 Journal of Cold War Studies 6.3 (2004) 168-170 Mitchell B. Lerner, The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 320 pp. Mitchell B. Lerner's The Pueblo Incident is a first-rate analysis of an important, relatively unstudied, and, as it turns out, most revealing Cold War crisis. Lerner covers the incident from the assignment of the USS Pueblo's mission through its capture in January 1968 and the eleven-month diplomatic standoff that followed. The book is based on exhaustive research in sources now available. It is persuasively argued and very readable. As described by Lerner, the ill-fated mission of the Pueblo seems a classic case of Murphy's Law in operation. The ship itself was a "small and dilapidated ex-cargo vessel" (p. 1) that had been refitted ostensibly for oceanographic research but in fact was...