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Chapter 8 The Costs of Managed History John McCone’s reputation on Capitol Hill in 1963 was still far better than that of Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs. During one of the SPIS Cuba hearings in March, with McCone present, Margaret Chase Smith told her colleagues matter-of-factly, “I think Mr. McCone has been more direct and frank than his predecessor.” Voicing a sentiment held by some other Republicans as well, she expressed concern about making “difficult his position in the administration.”1 A few weeks after that hearing, one of Gerald Ford’s constituents urged him to be tougher regarding Cuba. Legislators should initiate a total blockade and, if necessary, employ military force to achieve “a complete withdrawal of Russian troops,” she wrote. After all, she insisted, “Congress has the power to exercise authority over and above the president.” But speaking to a group of Republican women in Michigan weeks later, just before the release of the SPIS interim report, Ford spoke of the limits of congressional powers in the face of a resistant White House: “The president is keeping the Congress and the public in the dark; he is managing the news; he is preventing the lawfully elected representatives of the people from making informed judgments of the past conduct of our government and therefore the future hazards we face.”2 Although McCone had many admirers on Capitol Hill, he as much as anyone had enabled the Kennedy White House’s successful resistance. And in any case, Ford and his aggressive constituent were relatively lonely voices: most Americans, including those in Congress, thought the president was handling Cuba fairly well. Far fewer were interested in whether the administration had shared all relevant information with legislators. Nonetheless, the failure by Congress and the news media to learn the truth about the run-up to the missile crisis had real and varied consequences. Most obviously, it enhanced, or at least left intact, the administration’s preferred narrative of the crisis. The same could be said, of course, about the quid pro 113 The Costs of Managed History quo with Moscow and the role Operation mongoose played in fomenting Cuban acceptance of Soviet designs. One can speculate about the various effects these events, had they been revealed during the Kennedy presidency, might have had on US domestic politics and on later administrations. Some scholars have made the case, for example, that the false depiction of what occurred before and after the crisis created an impossible standard for all subsequent presidents during the Cold War.3 Even Bundy, in hindsight, seemed to admit tacitly that the enhanced image that was projected did not necessarily serve the Kennedy administration or its successors well over the long term. “In particular,” Bundy wrote in his 1988 history/memoir, “I think we could have done more than we did to discourage the conclusion that this was a case of wonderfully coordinated and error-free ‘crisis management.’”4 At the time, though, the temptation to repair the image of a president who had just fumbled his way through the Bay of Pigs was obviously too great. Scholarship about the missile crisis, of course, was demonstrably affected by the failure to get the story straight at the time. The record of how the photo gap was treated in the vast literature on the crisis, and how the real story came out in dribs and drabs over forty years, is addressed in a historiography that follows in the appendix. The seeming inability even over time to incorporate the operational failure of intelligence into histories of the missile crisis and biographies of President Kennedy suggests that the myth created by the administration became so firmly embedded in the popular and scholarly psyche that perhaps nothing will ever shake it. As John F. Kennedy said himself , during a 1962 commencement address at Yale, perhaps the greatest enemy of truth “is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”5 If what is known now had been known during the crisis or soon thereafter , it is difficult to believe that the episode would have the exalted status it enjoys in the annals of American Cold War history. A pusillanimous effort at the Bay of Pigs was followed by the vast, misguided covert Operation mongoose , which helped make the Cubans receptive to becoming an outpost of Soviet power. The Kennedy administration then miscalculated the effects on Moscow of its 1961 declaration that...

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