A Near Miss

Sheldon M. Stern. Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xxx + 459 pp. Photographs, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

By any measure, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 must rank not only as the single most dangerous moment of the Cold War, but, in the apt words of Sheldon M. Stern, as "one of the most perilous moments in human history" (p. xix). The crisis brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any other point during the atomic era. That inescapable conclusion has been confirmed by the wealth of documentary and oral history evidence made available over the past decade. It is further buttressed by Averting 'The Final Failure', the latest entry in the swelling scholarly corpus on the Cold War's closest brush with catastrophe.

Scholars have been drawn to this epic Soviet-American confrontation as moths to a flame, fascinated equally by the human miscalculations that precipitated so perilous a showdown and by the high-stakes deliberations in Washington and Moscow that ultimately averted a nuclear exchange that could have claimed tens of millions of lives. They have created a small library of monographs, articles, participants' reflections, review essays, and documentary compilations, parsing every aspect of the crisis that began on October 14, with the discovery by U.S. intelligence of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba, and that ended with the Soviet-American diplomatic bargain of October 28. That bargain, in essence, sanctioned the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade the island and a U.S. commitment to withdraw its nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

The earliest work on the Cuban missile crisis suffered from limited access to critical sources and, correspondingly, an incomplete understanding of issues crucial to its resolution. Graham Allison's Essence of Decision (1969), for example, although a seminal methodological study in political science, unavoidably made some profound factual errors. Robert F. Kennedy's self-serving memoir Thirteen Days (1969) distorted key events while remaining silent on the Turkish missiles, misleading a generation of readers. The declassification of essential U.S. sources, including the secretly recorded tapes of the Executive Committee (ExComm) meetings of President John F. Kennedy's National Security Council, not fully released until early 1997, has made possible a much fuller and more nuanced appreciation of Washington's response to the crisis. So, too, the end of the Cold War, the release of important Soviet and a handful of Cuban documents and memoirs, and the willingness of key participants on all sides—including Cuba's Fidel Castro—to share their perspectives during several landmark conferences have appreciably broadened our understanding of the confrontation's international dimensions.

These rich sources have spawned a spate of notable studies, including James G. Blight and David A. Welch's On the Brink (1990); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov's Inside the Kremlin's Cold War (1996); Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali's "One Hell of a Gamble" (1997); John Lewis Gaddis's We Now Know (1997); Lawrence Freedman's Kennedy's Wars (2000); and William Taubman's Khrushchev (2003). This newer work, although it hardly speaks with a single voice, has helped refurbish the reputation of John F. Kennedy as a statesman of no small stature. It has undermined the verdict of revisionist scholars who depicted the Democratic president as a rash Cold Warrior who chose confrontation over diplomacy, risking the fate of the world on matters of image, prestige, and credibility. Stern's study lines up foursquare with the new consensus; it dismisses as caricature the notion of a hawkish, rash Kennedy. Although Stern admits that the American leader's aggressive anti-Castro policies helped precipitate the crisis in the first place—a key element of the revisionist indictment—he quickly adds that "when faced with the real probability of nuclear war, he used his formidable intellectual and political skill to prevent...