MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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The Real Cuban Missile Crisis: Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.
By artappraiser on Fri, 01/11/2013 - 10:32pm |By Benjamin Schwartz, The Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2013 issue
Lots of damning de-canonization material; starts out like this:
.....Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested. Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: ....
and has stuff like this:
Stern demonstrates that Robert Kennedy hardly inhabited the conciliatory and statesmanlike role during the crisis that his allies described in their hagiographic chronicles and memoirs and that he himself advanced in his posthumously published book, Thirteen Days. In fact, he was among the most consistently and recklessly hawkish of the president’s advisers, pushing not for a blockade or even air strikes against Cuba but for a full-scale invasion as “the last chance we will have to destroy Castro.” Stern authoritatively concludes that “if RFK had been president, and the views he expressed during the ExComm meetings had prevailed, nuclear war would have been the nearly certain outcome.” He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts” and whose accounts—“profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive”—were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.
URL:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/
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Comments
Interesting and informative re-write that challenges a great myth. Thanks for the link. I hope it gets widely read. For a longer, more in-depth discussion of the same subject there is a one-hour Bloggingheadstv interview by Robert Wright with Peter Kornbluh of the National Securuty Archives and the Cuba Documentation Project.
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/11976
I find [some of] these verbal presentations to be very informative and I can listen to them on podcasts during a commute or while doing simple chores like lawn work. A downside is that quotes are much harder to bring to a blog comment.
This interview is highly recommended to anyone interested in the subject. Kornbluh draws some parallels to the current Iranian "crisis" which I think merit attention.
by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 1:04pm
Are there any harsher critics than disillusioned former true believers?
It amazes me that there are still people enchanted enough with the Kennedy mystique to be disillusioned by new revelations or who are just now discovering that Schlesinger Jr gave up 'serious' history that he was not very good at anyway to become a Camelot fanboy. Courtier and self-described gossip suited him just fine.If only he were a better writer. I don't even mind that too much. I enjoy learning bits of history wherever I can find them so thanks for the link.
by EmmaZahn on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 1:51pm
RFK was on Senator Joe McCarthy's communist hunting staff, so that he held anti-communist views is no secret to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of history.
The problem with this piece in Atlantic is it neither relates the extremely aggressive attitude in the Pentagon over what to do about the Cuban missiles, nor the far more dangerous actions than 'quarantine' that the top US military leaders were proposing to JFK on the 1962 crisis.
It also misleads as to facts.
The Jupiter missiles were developed in the mid-50's and the order for their deployment to Italy was in April, 1959, prior to JFK's Presidency.
The Russian missiles in Cuba were such a big deal that Curtis LeMay, AF Chief of Staff, went to Def Con 2, one level below nuclear war.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell Taylor, also advised JFK in writing, that the JCS recommended invading Cuba after a bombing campaign to get rid of the missile threat. link
Whether JFK took the best, safest course to get the missiles out, is certainly open to Monday morning quarterbacking.
But JFK did counter the mood for outright war on Cuba. He did get the missiles out. He did set up the Moscow-US hotline the following year, and he did sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, over the objections of many Republicans.
by NCD on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 3:24pm
But on the missiles, from the article, my bold:
Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance.
Smoke and mirrors, where the country was no safer, but quite a bit more terrified and rev'ed up on a Cold War.
On RFK, that RFK isn't the same RFK that RFK worshippers adore, he changed, he turned into their RFK.
by artappraiser on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 4:54pm
Meaningless point and quote. Yes dead is dead. Missiles are bad.
Ask yourself why the Pentagon invested hundreds of millions in the DEW system in Alaska. To give warning of a Soviet missile launch so we could retaliate in kind. Not possible with Cuban missiles 90 miles from our shores.
The boys at the Pentagon were hell bent to bomb/invade Cuba and Kennedy didn't let them, or support them in their failed Bay of Pigs op.
He even fired Lyman Lemnitzer who had the plan, Operation Northwoods, to fake a terrorist shoot down of a US plane, and terrorist acts within the US as false flag operations to excuse an attack and invasion of Cuba.
The fact is JFK, by the end of his shortened first term, had made the chances of nuclear war far less likely than they were when he took office.
by NCD on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 9:22pm
It has been a very long time since I read much on the story but wasn't one of our planes shot down by Cuba after they were notified that the missiles would be withdrawn?
by EmmaZahn on Sun, 01/13/2013 - 10:15am
I'm simply glad to see interest! (Like Emma, I do get frustrated by seeing people still propagate Kennedy myths, sometimes as if they fell asleep 50 years ago. It's not those who keep their lack of knowledge about facts quiet that frustrate, it's the ones that do things like passionately blog false hagiography.)
by artappraiser on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 4:04pm
Kennedy decided, against the advice of every adviser except one, not to attack Cuba. He made the right decision. Kennedy was willing to swap our missiles in Turkey for the Russian missiles in Cuba. He was NOT willing to offer that deal openly. He offered Krushchev the promise that he would remove the Turkey missiles later but would not put it on paper, he asked Krushchev to trust him and to not reveal that a deal had been offered. As a backup plan he sent a letter to the head of the U.N. saying that if Kennedy sent the word he wanted the U.N. to then propose that deal. He said the U.S. would accept it when the U.N. did so but could not propose it. Krushchev accepted the offer and the Soviets honored their promise to not say there was that deal in place.
It was considered too politically damaging for it to be known that the U.S. had compromised.
It is very possible that the distorted myth has affected our foreign policy ever since, when the truth would have affected it in a better way.
by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 5:38pm
Good points. Making a deal with the commies.....!!!
That's also why the right dumped Nixon (China), among other reasons, while they played make believe that the GOP would never do anything illegal again.
by NCD on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 9:10pm