The story of the Cuban missile crisis has attained the status of myth: President John F. Kennedy was stunned to learn that Khrushchev, in a naked display of adventurism, had put missiles in Cuba. Kennedy gave Khrushchev an ultimatum: remove the missiles and have peace, or keep them and risk war. Khrushchev backed down, and Kennedy attained his finest hour. So goes the legend. But the reality, as chronicled by Robert Smith Thompson, penetrates to the very heart of our illusions about the Cold War and the Kennedy mystique. Using recently declassified documents, Thompson reexamines the intricate diplomatic posturings and often covert U.S., Soviet, and Cuban actions that led up to the confrontation, giving grounds for a dramatically different account of the crisis.
Starting with the unprecedented political machine - dominated by Joe Kennedy - that pushed JFK into the White House, Thompson recreates the climate of anti-Communist hysteria, political one-upsmanship, and dynastic ambitions that infused the Kennedy administration, particularly their obsession with Communist Cuba and Fidel Castro. That obsession found its lightning rod when Kennedy learned that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba; in fact, Thompson presents evidence to suggest that Kennedy knew of the missiles by March 1962, well before the official warning. Moreover, as Thompson goes on to argue, Kennedy appears to have been planning a full-scale invasion of Cuba, scheduled for late 1962, from which he pulled back only when the potential cost in American lives became clear. Nor was the resolution to the crisis the unalloyed victory for the U.S. that has always been portrayed. In secret negotiations, Robert Kennedy pledged to Soviet ambassador Dobrynin that the U.S.
would not only drop its plan to invade Cuba but would withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. These major concessions underscore the complexity of Soviet and American roles in the Caribbean, and implicate the United States as the real aggressor in the crisis. As Thompson's spellbinding account compels us to see, the moment that supposedly marked a high point in American power was in fact a harbinger of its decline.
