The scholarly and journalistic literature on the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 is immense and continues to grow. Though the majority of those now on campuses or in newsrooms are too young to remember it, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet missiles based in Cuba brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and ranks with the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the most traumatic single events (as opposed to prolonged ones such as the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement) experienced by this country since the end of World War II. The 50th anniversary of the crisis is about to be observed; that it continues to fascinate us, including those who have no memory of it, should come as no surprise.
As David Coleman points out in the preface to “The Fourteenth Day,” the episode “is famously remembered as a thirteen-day crisis,” in large part because “Robert Kennedy chose ‘Thirteen Days’ for [his] memoir of the crisis” and because “much later, there was a Hollywood movie of the same name.” But contrary to received wisdom, the confrontation did not end in resounding triumph for the United States when, on Oct. 28, Premier Nikita Khrushchev caved and agreed to pull his missiles out of Cuba. Instead, as Coleman demonstrates, “Khrushchev’s capitulation had not brought the finality to the crisis that many had hoped for. A year after the crisis, just days before his assassination, Kennedy was still referring publicly to ‘unfinished business’ from the Cuban missile crisis.”
Coleman, who teaches history at the University of Virginia, adds little to our knowledge of the period following Khrushchev’s decision, but he adds nuances to our understanding of it because, as director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center in Charlottesville and Washington, he has intimate knowledge of the tapes that Kennedy made, “most likely in anticipation of one day writing a memoir,” in the Cabinet Room of the White House between July 1962 and November 1963. At Kennedy’s place at the conference table in that room there was, “attached to the table, a discreet button . . . [that] allowed Kennedy to stop and start the reel-to-reel tape recorder that was downstairs in a basement room used for filed storage.” Apparently the only people who knew about this system were his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln; “the Secret Service agents who installed and maintained the system”; aide Kenneth O’Donnell; and Robert Kennedy and his secretary.
In all, Kennedy “compiled approximately 260 hours of recordings.” Most of these have already been released and have caused far less stir than might have been expected; three volumes of them were published in 2001 under the title “The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy,” but the ones that Coleman uses in “The Fourteenth Day” were not released by the Kennedy library until early this year. Their quality is poor by today’s standards, and it must have required keen ears and patience to transcribe them, but their historical value needs no explanation: These are the voices of John and Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, and all the other members of “ExComm” (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council) as they charted the country’s way through and beyond one of the most dangerous moments in its history.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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