The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 is seen as President John F. Kennedy's finest hour. In the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination, those “thirteen days” became the centerpiece of the “Camelot” legend. This legend held that a young president, aided by his brother Robert, rebuffed the “hawks” in his administration who wanted to attack Cuba while at the same time the Kennedy brothers vanquished the Russians through a mixture of force and face-saving offers to Nikita Khrushchev. Remarkably, over fifty years after the fact, this mythological version of the crisis dominates most popular and academic accounts of the missiles of October.

Sheldon M. Stern was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library from 1977 to 2000 and was the first outsider to listen to the secret tape recordings of the meetings of the ExComm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) from the missile crisis. Stern is uniquely qualified to do what should have been done years ago—challenge the contrived accounts of this seminal event of the young president's thousand days in office. Stern notes that the “heroic” interpretation of Kennedy's actions in the missile crisis were “created and promulgated by JFK, RFK, and key members of the administration, eagerly swallowed by gullible journalists … and popularized by the selective and manipulative writings of administration insiders like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen” (4). And, it should be noted, the manipulation of the historical record involved members of the Kennedy circle leaking unflattering (and inaccurate) accounts of the role of Dean Rusk (68–71), Lyndon Johnson (148–53), and Adlai Stevenson, all of whom were disliked by RFK. Stevenson was accused by the Kennedy circle of advocating a “Munich” despite the fact that the president secretly adopted Stevenson's proposal to defuse the crisis (133).

Long after both President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were killed, prominent officials such as Robert McNamara and Ted Sorensen “continued to peddle” their “mythology,” their “time-honored fable” about the crisis, particularly in regard to covering up the president's secret deal with the Soviets to remove American missiles from Turkey in exchange for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba (135). Sorensen was still “spin[ning] and shap[ing] the evidence” as late as 2008, in support of this “mythic” version of the Cuban missile crisis (6–7). The American public, members of Congress, former American presidents, the secretary of state, and even President Kennedy's successor, were misled regarding Kennedy's decision to remove US missiles from Turkey. Shortly after the crisis ended, RFK falsified documents to ensure that no paper trail existed regarding these missiles (2, 137, 149, 153). Stern dryly observes that this “deliberate falsification of the historical record was the first step in writing [RFK's] Thirteen Days,” which became the “template” of the “heroic” interpretation of the missile crisis (32, 52). Both critics and admirers of President Kennedy frequently cite this disingenuous book which “continues to frame the discussion” of the crisis (33).

The key figures of President Kennedy's ExComm were Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Throughout the crisis, Kennedy repeatedly resisted advice from members of the ExComm to mine the harbors around Cuba; seek a declaration of war against that nation; invade Cuba without a declaration of war; destroy the surface-to-air missile sites in Cuba; or stage some sort of event at the American naval base at Guantanamo as a pretext for an assault on Cuba—as Robert Kennedy bluntly put it in one ExComm meeting, “you know, sink the Maine again or something” (44). As Stern notes, “RFK was one of the most consistently hawkish and confrontational members of the ExComm” (19), although many history books dealing with the crisis portray the Attorney General as a “chastened man” who had “matured from a kneejerk hawk to a wise and restrained diplomat” (53).

Stern commends President Kennedy's restraint and notes that the President “often stood virtually alone against warlike counsel from the ExComm, the Joint Chiefs, and the leaders of Congress” (158). Nonetheless, the President publicly adopted a hawkish stance on the missiles in a nationally televised address to the nation on October 22, 1962. Kennedy demanded the unconditional removal of Soviet missiles from “that imprisoned island” and announced that a “strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba” was underway. At the same time Robert Kennedy was meeting with a KGB agent, and through the use of this back channel and others the President brokered a deal with the Russians committing the United States to the removal of American missiles in Turkey and a pledge not to invade Cuba. On October 28, 1962, Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that he would dismantle the existing missile sites in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union.

Viewed at the time as an American triumph, the missile crisis was in fact a somewhat predictable (and dangerous) result of a halting and incoherent Kennedy foreign policy. As a presidential candidate, JFK claimed that Fidel Castro was a threat to the entire western hemisphere and promised to replace Eisenhower's lethargic foreign policy with one that would get the nation “moving again.” The first movement occurred at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, where a CIA-trained force of 1400 exiles were all captured or killed. Kennedy refused to commit American air power to provide cover for the invasion force while they were pinned down on the beach, despite pleas from some of his advisors. Kennedy's wavering stance at the Bay of Pigs was followed by his disastrous summit with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, where, as Kennedy himself admitted, the Soviet leader bullied the American president. This in turn was followed by Kennedy's tacit approval of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. In Moscow, Khrushchev had taken the measure of the new American president and was unimpressed. The Kremlin was emboldened to believe that Kennedy could be intimidated, and this contributed to Khrushchev's decision to deploy the missiles in Cuba, thus bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Years later it emerged that in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy asked Robert Kennedy to direct “one of the largest clandestine operations in CIA history” which was designed to destroy the Cuban economy and assassinate Fidel Castro (41). “Operation Mongoose” saw at least eight attempts on Castro's life, with the CIA enlisting the help of American organized crime to do their bidding. In the days after the missile crisis, after securing a “no invasion” pledge, it was no wonder that Khrushchev would proclaim the event a victory for the Soviet bloc. Kennedy nonetheless did not feel bound to honor this pledge, and Mongoose continued through November 22, 1963 (158).

Sheldon M. Stern's book is history as it should be—challenging the conventional wisdom and dissecting the myths propagated by both sycophants and scholars with an agenda. Unfortunately, many details surrounding RFK's leadership of Operation Mongoose are still held under lock and key, in part because of the refusal of Robert Kennedy's children to release boxloads of information regarding their father's involvement in various plots. Sadly, some fifty years after the missile crisis, the manipulation of history for political purposes continues unabated. These documents, if they are ever opened, will reinforce the fact that the accounts offered by Robert Kennedy and by hagiographers such as Sorensen and Schlesinger were pure fiction.