In this tightly argued, rigorous study, sociologist David Gibson wades deep into the proceedings of the United States Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm), which were surreptitiously recorded by President John F. Kennedy during the tense days of the Cuban missile crisis (16–28 October 1962). Relying on the labor-intensive tool of conversation analysis, Gibson's work could be heavy lifting for nonspecialists, particularly historians (like myself), who are more comfortable with slightly broader brushstrokes. Yet Gibson, perhaps aware of his wider audience, patiently spends nearly half the book introducing this theory and methods, resulting in a fresh, enlightening take on the deliberations that framed Washington's response to the crisis.

Gibson takes as his subject of analysis three ExComm “decisions,” concluding that they resulted neither from systematic deliberation by rational actors, nor from an assertive President. Instead, Gibson writes, they resulted from “foretalk,” stories about the future that were told and retold, until one emerged as the dominant narrative.

On 18 October, for example, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara employed skillful “foretalk” regarding the benefits of implementing a blockade of Cuba in response to Soviet nuclear missile installations on the island. In so doing, he and other supporters of the blockade succeeded in suppressing its main drawback: that it would preclude Kennedy's first choice of an air strike against preoperational missiles. In the case of blockade enforcement, on the other hand, Gibson argues that no dominant narrative emerged through “foretalk” on 25 October, leading the President to postpone a decision until three Soviet ships had already crossed the blockade line undisturbed. Further, President Kennedy was strongly opposed to ExComm's decision on 27 October to respond only to the more generous offer transmitted by Nikita Khrushchev the previous evening, whereby Moscow would remove the missiles in exchange for a US guarantee not to invade Cuba. Instead, Kennedy wished to accept Khrushchev's tougher follow-up offer, calling on the United States to remove NATO nuclear missiles from Turkey. In Gibson's view, the dominance of “foretalk” in favor of the first track demonstrates that ExComm's decision-making “rested on grouptalk – on most ExComm members converging on the same story while preventing its discontents,” in this case President Kennedy himself, “from raising an effective objection” (164).

Gibson's approach succeeds as a theoretical reinterpretation, but it nonetheless falls short of representing a narrative “sharply at odds with previous scholarship” (10). This is principally due to his tightly focussed methodology: he restricts his analysis to thirty-seven snippets of the recorded ExComm sessions, representing an hour or two of the forty-three-hour total. Gibson omits, for example, ongoing consideration of air strikes through 20 October,Footnote ¹ when intelligence revealed that some missile sites were operational.Footnote ² These reports dampened ExComm enthusiasm for air strikes at least as effectively as McNamara's impressive “foretalk.” Similarly, Gibson does not mention Vice President Lyndon Johnson's defense of Kennedy's inclination to accept the tougher Soviet offer late on 27 October. “[S]ay we're tradin’,” Johnson exclaimed with Kennedy absent, “Save all the invasion [sic], lives, everything else.” CIA director John McCone agreed: “We've sat down over in the State Department day and night and we've talked about this, and we'd say we'd be delighted to trade those missiles in Turkey for the thing in Cuba … What we were afraid of was he'd never offer this.”Footnote ³ Secretary of State Dean Rusk was listening, and in the Oval Office an hour later he convinced the President to follow his instincts and pursue a secret deal to remove the missiles from Turkey.Footnote ⁴ Gibson dismisses this backchannel as having been unimportant to the resolution of the crisis (156), but it demonstrates that presidential prerogative, at least at this critical juncture, trumped ExComm “foretalk.”

Talk at the Brink is not academic history, however; it is narrowly focussed sociology. Thanks to Gibson's labor, three momentous ExComm decisions are now more profoundly understood than ever before. All those interested in the Cuban missile crisis, or in the mechanics of crisis deliberation more broadly, will learn a great deal from this book.