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The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myth Versus Reality. By Sheldon Stern. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 196 pp.
Sheldon Stern, a former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, has spent much of his career studying the Cuban Missile Crisis. His particular interest is the audio tapes of the deliberations of October 1962. These secret conversations of "the Ex-Com," the committee President Kennedy created to deal with the issue, concerned how the United States should respond to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's installation of nuclear rockets in Cuba. This is Stern's third book on the topic.
In this volume, Stern is committed to discrediting various self-serving recollections by members of the Ex-Com. Stern demonstrates that the president wanted to end the crisis by dismantling missiles in Turkey, under the control of the United States and aimed at the USSR, in exchange for getting rid of the Cuban missiles. Kennedy persistently promoted this solution. Yet, at the time, his advisors almost unanimously recommended more belligerent assertions of American interests, with no concessions made to the Soviet Union. When the crisis was...