Averting the "Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings

Averting the "Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings. By Sheldon M. Stern. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 419 pp.

The Cuban missile crisis is the most "over-studied" crisis in history. For 1 3 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood at the brink of nuclear war. Since that time, the deliberations of President John F. Kennedy and the Executive Committee of the National security Council (ExComm) have been the subject of innumerable books, articles, documentaries, and films. With the John F. Kennedy Library's 1996 release of the secret recordings of the ExComm meetings and the subsequent publication of Ernest May and Philip Zelikow's The Kennedy Tapes (Harvard University Press, 1997; Norton, 2001), it appeared that we had the "definitive" account, at least on the U.S. side. Is there anything new to learn about the Cuban missile crisis? The answer evidently is yes. Sheldon M. Stern's Averting the "Final Failure" greatly contributes to our understanding of the ExComm deliberations and JFK's role as a crisis manager.

Stern, the retired historian of the Kennedy Library, presents a comprehensive narrative account of the ExComm meetings based upon exhaustive analysis of the recordings. His main claim...