The Word of POTUS has been unreliable since at least, JFK
This is healthy criticism. It also exposes the flaws of many of the heroes I had for a while. The Kennedy brain trust (the best and the brightest) were gods where and when I grew up. But unlike many of the peolpe who worship a Reagan or a Bush, I've never shied away from criticism of my heroes of old.
note: I no longer have heroes. I grew up when I was in my late twenties.
Quote:
Facts are a casualty of missile crisis
By Alex Beam
Globe Columnist / June 10, 2008
You have heard about the fog of war. What about the fog of not war?
For my generation, the 13-day Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 was the big dog that, mercifully, did not bark. The John F. Kennedy administration's actions have been picked through with a fine-toothed comb, and the high priests dissecting the events have evolved their own jargon. If you want to play the missile crisis game, you need to understand the "Trollope ploy," and know the difference between a Soviet Sopka coastal defense cruise missile and the nuclear-tipped frontovaya krylovaya raketa, which, we now learn in my friend Michael Dobbs's new book, was aimed at our Guantanamo Bay naval base during the crisis.
No flyspeck escapes the scrutiny of missile crisis mavens, because, after all, the world has never come closer to a nuclear war. There are even rival copies of the famous ExComm, or Executive Committee, tapes, the recorded sessions of the inner circle of JFK advisers who bird-dogged the crisis to its successful conclusion. Listening to different copies of the same tapes, different people hear different things.
Talk about detail: In "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War," Dobbs takes the time to re-plot the navigational fix of the Soviet transport ship Kimovsk, which featured in the decades-old mythology of the US-Soviet "eyeball to eyeball" confrontation. ("We're eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked," Secretary of State Dean Rusk said.) Using naval intelligence logs, Dobbs writes that the Kimovsk and another Soviet freighter were not even close to American warships when Rusk made his epochal proclamation. The ships had in fact reversed course the day before, but for propaganda purposes, chroniclers Robert Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and many latter-day historians never bothered to correct the historical record.
Dobbs is too polite to say this, but the Kimovsk mistake is one of several that besmirches Harvard professor Graham Allison's career-making tome, "Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis," still a fixture on the political science syllabus. Allison's book, revised with co-author Philip Zelikow in 1999, purports to illuminate the crisis with its comical "rational actor" theory, and endless blather about the "organizational behavior paradigm."
But the famous 13 days more closely resembled a NASCAR pile-up than a Kennedy School political science seminar, Dobbs argues. "History is determined not just by the so-called rational actors, the men (or women) in suits, the bureaucrats, and the top military brass," he writes. " 'Irrational actors' - people who stumble onto the stage by chance and change the course of history - also play a role."
Dobbs has some new research on one of the event's most irrational actors, the U-2 spy pilot Charles Maultsby who took a wrong turn at the North Pole and wandered into Siberian airspace in the thick of the crisis. In his new memoir, "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History," former Kennedy adviser and ExComm member Theodore Sorenson highlights another random player who may have saved the world from nuclear war: the commander of Soviet submarine B-59, who could have fired a nuclear-tipped torpedo at US Navy ships but decided to check with Moscow first. Thanks to clunky Soviet-era technology, he never got through. "That careful Soviet bureaucrat, anonymous to history," Sorenson writes, "may have prevented nuclear war and possibly global destruction."
In classic missile crisis fashion, Sorenson's eloquent assertion gets some facts wrong. Commander Valentin Savitsky is far from anonymous, nor is his chief of staff, Vasily Arkhipov, who was also being depth-charged in the B-59, and who may have stayed the captain's hand. As former John F. Kennedy Library historian Sheldon Stern points out in his 2003 book, "Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings," there are several versions of this famous incident.
When Dobbs arrived in Moscow in 2004 to research his book, Savitsky and Arkhipov were both dead.
Past is not prologue
During the October crisis, Sorenson writes, JFK dispatched former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to show the CIA's surveillance photos of the Cuban missiles to French premier Charles de Gaulle. I don't need to see pictures of the weapons of mass destruction, de Gaulle replied: "The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."
Not anymore.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com
|
__________________
_________________
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know them by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against them.
- Jonathan Swift
--- "Thoughts On Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting."
|
06-11-2008, 06:06 AM
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
