The Kennedy Tapes

"During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the world came the closest it has been to nuclear war. Khrushchev secretly installed missiles in Cuba, and when American spy planes spotted them Kennedy saw that American public opinion would not stand for a nuclear threat so close and possibly under Castro’s control. Should the United States bomb the missile sites in Cuba, or might that lead to Soviet retaliation? Would anything less lead to their removal? Amazingly, and unknown to most participants, the meetings of the committee set up to decide policy were taped, as were many other meetings at the White House. This book gives the complete taped history of the discussions. In human history, no other crisis of comparable gravity has been documented from the inside in this way. Several things stand out. One is the degree of pressure from some military people to go for the “tough” policy of bombing Cuba, and the strength it needed to resist it. Another is that Kennedy himself and a few members of his administration had been to a session put on by scientists and others spelling out just what nuclear war would be like. After the session, Kennedy had said, “And we call ourselves the human race.” Notably, while others were prepared to risk nuclear war by bombing Cuba, those who had been present at this session were not. It is interesting that Kennedy deceived the American people by concealing the concession he had to make in the secret part of the negotiations. By removing US missiles in Turkey (as close to the Soviet Union as Cuba is to America), Kennedy gave Khrushchev something to justify to Soviet colleagues his withdrawal of the Cuban missiles. This concession might have been too much for American public opinion. If so, this is a case of an apparently “immoral” act of deception being the right thing to do. It raises questions about the absolute desirability of transparency and honesty in politics."