Mapother, John R. "Berlin
and the Cuban Crisis." Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene 12,
no. 1 (1993): 1-3. Mapother, John R. "Berlin
and the Cuban Crisis." Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene 12,
no. 1 (1993): 1-3.
The Cuban Missile Crisis "was the final act of an attempt at military extortion that began in November 1958."
May,
Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds. The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the
White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997.
Clark comment: This work consists of the edited transcripts of the taped meetings of President Kennedy's Executive Committee (Ex-Com) during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
For Hendrickson, FA 77.3, as invaluable as these tapes will prove to historians, "they still leave ample room for argument over what brought about the crisis, whether the participants acted wisely, and how it was resolved." Pincus, WPNWE, 20 Oct. 1997, notes that there are no stunning new facts here. However, he adds that "a great deal ... is new if you want to understand the day-to-day evolution of a policy and the people involved in a crisis through all its ups and downs."
Powers, London Review of Books (13 Nov. 1997) and Intelligence Wars (2004), 171-184, says that the editors "have convincingly placed the White House deliberations within the political and military context of the missile crisis itself. To this they have added a brilliant account of the shared assumptions which Kennedy and his advisers brought to their discussions."
McAuliffe, Mary S.,
ed. CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. Washington, DC:
Central Intelligence Agency, 1992.
Clark comment: This compilation of documents comes from the declassification process managed by the CIA's Historical Review Group.
According to Surveillant 3.1, the editor/compiler, Dr. Mary S. McAuliffe, "recently completed an internal study of John A. McCone's tenure as DCI [not yet available to the public], and is the author of Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954" (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 1978).
FILS 11.6 says this collection is "unique and provides ... invaluable information." For Lowenthal, the documents give "a good feel for the role played by intelligence in this crisis and [how] senior policy and intelligence officials interacted."
Additional documents on the 1962 crisis have been published in Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis (1992).
Merom, Gil. "The
1962 Cuban Intelligence Estimate: A Methodological Perspective." Intelligence
and National Security 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 48-80.
The author argues that "positive evaluations of the intelligence performance," specifically with regard to SNIE 85-3-62, "are misplaced.... [T]he American intelligence failure in the Cuban case [can be explained] in terms of a lack of commitment to fundamental methodological principles of investigation and analysis."
Raymond A Garthoff, "A Commentary on Merom's Methodology," Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 146-153, finds that "[m]any aspects of the discussion are distorted by the author's fitting data into a Procrustean bed" of two alleged and competing theories in the intelligence community -- "conservative" and "revolutionary."
Meyer, Karl E. "Inside
the C.I.A.: A Bit of Sunlight on the Missile Crisis." New York Times,
24 Oct. 1992, A14 (N).
Munson, Harlow T.,
and W.P. Southard. "Two Witnesses for the Defense." Studies
in Intelligence 8, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 93-98.
Munton, Don, and David A. Welch. The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Nash, Philip. The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Clark comment: There is negligible intelligence content in this work, but the author's study of the Jupiter IRBMs in Turkey and Italy and their eventual withdrawal in exchange for the removal of the Soviet SS4s from Cuba is a piece of the Missile Crisis puzzle that is usually treated almost as a footnote.
As Rosenberg, History 26.3, notes, this is "an excellent and very well written account" based on research that "is thorough and up to date."
Nathan, James A., ed.
The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 1993. [pb]
Contents: James A. Nathan, "The Heyday of the New Strategy: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Confirmation of Coercive Diplomacy"; Raymond L. Garthoff, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Overview"; Barton J. Bernstein, "Reconsidering the Missile Crisis: Dealing with the Problems of the American Jupiters in Turkey"; Laurence Chang, "The View from Washington and the View from Nowhere: Cuban Missile Crisis Historiography and the Epistemology of Decision Making"; Richard Ned Lebow, "The Traditional and Revisionists Interpretations Reevaluated: Why Was Cuba a Crisis?"; Philip Brenner, "Thirteen Months: Cuba's Perspective on the Missile Crisis"; Elizabeth Cohn, "President Kennedy's Decision to Impose a Blockade in the Cuban Missile Crisis: Building Consensus in the ExComm After the Decision"; James G. Hershberg, "Before 'The Missiles of October': Did Kennedy Plan a Strike Against Cuba?"; Philip Brenner, "The Kennedy-Khrushchev Letters: An Overview."
Szulc, WPNWE, 23-29 Nov. 1992, finds that the "elegant and insightful essays ... in the Nathan compendium throw significant new light on Kennedy's decision-making ... and on the reasons he proceeded as he did." Bernstein's essay, "Reconsidering the Missile Crisis," is "brilliant."
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