Until now the standard work on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has been Elie Abel’s well-researched if journalistic account, The Missile Crisis. This memoir by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy is not likely to displace it, despite the publicity which the new book has inspired and the great nostalgia which it will foster in many hearts. Essentially it is a series of vignettes describing various stages of the discussions and adding occasional new details, but also omitting a good deal of Abel’s narrative. Senator Kennedy gives us his personal viewpoint, but it will surprise few. When he wrote this book, he anticipated a long political career, and he had no desire to make unnecessary enemies through premature frankness.
Under these circumstances the most interesting chapters are those at the end, which set forth the lessons learned from the crisis. One is impressed with Kennedy’s realization of the role played in diplomacy by empathy—“the importance of placing ourselves in the other country’s shoes” (p. 124). It is too bad that he never got around to writing his planned final chapter on the ethical problem underlying the crisis— does any government have the right to bring the world under the shadow of nuclear destruction?
The book is well produced, with a collection of timely photographs and an appendix containing the principal documents of the crisis. But the main questions which Abel had to leave un-answered remain questions here. The present generally accepted interpretation of the crisis holds that it was a justifiable gamble and a triumph for the United States. We shall not be able to confirm or modify this interpretation until we have access to memoirs as yet unwritten and archives as yet unopened.
