The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

The other palace historians picked up on the same myth—as did the anti-Kennedy revisionist historians, who would cite Kennedy’s alleged rejection of the trade as an example of his dangerous machismo. A quarter-century after the crisis, McGeorge Bundy admitted in his memoir that hushing up the missile trade produced pernicious consequences. “We misled our colleagues, our countrymen, our successors, and our allies” into believing “that it had been enough to stand firm on that Saturday.” Among the misled advisers was Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who was never told the true story about the trade and who followed the false lesson of the Cuban missile crisis—stand firm, never negotiate—in his decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1962, Kennedy came away from his tangle in two near-catastrophic crises with the conviction that he had to find a way out of the nuclear trap—and, if possible, out of the whole Cold War.