Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) Review

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Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) ReviewFor nearly 20 years, I have taught an elective for high school seniors that surveys the origins and spread of nuclear power & weapons from 1895 to the present. Every year the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a highlight, especially because we drove vans right to the JFK Library and heard its historian Sheldon M. Stern lay out stunning detail, complete with audio clips, transcripts of ExComm tapes, Adlai Stevenson's actual UN photo set, and more.
But now, Stern has put it in book form, and if ever the devil was in the details, this book is a glorious teaching opportunity to show students how details and exact evidence are indispensable -- especially in a 9/11 age where imprecise Intelligence can have huge consequences at home and abroad. Certainly Intelligence proved breathtakingly faulty before and during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the consequences then were almost cataclysmic, as Stern's book demonstrates in chilling chapter and verse.
The Cuban missile crisis is a history teacher's dream assignment anyway, for its layers and layers of historiographical changes, as new revelations have kept trickling out, not only with the gradual release of the ExComm tapes, but also Soviet sources after the Cold War ended. Stern's volume makes this "crystal," and breaks through student glaze, by showing as well as any monograph I have ever read how once in a while an historian really can become the proverbial fly on the wall during momentous spoken history. Check out the moments when General Curtis LeMay provocatively invokes Munich, or JFK snaps uncharacteristically at Dean Rusk, or the Cabinet room almost goes nuts when the U-2 gets shot down. Even the footnotes are a treasure trove, pointing out remarkable links to Winston Churchill in 1940, Joseph McCarthy in 1954, and the Bay of Pigs & Operation Mongoose as somewhat terrorist activities in the 1960's.
For 20 years, we had assigned RFK's Thirteen Days, aware of its faults as a kind of 1968 campaign document, but grateful for a short, readable, if flawed, first-hand account ghosted by Ted Sorensen. In 2001 we added Hollywood's film Thirteen Days, grossly misleading but useful in its own ways.
Now, however, we have a source, Averting the Final Failure, that shows with a trained historian's meticulous concern for evidence, wherever it may lead, how dangerous it can be for students to rely on Thirteen Days, either the book or the movie. The fact that a disheartenly huge percentage of Americans will judge the 1962 Cuban missile crisis -- and any other historical topic for that matter -- by what either Hollywood or a self-serving participant told them about it, makes Sheldon Stern's careful study almost urgent reading, at least for high school teachers and the young citizens they nurture.
It will take time: 419 carefully crafted pages and then some. But Andover students are finding that this time translates efficiently into historical treasure, where an historian eavesdropping in a library basement can find more real-life drama in unvarnished evidence than countless Hollywoods.Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) Overview

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