The Cuban Missile Crisis, According to Harvard
9-17-12
Max Holland was a research fellow with Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs when the controversy over the missile crisis transcripts erupted in 2000. Cross-posted from Washington Decoded.
Footnotes
(1) Miriam Steiner, “The Elusive Essence of Decision,” International Studies Quarterly, June 1977, 389, 395; Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” American Political Science Review, June 1992, 301-302.
(2) Bruce Kuklick, “Reconsidering the Missile Crisis and Its Interpretation,” Diplomatic History, Summer 2001, 517-523.
(3) Barton J. Bernstein, “Understanding Decision-making, Explaining US Foreign Policy and the Cuban Missile Crisis: A Review Essay,” International Security, Summer 2000, 157-158.
(4) Ibid., 145-146.
(5) Ibid., 147, 155.
(6) Ibid., 147.
(7) Sheldon M. Stern and Max Holland, “Presidential Tapes and Transcripts: Crafting a New Historical Genre,” HNN, 21 February 2005.
(8) Sheldon M. Stern, “What JFK Really Said,” Atlantic Monthly, May 2000, 122-128 and “Source Material: The 1997 Published Transcripts of the JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes: Too Good to be True,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2000, 586-593.
(9) Terry Sullivan, “Confronting the Kennedy Tapes: The May-Zelikow Transcripts and the Stern Assessments,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2000, 594-597.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Tim Naftali, Ernest May, and Philip Zelikow, eds. The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, The Great Crises (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). Educators should be excused if they are confused, because May and Zelikow actually have published four distinct versions of “authoritative” missile crisis transcripts. HUP published two, a hardcover volume in 1997 and paperback in 1998, and Norton, in addition to the aforementioned hardcover, published in 2002 a still-in-print concise paperback that uses the HUP title (The Kennedy Tapes) but the Miller Center transcripts. Amendments and corrections were incorporated in these various volumes without any notation or explanation, leaving it to scholars to sort out the muddle.
In February 2003, Zelikow, then the director of the Miller Center, announced the creation of a website to allow scholars unaffiliated with the Center to amend the published missile crisis transcripts and download corrected versions. “Scholars,” Zelikow affirmed, “should invite further comments and criticism and ... try to welcome them. ... That’s the way that scholars work.” Philip Zelikow, remarks at 2003 JFKL conference on presidential tapes; see also the Miller Center page containing updates to the Presidential Records Program. Unfortunately, the updates and corrections site is still not interactive.
(12) A just-released book by Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality, includes a rigorous critique of Thirteen Days.