The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
White House

The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis

1998 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 652
Author(s):  
Philip Brenner ◽  
Ernest R. May ◽  
Philip D. Zelikow
Keyword(s):  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
White House

Making the Best of It

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Sean J. McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
White House ◽  
American Policy ◽  
High Level ◽  
De Gaulle

This chapter covers the period from the end of the Franco-American summit in June 1961 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During this juncture the policy dispute over Vietnam was neither the biggest stumbling block in the Franco-American relationship nor one that had come out into the open, but it certainly was a festering source of mutual dissatisfaction. The White House, increasingly annoyed with French “obstructionism” and unable to see beyond a perception that de Gaulle harbored wartime grudges with the “Anglo-Saxons” and was reflexively anti-American, expected little from another presidential tete-à-tete and constantly rebuffed French efforts to restore some civility. Voices in the American bureaucracy moderately sympathetic to French aims were either removed or marginalized and the American embassy in Saigon emerged as a particularly hostile voice against French policy in Vietnam. The hardening of American policy toward France grew to the point that Kennedy privately admitted in mid-1962 that he had completely given up on finding any common ground with de Gaulle. Distrustful of French motives, the administration dismissed evidence of growing French influence on both sides of the 17th parallel and signs that de Gaulle actually had the high-level connections necessary to begin negotiating a solution to the war.

The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Mark J. White ◽  
Ernest R. May ◽  
Philip D. Zelikow
Keyword(s):  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
White House

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Sean J. McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
Kennedy Administration ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
White House ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Planning Culture

At the end of January 1963, France’s long-tenured ambassador to the United States, Hervé Alphand, reported back to Paris on a top secret American exercise at Camp David that laid bare many of the stark differences between the two NATO allies. As Alphand noted to French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville, his old colleague from the Free French days of World War II, the Kennedy administration had decided the previous October (either before, during, or after the Cuban Missile Crisis—he does not specify) to include representatives from Britain, France, and West Germany in a three-day series of politico-military simulations of potential conflict scenarios in divided Berlin. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, French president Charles de Gaulle had barely concealed his frustration from former Secretary of State Dean Acheson when he discovered that the Kennedy administration had no intention of coordinating strategy with the NATO allies it could have plunged into nuclear war. This may have convinced the White House to pull back the veil and show Washington’s closest allies how its planning culture operated....

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Deliberative Process ◽  
White House ◽  
Making Sense

Reflecting on the decision-making process after the Cuban missile crisis was over, President Kennedy famously observed that “the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself ... There will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision-making process—mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved.” This chapter summarizes theoretical and empirical arguments with an eye toward making sense of this striking claim, wherein Kennedy appears to admit that even he felt baffled by what happened in the White House during his presidency. It then discusses the peculiar fact that, at a conference of former ExComm members and academics held twenty-five years after the crisis, the former were forced to admit that their deliberative process was far from systematic. The academics were baffled, but the findings of this book provide an explanation, involving the strange twists and turns that the deliberative process undergoes when it is conducted aloud, subject to the whims of other people and the demands and sensitivities of the conversational machinery that makes the whole thing work.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Executive Committee ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
National Security Council ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
White House ◽  
Joint Chiefs Of Staff

This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the events that unfolded during the Cuban missile crisis. It describes the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or the ExComm, consisting of Kennedy's cabinet, their immediate subordinates, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a number of other top-level advisers. It then turns to Kennedy's secret recordings of many White House meetings and telephone conversations, which capture more than twenty hours of ExComm deliberations. Next, it sets out the book's purpose, namely is to undertake the first sustained analysis of the ExComm recordings. The goal is to mine the details of these discussions from a sociological perspective that views conversation as an achievement unto itself, and anything achieved through conversation as indelibly shaped by its rules, constraints, procedures, and vicissitudes.

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