New Scholarship on the Cuban Missile Crisis

Books reviewed in this article: Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963 Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 The Cuban missile crisis generated acrimony and tension not only among the policymakers in Washington, Moscow, and Havana who handled the October 1962 confrontation, but also among future generations of historians and political scientists. As the apogee of the Cold War contest, the closest the world has been to the nuclear brink, the missile crisis has not surprisingly served as a magnet for scholarly attention. In the first decade after the crisis, Elie Abel and Graham Allison produced the most important works.

In The Missile Crisis, Abel used interviews with numerous participants to craft the first richly detailed narrative of the crisis. For his part, Allison examined the crisis in order to develop various models for understanding the process of policy formulation. His Essence of Decision remains a classic of missile crisis historiography.

Soon a vast article literature was also being generated, including Barton Bernstein's examination of the issue of the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey. In the 1980s and 1990s, a cluster of historians, such as Thomas Paterson, James Hershberg, and Michael Beschloss, produced significant work on the missile crisis and its origins. Raymond Garthoff's Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis has been among the most important of these.

For the detail it furnished on the Soviet side of the story, it was path breaking.1