All Resources: The Cuban Missile Crisis

Richard Ned Lebow

Maps

Soviet Missle Installations in Cuba

Sound

Recording of Kennedy during the Crisis

Letters

Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev, April 18, 1961

Indications of Soviet Arms shipment to Cuba, October 5, 1960 (pdf)

Bibliographical Essay

For much of the Cold War the Cuban missile crisis was a hot topic, and there is considerable literature on the crisis, almost all of it from the Western side. Most of these books and articles need to be read with great caution; they are infected by Cold War attributions, a bias facilitated by the absence of any good evidence on the Soviet side. The memoirs of American officials, and interviews with them, which are the primary sources of most empirical studies, share the same bias. Some of the most important memoir-cum-historical accounts – those of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, Theodore Sorenson and Robert F. Kennedy (as rewritten posthumously by Sorenson) – contained misinformation to preserve and enhance the President’s reputation and facilitate the American cover-up of the missile swap. Khrushchev’s memoirs, published in two volumes, were also heavily edited. New evidence on the Soviet side emerged as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. Former Soviet officials were permitted to participate in a series of conferences on the missile crisis organized by the John F. Kennedy Center. Their oral recollections triggered matching revelations by American officials, and started a cascade of memoirs, documents from Soviet and American archives, and secondary works based on these sources. The most remarkable documents are the transcripts of the recordings that Kennedy had secretly made of the deliberations of the Ex Comm during the crisis. The actual recordings are now available on line at http://www.hpol.org/jfk/cuban/. The U. S. Department of State has many documents one line at a http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusX/index.html. The National Security Agency has also released many documents that can be found at http://www.nsa.gov/docs/cuba/. The National Security Archive, a private, non-profit organization, is the largest repository of public documents and photographs on the crisis, and many can be found at http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com. The website includes an extensive discussion of available documents and gaps in documentation. Other on-line sources include http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/cuba.htm and http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/r/x/rxb297/CUBA/MAIN.HTML.

Soviet documents are not yet available on line, but many can be obtained through the National Security Archive, and many memoirs of participants have been published in English. Some of the most valuable ones have been cited in this essay. The Central Intelligence Agency has declassified documents, available in Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (New York: The New Press, 1992).

There are a number of good secondary sources on the crisis, the best of which base their interpretations on the new material. The most comprehensive and reliable overall accounts of the crisis are Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1990) and Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Mc George Bundy’s, Danger and Survival: Choice About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), which appeared before many of these documents were classified, is the best and most honest inside account of the crisis by an American official. James G. Blight and David A. Welch, eds., Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), is the most authoritative study of intelligence and the missile crisis. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1997), makes use of many KGB, Committee for State Security, and Soviet foreign ministry documents, but must be read with great caution. The KGB provided a select set of documents for the authors to use, and their interpretative claims often go beyond any documentary base.