- “Don’t believe the early, first draft of history, which is often written by the victors, channeled through uncritical journalists.”
- “The real risk of nuclear war in October 1962 arose from miscommunication and miscalculation.”
Michael Dobbs, “The ‘eyeball to eyeball’ moment that never was” (Foreign Policy, 10/24/12)
————————————————————————–
“Most important lesson Kennedy drew from reading The Guns of August: ‘mistakes and misunderstandings can unleash an unpredictable chain of events, causing governments to go to war with little understanding of the consequences.’”
Lesson: Biggest source of crisis instability: miscommunication, mistakes, and misunderstandings.
Michael Dobbs, “The Price of a 50-Year Myth” (New York Times, 10/15/12)
————————————————————————–
- “The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrates the sometimes pivotal role of personality in politics. Character counts. Had someone else been president in October 1962, the outcome could have been very different.” (p. 351)
Lesson: The role of personality in politics is important during crises.
- “Acheson attributed the peaceful outcome of the crisis to “plain dumb luck”. This is unfair. The story of the Missile Crisis is replete with misunderstandings and miscalculations. But something more than “dumb luck” was involved in sidestepping a nuclear apocalypse. The real good fortune is that men as sane and level-headed as John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev occupied the White House and the Kremlin in October 1962.” (353)
Lesson: This crisis was not prevented by pure luck. Good leaders are important to navigating a crisis.
- “There were many intelligence failures…Reviewing this record, one is struck, above all, by the corrosive effects of conventional wisdom. The problem was not so much with the collection of intelligence as with its interpretation and analysis. Eyewitness reports of giant tubes being unloaded from Soviet ships were dismissed because they were at variance with the official CIA estimate…The analysts dismissed the [Bejucal] site from serious consideration because it was protected by a single security fence, in contrast to the multiple fences and guard posts visible at similar installations in the Soviet Union.” (p. 352)
Lesson: Be wary of “conventional wisdom” when conducting intelligence work. Sometimes, the unconventional explanation may explain a shocking truth.
- “The most enduring lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that, in a world with nuclear weapons, a classic military victory is an illusion.” (p. 350)
Lesson: Nuclear weapons changed warfare completely: they made classic military victory impossible.
Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2008)..