The Kennedy Imprisonment, by Garry Wills

Wills, Garry. The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1982).

Wills, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian, wrote this book in the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy’s unsuccessful run in 1980 for the Democratic presidential nomination. Like a political observer trained in family psychology, the author attempts to explain the unique privileges, burdens--and now failures-- of the youngest Kennedy son.

He describes it all as the result of the family’s development and abuse of power over many decades. For example, in “Part One: Sex,” Wills tells a number of stories about the philandering father, Joe Kennedy Sr. He suggests that John Kennedy, also a compulsive womanizer, was both acting like his father and trying to compensate for his own weak constitution. Only years later would the moral weight of this “masculine” family habit fall squarely on Ted’s shoulders. His lonely and damaged wife, Joan, and the candidate’s obvious reluctance to come close to any woman in public were just two of the pitiful consequences of a pattern of immorality spanning two generations.

In subsequent parts, Wills likewise depicts Ted as the prisoner of “Family” and “Image,” and “Charisma.” To devastating effect, he describes a Joe Kennedy Sr. obsessed with the goal of portraying his children, especially his sons, as a group of indomitable winners. For example, working behind the scenes Joe began with John’s senior paper at Harvard and managed to have it padded, reworked, and promoted as a noteworthy book, Why England Slept. He also saw to it that the story of PT 109 was carefully crafted and publicized so that John emerged as one of the best-known heroes of World War II. Again, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Years later it was not John Kennedy, but Ted Sorensen assisted by Jules Davids, who wrote almost all of Profiles in Courage, a book that, incredibly, garnered for JFK a Pulitzer Prize. Of course, the decades-long tradition of deception and empty credentials would inevitably come crashing down. But again, in this tragedy of Shakespearean proportions the older Kennedys experienced the pride. It was Ted, in so many ways alone, who would know the fall.

In the last major section of the book, “Power,” Wills sets out to demolish, among other things, the American myth of the Cuban missile crisis. One by one, he takes out each pillar holding up the structure: Notwithstanding the attempts to spread the blame, only President Kennedy could have launched or prevented the Bay of Pigs. With a mixture of hubris and ignorance, he opted to go with the plan, in part because it was clandestine, unconventional, and high brow, “a James Bond exploit blessed by Yale, a PT raid run by Ph.D.s” (231). And why not risk it? The president had been so lucky up till then.

The early, conventional portraits of the Kennedy administration suggest that not only did JFK learn several important lessons from his humiliating defeat, it was this newfound wisdom that supposedly enabled him to act so effectively during the missile crisis. But Wills insists that the facts speak otherwise. He says that after the Bay of Pigs, the president never questioned the general purpose and plan of the scheme. To the contrary, he increased his dedication to an anti-bureaucratic approach that specialized in things like paramilitary assaults, counterinsurgency, and guerrilla warfare. In other words, after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy did not change his course. Instead, he became more devoted to the prospect of unseating Fidel Castro, this time by means of the secretive Operation Mongoose. Plans designed to topple the Cuban dictator were well known by both Castro and Khrushchev. Thus, the reason why Castro reluctantly agreed to have Soviet missiles sent to Cuba was because he wanted a deterrent against an invasion by the US. When Cuba and the USSR made this claim during the crisis, they were telling the truth.

And what of the legendary restraint shown by Kennedy during the crisis? Wills answers that the president’s claim that he made “every effort” in order to provide room for his adversary is “demonstrably untrue” (265). Among other things, Kennedy ruled out open diplomacy from the very beginning of the crisis, insisted that the removal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey must not be seen as a quid pro quo, and eventually gave the Russians a 24-hour deadline along with his proposal, a move that actually increased the likelihood of war.

Wills says that by acting in such unrestrained fashion, Kennedy helped to precipitate the fall of Khrushchev, a relatively-easy opponent who was replaced by a Soviet hard-liner. Having been treated this way once by the US, leaders in the USSR were in no mood to make compromises later. Not only that, Kennedy’s behavior in the crisis established a pattern of insisting that the US always deal with adversaries from a superior position, instead of as equals. For these reasons, Wills concludes that the Cuban missile crisis was not, in fact, a great victory for Kennedy and America.

The Kennedy Imprisonment was intended for a general, non-academic audience. It is extremely well written and reads easily. Nevertheless, any book making so many counter claims, several of them audacious, really should be accompanied by documentation. There was no good reason for this work to be published without some sort of notes. Their absence significantly weakens the credibility and usefulness of what might have been a convincing, as well as telling, critique.

Been Readin'

Cold War Fever

So maybe you've guessed by now. These days I'm focused on the Cold War; especially that episode called the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in October 1962. My previous two posts are short reviews of some important sources about the crisis. One, Robert F. Kennedy's Thirteen Days, is an early, first-person report that was polished up and published not long after his assassination in 1968. The second, Sheldon Stern's The Week the World Stood Still, is based on the author's transcripts of the tape recordings of meetings held in the Cabinet Room and in the Oval Office during the crisis. In addition to those two books and a few others I'm currently reading, I've recently come across a few articles you might find interesting. . . .

The Calvinists are Coming!

Something I've noticed about Religion majors at Amarillo College: many of them are Calvinists of sorts. A recent issue of the Economist magazine contains an article about how this phenomenon is impacting the Southern Baptist Convention: Southern Baptists: the new Calvins.

The Sunday-Night Slide

I always enjoy taking a look at Christian Century magazine. For many decades now, it's been the voice of mainline Protestantism in America. It's like the Christianity Today magazine for people who are to the left of evangelicals. Anyway, a recent issue contains an article about something I've mentioned here before: Sunday night services a fading tradition.

A Scholar of the Classics Reads Paul

I can still remember the shock. I had just started reading Philo. He was a Jewish leader who lived in Alexandria, Egypt about the time Christianity first began. My Greek wasn't good enough to read Philo in the original. I had to settle for an English translation. But even then, on nearly every page I came across phrases and expressions that reminded me so much of Paul. It was overwhelming evidence of something I'd never really understood before: Paul's rhetoric was hardly unique. In fact, in many ways it was typical. Wanna see? Check out Philo for yourself. Anyway, more recently, a real scholar of the Classics, Sarah Ruden, has published a book on the Apostle called Paul Among the People. I haven't read the book yet, but enjoyed John Wilson's interview with Sarah Ruden, which showed up in a recent issue of Christianity Today. The article is titled The Apostle of the Golden Age.

So, what are you reading these days? Anything especially good? . . .

The Week the World Stood Still

Stern, Sheldon M. The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.


From 1977 to 1999, Sheldon M. Stern served as Historian of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. In 2003, Stern published Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). The author describes that book as a “full-length” account based primarily on tape recordings of meetings that were held in the Cabinet Room and Oval Office of the White House during the crisis. Two years later, in 2005, Stern published The Week the World Stood Still, the book under review. In his “Acknowledgments,” he explains that this later work is a “revised and condensed version of Averting ‘The Final Failure’,” designed especially for “students and general readers.”

In Chapter One, “The JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes,” Stern describes both the delight and the frustration of listening to the recordings of the meetings. He relates the tedium of using the tapes, often incomplete and sometimes poor in quality, in order to identify who was speaking and what each person said. He also tells some of the story behind the production of the tapes: of JFK’s request for a recording system in the White House, the system itself and how it worked, etc. Finally, he disputes the notion that because only President Kennedy and his brother Robert knew that they were being recorded, the tapes fail to capture honest dialogue, but instead record the Kennedys posturing for posterity. In defense of his assertion, the author notes that a freewheeling conversation among fifteen bright people would be impossible to manipulate. Besides, like Richard M. Nixon a decade later, President Kennedy never imagined that anyone else would ever have access to his tapes. Above all, Stern reminds the reader that at the time of the crisis, as the meetings were being recorded, no one knew for sure how it would all turn out.

In Chapter Two, “The Making of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” the author sets the stage with a short, well-written, and helpful overview of the historical realities leading up to the crisis. Stern describes the Cold War and U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and with Cuba. He also tells us, with remarkable insight, about John F. Kennedy. Stern quotes letters written by JFK when he was a junior naval officer serving in the Pacific during World War II. Here, the reader gets to listen in as the unsuspecting future President candidly talks about the unspeakable ugliness of war and the comic ineptness of at least some military leaders. Stern closes the chapter with something that I found especially helpful: a brief, professional biography of each of the “Key Members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.”

Chapter Three, “The Secret Meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council,” makes up more than three-quarters of the book. Here Stern recounts the significant events and meetings of each day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, beginning with Tuesday, October 16, 1962, and continuing through Monday, October 29. Throughout, the author weaves together description and direct quotation in order to produce a continuous narrative. Without hearing the tapes themselves, the reader gains a strong sense of how the meetings went, the personalities involved, the attitudes of the participants, who spoke most frequently, and the specific decisions that President Kennedy had to make while under incredible pressure.

Stern’s account provides plenty of high drama. A good example comes from JFK’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday morning, October19. A few days into the crisis by this point, the deliberations of the Executive Committee had convinced the president of the terrible hazards and possibly-tragic consequences of a full-scale attack and invasion of Cuba. Kennedy favored something less drastic, a naval blockade of Cuba. But the JCS stoutly opposed him:

General LeMay, giving no indication that he had understood the dangers raised by the president, turned JFK’s Berlin argument on its head: “I don’t share your view that if we knock off Cuba they’re gonna knock off Berlin.” The Soviets “are gonna push on Berlin and push real hard” if the U.S. fails to take military action against Cuba, since they would feel “they’ve got us on the run.” Kennedy interrupted to ask about Soviet reprisals after a U.S. attack on Cuba. There would be no reprisals, LeMay asserted confidently, as long as you tell Khrushchev again, “If they make a move [in Berlin], we’re gonna fight.” The self-assured general moved in for the verbal kill: “This blockade and political action I see leading into war. . . . This is almost as bad as the appeasement in Munich. . . . I just don’t see any other solution except direct military intervention, right now” (pp. 67-68).
Passages like that one typify Stern’s account. From beginning to end, the reader is able to perceive the emotional ebb and flow of the meetings, as well as the political, military, and diplomatic questions that the president had to answer. The chapter ends not long after Nikita Khrushchev made his surprise announcement, on Saturday, October 27, that the Soviets would dismantle and remove their offensive weapons from Cuba.

“Epilogue: The November Post-Crisis” describes the tentative character of the agreement that the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. had reached. There were still many loose ends to tie up.

In his “Conclusion,” Stern reflects on the ways in which his experience with the tapes radically changed his perspective on the president and the crisis. Like most everyone else during the late 1960s, Stern says that he took it for granted “that John Kennedy had been a tough and relentless Cold Warrior.” However, in spite of his hard public rhetoric and his desire to see Castro eliminated, during the crisis Kennedy "repeatedly acted to prevent, postpone, or at least question the wisdom of” more than a dozen “potentially provocative measures” (216). In doing so, he “often stood virtually alone against warlike counsel from the ExComm, the JCS, and the leaders of Congress during those historic 13 days” (217). It seems clear that the author continues to esteem John F. Kennedy as a hero. Only now, he has different reasons.

Bobby Kennedy on the Cuban Missile Crisis

Kennedy, Robert F. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Introductions by Robert S. McNamara and Harold Macmillan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969.

At the beginning of Thirteen Days, Robert Kennedy relates something of what it felt like when he and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and several other high officials of the U.S. government first heard the facts. On Tuesday, October 16, 1962, experts from the U.S. Intelligence Community revealed to the group that the Soviet Union was building a missile base on the island of Cuba, and that atomic weapons and large missiles were already there. During the weeks leading up to that meeting, Soviet representatives, including Chairman Nikita Khrushchev himself, had consistently assured American leaders that they had no intention of sending surface-to-surface missiles or offensive weapons to Cuba. Remembering the moment when the truth became clear, Kennedy writes: "Now, as the representatives of the CIA explained the U-2 photographs that morning, . . . we realized that it had all been lies, one gigantic fabric of lies." There at page 27, I was hooked and kept reading to the end. What a riveting story, told so well.

From there, Kennedy describes some of the initial deliberations of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the "Ex Comm"). He tells about the competing recommendations they offered, which invariably led to the excruciating decisions that finally only the President could make. The first major decision took up the question of an appropriate initial response. After President Kennedy rejected the plan of a military strike and adopted the idea of naval blockade of Cuba, there were other questions to answer. Many of these were related to the task of striking a balance. On the one hand, it was imperative that the U.S. forcefully confront Khrushshev over the treachery and provocation of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, it was also necessary to leave room so that the Chairman could retain honor and respectability while backing down. As Kennedy describes it, this balancing act was performed by the President as he stood between the implicit threats from the Soviets on one side, and calls from U.S. military leaders and hawkish members of Congress for at least a strike, or even a full invasion of Cuba, on the other side.

Kennedy relates a number of nail-biting episodes as the crisis unfolded. He tells, for example, about the President meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko two days after U.S. officials became aware of the build up, and how Gromyko denied any such activity. He also reports how, at his brother's request, he made a visit to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin who, like Gromyko, held to the same official line: no long-range missiles had been delivered to Cuba, and the Soviet government had no intention of doing any such thing. Kennedy gives the reader a good sense of what it was like for the President to hear from the Ex-Comm about every possible contingency before making day-to-day and sometimes minute-to-minute decisions that brought with them huge consequences. Finally, Kennedy relates the official agreement according to which the Soviet Union would remove their weapons systems from Cuba and the United States would end the quarantine and pledge not to invade the island nation.

In addition to a sense of relief, I had several reactions as I finished this book. First, I was impressed at how well it is written. Throughout, Kennedy exhibits a crisp, easy-to-read style, the eloquence of precise and clear language.

Second, I was struck by the consistent humanity of this unique story. For example, if they go on long enough, even the most grave circumstances get interrupted by humor and the ridiculous. The Cuban Missile Crisis was no exception. Kennedy relates some of this. For example, upon realizing that something would have to be done in response to the aggression and deceit of the Soviets, Robert passed a note to his brother saying, "I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor" (31). And I had to smile when reading the story of how, instead of traveling in a long line of limousines which would have tipped off the press, ten men crammed into Kennedy's car for a ride to the White House (43).

Third, I felt suspicious whenever I sensed that Kennedy's own presidential aspirations and his natural desire to preserve his brothers' dignity overwhelmed the narrative. For example, he chalks up the Bay of Pigs debacle to a failure to solicit a variety of competing opinions. That action was precipitated by a unanimity of thought, says Kennedy, which closed off the possibility of a better decision (112). It also seemed more than a coincidence that Kennedy never mentions his official title, U.S. Attorney General. From beginning to end, he casts himself primarily as the President's brother, close advisor and assistant. An uniformed reader might be forgiven for concluding that Robert was the Vice President, instead of Lyndon Johnson to whom the author grants nothing more than a cameo appearance.

Most of all, I was glad I had read this book. In it, Robert Kennedy accomplished exactly what he set out to do: to tell the incredible story of the Cuban Missile Crisis from his own singular perspective.

Bombs Away

About a month ago, I mentioned some plans for a project in history, something I wanted to complete before the end of this year. I didn't mention it at the time, but my aspirations were related to a graduate course I'm taking this semester at West Texas A & M.

As it turns out, I don't have that much say when it comes to what my paper will be about. The course begins with us students reading some of the prominent secondary literature on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, during the second half, we do some research and then write up something that deals with a sub-topic related to that event.

So, here's my new idea: I'm thinking about a project at the intersection of the Cuban Missile Crisis and American Dispensational Premillennialism. I don't know much about this yet. But with the coming of the nuclear age, end-of-the-world scenarios began to assume that the Battle of Armaggedon would feature nuclear weapons. So, in what ways did the Cuban Missile Crisis ramify specifically among American premillennialists and their visions of the end time?

I'm interested in what you can tell me about things like must-see sources, for example. I know, the professor, the good folks at the WT library, and my course of study will do a lot of this. But here at the beginning of the race, I can use all the help I can get. So whaddaya think?