History : from reel to real -- The template : Robert F. Kennedy's Thirteen days -- The real Robert Kennedy -- The mythmaking of Robert McNamara -- The forgotten voice of Dean Rusk -- The erratic expertise of Llewellyn Thompson -- The selective memory of McGeorge Bundy -- The determined diplomacy of Adlai Stevenson -- The Trollope ploy myth -- Lyndon Johnson and the missile crisis : an unanticipated consequence? -- Conclusion : leadership matters -- Epilogue : What if?
Summary
This book exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies that have shaped the still dominant but largely mythical version of what happened in the White House during those harrowing two weeks of secret Cuban missile crisis deliberations. A half-century after the event it is surely time to demonstrate, once and for all, that RFK's Thirteen Days and the personal memoirs of other ExComm members cannot be taken seriously as historically accurate accounts of the ExComm meetings
