Bundy decided to look back on his role in the debacle. One of the first books he read was David Halberstams's The Best and the Brightest. A book in which he figured prominently. Although he thought it was an
entertaining and informative read, he concluded that the central thesis
was just wrong. (pgs. 148-49) It was not the advisers—the best and
brightest—who did the staff work who got us into the Vietnam War. It
was the difference in the men who occupied the Oval Office. It was the
difference between Kennedy and Johnson...

BOB
GARFIELD: Machismo was certainly part of the popular image of JFK back
then. Here's a clip from a 1970s TV docudrama Missiles of October,
starring a very young William Devane.


[CLIP]:


WILLIAM
DEVANE/JOHN F. KENNEDY: Now we must convey an uncompromising message.
This government is prepared to negotiate, but not until those missiles
are removed from Cuba. We will not be deterred. We will not be shaken.
We'll bomb, if we must. We'll invade if we must.


[END CLIP]


FRED
KAPLAN: Yeah, that, that clip is just hilarious, diametrically opposed
to the way John Kennedy was acting at any of those sessions. In fact,
this does lead us to the fourth draft of history, tapes that Kennedy
had secretly been making. Long before Nixon and before Johnson, Kennedy
was taping a lot of things that happened in the Oval Office and in the
Cabinet Room, where the ex-con meetings took place. And we hear very
clearly in those meetings that Kennedy took Khrushchev's offer of the
missile trade very, very seriously.


In fact, on the third day of
the crisis, Kennedy is already musing that well, you know, Khrushchev,
he's made a miscalculation. He's obviously done this for bargaining
leverage, and we're going to have to help him find a way to save face.
Maybe if we trade those missiles in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba,
that might be the answer. Nobody even takes him up on it. So on the
last day of the crisis, when Khrushchev does bring it up, he's very
eager to take it. And, in fact, he is the only one in the room who's
willing to take it.


You know, there's been this, this model from
the first draft of history on, that the room was divided into hawks and
doves and centrists. But, in fact, on the last couple of days of the
crisis, the room was divided between John Kennedy and everybody else.
Everybody else in that room wanted to bomb the missiles in Cuba, and
only John Kennedy wanted to take the trade.


BOB GARFIELD: Now, unaccustomed as we are to having presidential tapes reveal the president in a positive light [LAUGHS] —


FRED KAPLAN: Yeah.


BOB
GARFIELD: — Nixon certainly was ensnared by his own voice on tape — it
must have had an astonishing effect. When were the tapes released, and
how long did it take before this real version of history informed our
public understanding of the crisis?


FRED KAPLAN: Word of the
tapes first came out in 1982, 20 years after the crisis, when several
of Kennedy's advisors — McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, a few others —
wrote a little article in Time Magazine in which they admitted that the
myth of the Cuban missile crisis was false.


When I interviewed
Ted Sorensen about this five years ago, he admitted that basically
Kennedy, after that last ex-con meeting, he took seven people into his
office and he told them that look, I'm sending my brother over to the
Soviet Embassy and I'm going to accept this deal, but you can't tell
anybody, and that after Kennedy was assassinated they all got together
and pledged that nobody would ever reveal this.


The first tape
was revealed in 1987, and it was of the last day of the crisis where
Khrushchev comes out with a deal and Kennedy says hey, this is a pretty
good deal, and everybody in the room is shouting him down, saying this
will wreck NATO, we can't do this, it'll, it'll ruin our credibility.


Kennedy
lets them talk on and at one point he says look, to any man at the
United Nations or any other rational man it will look like a very fair
trade. I'm reading from the transcript here. And later he also says,
and this I think is the - is the telling point, he says, well I'm just
thinking about what we're going to have to do in a day or so, which is
500 sorties. The Air Strike Plan called for 500 air sorties against the
Cuban missile sites every day for seven days...