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The claim that “I was there” should, if anything, be regarded as a warning about historical inaccuracy rather than accepted as a special form of validation. History based on personal recollections rarely transcends the author’s motives in writing it. This flaw has been particularly striking among the small, closed, and inevitably dwindling group of ExComm participants, who until the release of the tape recordings had successfully promoted their unique authority to shape our understanding of those historic deliberations.

He also reiterated that a blockade would not force the Soviets to stop construction of the existing missile sites. ” On the following day, the president met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and revealed, to their dismay, that he had decided to start with a blockade. Anxious to avoid alerting the press about the evolving crisis, JFK then left Washington for a previously scheduled campaign trip to the Midwest. Meetings were held at the State Department on October , and RFK, essentially standing in for his brother, pointedly mentioned that he had spoken to the president only a few hours earlier and argued for the blockade because a sneak attack on a small country was not in the American tradition.

Nonetheless, he continued—much like in his  RFK biography—to uncritically accept many of RFK’s published assertions despite the fact that they were, for the first time, open to corroboration by the tape recordings or to a lesser degree by the  publication of a set of complete ExComm transcripts. ” and a “remarkable [and] unprecedented illumination” of the ExComm meetings. Nonetheless, he completely ignored both the aural and written substance of these new sources of information. His foreword, as a result, is shot through with what we can now prove are demonstrably manipulative and erroneous conclusions.