Cuban Missile Crisis Historian Quotes

Recent scholarship confirms the portrait of John F. Kennedy sketched by his brother in Thirteen Days: a remarkably cool, thoughtful, nonhysterical, self-possessed leader, aware of the weight of decision, incisive in his questions, firm in his judgment, always in charge, steering his advisers perseveringly in the direction he wanted to go. “We are only now coming to understand the role he played in it,” writes John Lewis Gaddis, the premier historian of the Cold War.

Again and again, governments have made world-shaking decisions based upon misinformation. The fallibility of giant state information-gathering machines bewilders historians, and all nations have regularly suffered from its consequences. Every sensible national leader listens to their intelligence chiefs, but none make critical judgements solely on the basis of their claims.

Studying history, of course, is not like assembling a neatly cut jigsaw puzzle. Pieces of historical evidence do not have to fit together tidily or logically within fixed and predetermined borders. Indeed, despite the best efforts of historians, they do not have to fit together at all. History defines its own parameters, and real historical figures often defy our assumptions and expectations. Contradictions and inconsistencies are the rule rather than the exception in human affairs. History is not a play. There is no script.