Railing Against Myths

So, I recently read Sheldon M. Stern's The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality. The blurb on the back said it "exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies . . ." about the crisis. As a student of the missile crisis, I thought it would have new and interesting things to say. I was disappointed.

Stern has obvious strong emotions around this project. He seems to feel that Robert Kennedy had an explicable and malign plan to twist the truth -- and he is aggravated and upset that people still believe it. (For those of you who don't follow this stuff, the crisis was resolved by the Russians withdrawing the missiles from Cuba and the US publicly promising not to invade Cuba. But, in addition, JFK secretly promised to remove US missiles in Turkey. Robert Kennedy didn't mention this promise in his book about the crisis, Thirteen Days. The secret was reveal only years later.)

As someone who struggles against myths, I think Stern's obvious anger is misplaced. Myths don't exist because evil actors cleverly fool everyone. Hirohito didn't have a dastardly plan to exaggerate the power of nuclear weapons by saying they forced Japan's surrender. He had a practical, political problem that involved getting his country to accept defeat and still retain its dignity (and preserve his own role as Emperor). He was doing the best he could under difficult circumstances. Hirohito's actions are entirely understandable.

The reason the myth about the overwhelming power of nuclear weapons has endured is not that Hirohito tricked us. It's that it works for people. It makes them feel good, or safe, or proud of the United States. Myths endure not because some trickster lied once and then no one was smart enough to see the truth. Myths endure because they are congenial to the society as a whole. They fit with their self-conception of their national identity.

For example, everyone has known for at least a hundred years that Richard the Third did not strangle his nephews in the Tower of London. It's been shown quite convincingly again and again. The problem is not the first person who told the lie. The problem is all the people for whom that lie worked. All the people who believed it because it seemed to "fit" with their ideas about themselves or their country. They repeated it. They are the root cause of it continuing, not the first liar.

(It works for the people of the United Kingdom to continue to think of Richard as a bad guy because if he were a steady, responsible, sympathetic king [which is what he seems to have been] who was killed and displaced by a ruthless usurper [which is my own read on Henry VII but not an unreasonable reading of the evidence], it would undermine the story of Great Britain as a whole. It would call into question the notion of the monarchy. The King of England has to be divinely anointed and approved, otherwise the line down to this day is tainted. So if Richard lost the kingship and Henry got it, then Henry has to be the good guy and Richard didn't deserve to be king in some way.)

The reason people believe the myths about the Cuban Missile Crisis is not because the Kenendys were dirty, rotten, liars. The reason people believe it is that it is too uncomfortable, too frightening to believe that we blundered to within an inch of a catastrophic nuclear war and the people in charge were lurching from one idea to the next with no real clear plan. It is important for our national peace of mind to believe that in a nuclear crisis the people in charge solve the problem rationally, systematically, and through it all keep our position in the world intact.

Stern's bias is most clearly evident in the way he continually tells you what people are thinking or what they intend when they say things that are ambiguous. You shouldn't do that as a historian. The evidence has to speak for itself. The judge doesn't let lawyers testify for the witnesses, constantly interpreting and expanding what they actually said, and historians should not be allowed to ventriloquize either.

I also didn't find that much that was new (despite his promises in the intro) or that surprised me. Most of his shocking revelations involved people taking first one viewpoint and then later arguing something else. This is not particularly new or even that surprising. It makes sense that people would take first one position then another. That is the way people talk when they are trying to work through a problem together.

The one interesting thing he said, which he said in passing and unsourced, was the assertion that Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days was originally drafted to be a campaign book for JFK's 1964 Presidential campaign. If true, that would put an entirely different spin on the book (not the finished product, but the original plan of it). It would have been designed as a political document whose first job was to present the Kennedys in their best light, rather than some historian's attempt at an objective account.

I found it hard to get through this book. Stern is angry that people don't believe historians and willingly put aside the comforting myths they've been living with for decades. That's just not the way things work, Mr. Stern, and being snappish and upset about it doesn't get you there.