Talk at the Brink
Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis
David R. Gibson
Copyright Date: 2012
Published by: Princeton University Press
Pages: 256
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t7gm
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Book Info
Talk at the Brink
Book Description:

In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the American response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. That response was informed by hours of discussions between John F. Kennedy and his top advisers. What those advisers did not know was that President Kennedy was secretly taping their talks, providing future scholars with a rare inside look at high-level political deliberation in a moment of crisis.Talk at the Brinkis the first book to examine these historic audio recordings from a sociological perspective. It reveals how conversational practices and dynamics shaped Kennedy's perception of the options available to him, thereby influencing his decisions and ultimately the outcome of the crisis.

David Gibson looks not just at the positions taken by Kennedy and his advisers but how those positions were articulated, challenged, revised, and sometimes ignored. He argues that Kennedy's decisions arose from the intersection of distant events unfolding in Cuba, Moscow, and the high seas with the immediate conversational minutia of turn-taking, storytelling, argument, and justification. In particular, Gibson shows how Kennedy's group told and retold particular stories again and again, sometimes settling upon a course of action only after the most frightening consequences were omitted or actively suppressed.

Talk at the Brinkpresents an image of Kennedy's response to the Cuban missile crisis that is sharply at odds with previous scholarship, and has important implications for our understanding of decision making, deliberation, social interaction, and historical contingency.

eISBN: 978-1-4008-4243-8
Subjects: Political Science, Sociology, History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. List of Illustrations and Excerpts
    List of Illustrations and Excerpts (pp. ix-x)
  4. Preface
    Preface (pp. xi-xvi)
  5. CHAPTER 1 Introduction: TALK IN TIME OF CRISIS
    CHAPTER 1 Introduction: TALK IN TIME OF CRISIS (pp. 1-23)

    The course of history sometimes hinges on what happens when people talk. On the night of August 4, 1789, amid rumors of peasant unrest, clerics and nobles in the French National Assembly enthusiastically renounced their feudal privileges, overturning the old regime and establishing equality before the law.¹ On October 13, 1962, Vatican II opened with a dramatic challenge to conservative Curia control over the proceedings, paving the way for sweeping church reforms.² On the evening of January 27, 1986, NASA engineers teleconferenced with their contractor counterparts and decided to go ahead with the launch of theChallengerspace shuttle, which...

  6. CHAPTER 2 The Future in Thought and Talk
    CHAPTER 2 The Future in Thought and Talk (pp. 24-48)

    What the ExComm did, much if not all of the time, was talk about possible futures: about the repercussions of a surprise air attack on Cuba versus a blockade, about the consequences of firing on a Soviet ship at the blockade line, about the chances that Khrushchev would accept a deal that did not involve the missiles in Turkey.¹ It did this by telling stories, adapting procedures and devices from storytelling about the past to narrate things that had not yet unfolded and that might never. This is what I mean by “foretalk.”

    To understand the foretalk from which the...

  7. CHAPTER 3 The ExComm
    CHAPTER 3 The ExComm (pp. 49-73)

    To understand how the ExComm arrived at particular discursive states, or particular articulated understandings of the options and their attendant risks, it helps to know something about the institutional and historical conditions that gave rise to it, and how, once in place, it operated. I begin this chapter with some historical background, situating the ExComm, as a deliberative body, against the backdrop of the Bay of Pigs, where genuine deliberation was lacking. Then I describe how the ExComm’s meetings were organized and conducted. I start with some remarks about the composition of the group, and then describe, in general terms,...

  8. CHAPTER 4 The Response
    CHAPTER 4 The Response (pp. 74-108)

    The ExComm first assembled shortly before noon on October 16 (though it was not formally constituted as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council until the twenty- third, and the nickname was a later invention). Fifteen men were in attendance. Regular ExComm members included the president, his brother and attorney general Robert Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy, Under Secretary of State George Ball, Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs...

  9. CHAPTER 5 The Blockade
    CHAPTER 5 The Blockade (pp. 109-134)

    President Kennedy announced the blockade, or quarantine,¹ on the evening of October 22. Twenty Soviet ships turned around the next morning, though the ExComm did not learn of this until the morning of October 24 (and then they believed the number to be fourteen). These, we now know, included all ships with military cargo, including those carrying missiles.² Yet other Soviet (and Soviet-chartered) ships continued on course to Cuba. While Kennedy, in particular, doubted that any of these carried nuclear weapons, his advisers were less certain, and in any event the credibility of the blockade seemed to depend on its...

  10. CHAPTER 6 The Deal
    CHAPTER 6 The Deal (pp. 135-158)

    On the evening of Friday, October 26, President Kennedy received a private letter from Khrushchev. After lecturing the president on the peaceful nature of communism and the difference between defensive and offensive armaments— insisting that the missiles on Cuba were defensive because Castro did not have the means of invading the U.S. mainland— and equating the blockade with “piracy,” Khrushchev appeared to offer to withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade the island:

    If assurances were given by the President and the government of the United States that the USA itself would not participate in...

  11. CHAPTER 7 Conclusion
    CHAPTER 7 Conclusion (pp. 159-166)

    Reflecting on the decision-making process after the Cuban missile crisis was over, President Kennedy famously observed that “the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer— often, indeed, to the decider himself. . . . There will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision- making process— mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved.”¹ In this conclusion, I summarize my argument with an eye to making sense of this striking claim, wherein Kennedy appears to admit that even he felt baffled by what happened in the White House during his presidency.

    Let me begin...

  12. APPENDIX A Timeline of Events and ExComm Meetings
    APPENDIX A Timeline of Events and ExComm Meetings (pp. 167-174)
  13. APPENDIX B Dramatis Personae
    APPENDIX B Dramatis Personae (pp. 175-176)
  14. APPENDIX C Conversation-Analytic Transcribing Conventions
    APPENDIX C Conversation-Analytic Transcribing Conventions (pp. 177-180)
  15. APPENDIX D The Audio Recordings
    APPENDIX D The Audio Recordings (pp. 181-182)
  16. Notes
    Notes (pp. 183-202)
  17. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 203-212)
  18. Index
    Index (pp. 213-218)
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