May-ZelikowConfidential

Abstract

I am grateful for the chance, which was unprecedented in my thirty years of writing books and impossible to pass up, to have my say in the same issue as a critical review. Let me begin, then, by noting that I think the editor's choice of May and Zelikow, authors of The Kennedy Tapes, as reviewers of my book was wrongheaded. These two academics spent many difficult years dredging their way through audio tapes from the Kennedy Library and laboriously putting together transcripts only to find that shortly before publication a very high-profile book about Jack Kennedy was published that told the world, in effect, don't believe what we're telling you about the Kennedy presidency – and especially be skeptical of Kennedy's wondrous victory in the Cuban missile crisis. In their book, as they wrote, the missile crisis “may well have been the finest hours of John F. Kennedy.” In my book, it's a con – a crisis precipitated by Kennedy and adroitly, even brilliantly, resolved by him through lies and deceit.