Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis By David R. Gibson. Princeton University Press. 2012. 256 pages. $35 cloth

Abstract

David Gibson's Talk at the Brink is a stimulating and insightful contribution to scholarship on one of the single most important events in American history of the past sixty years—the Cuban Missile Crisis. It adds another level to our understanding, continuing the multi-model approach pioneered by Graham Allison (along with Philip Zelikow) in Essence of Decision(1999). Who needs a rehashing of the decisions around the crisis, given that it has been analyzed from stem to stern by a bevy of social scientists? As it turns out, we do. Gibson covers new ground on the case by engaging in deep analysis of the deliberations of President Kennedy and his advisors from ExComm, as they tried to decide how to extricate the United States from a diplomatic mess that held the potential to escalate to full-on nuclear war. Gibson's focus on micro-contingency, or the notion that history can be influenced by the local as much as by the global, asks us to get our feet back on the ground. Rather than focus on the Hobbesian world of political scientists, in which nations relentlessly pursue national interest, or the bureaucratic political realm, in which “where you sit determines where you stand,” Gibson asks us to focus our gaze on talk.