Wrong Said Fred

In Slate, Fred Kaplan has a problem with Robert Caro's latest volume in his celebrated, massive life of Lyndon Johnson.  Kaplan believes Caro misreports the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This may be correct.  For years it was portrayed as Kennedy facing down the Soviets, though eventually the true story came out--we made a deal, where they pulled their missiles from Cuba and we pulled ours from Turkey six months later.  What Kaplan says Caro misses is that JFK was the only one of his group the support the deal.

He may be right about that, but he goes further:

JFK stood alone on making a deal with the Soviets—and, in the end, was redeemed. [....] Jack Kennedy emerges as the lone fount of wisdom in the tapes and transcripts.

Kennedy may have decided to do what he did on his own, but Kaplan just assumes that history has proven it was the wise thing to do.

The trouble is we can't rerun history.  Who knows what would have happened if Kennedy stood firm?  Maybe the Soviets would have backed down anyway. I guess we definitely gave up Cuba after the Missile Crisis, and condemning all those millions to live on an island-prison may have been better than any other scenario, but who can say?

Anyway, Cuba is small potatoes to someone like Fred Kaplan.  What he doesn't like is America throwing its weight around, so a humble Kennedy is better than a bellicose Johnson.  But once again, perhaps when Kennedy made the deal, the Soviets took our measure, and decided they could be more aggressive.  This may have led to more wars and the continuation of a brutal system that enslaved hundreds of millions.

I don't know, and I don't think Fred Kaplan knows either.