American Policy & the Cuban Missile Crisis

Dino A. Brugioni, in Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, presents a fascinating and detailed account of the generally successful American policy in the 1962 confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Soviet effort to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. His work is invaluable as a sourcebook for understanding the behind-the-scenes formation of that policy, particularly with respect to the intelligence operations involved. As an insider in the photographic realm upon which President Kennedy relied so heavily for his policy, Brugioni was privy to matters of vital importance to any understanding of that crisis. If there is any reasonable criticism of Brugioni's work, it must focus on his blatant biases favoring the intelligence community, and on his failure to recognize the larger issues of foreign policy. In other words, the author assumes, from his limited perspective, that whatever the intelligence community does is right and good, and that if only political leaders would make proper use of intelligence everything would go well for the United States in world affairs.

In short, Brugioni's book can be seen as two works in one. If we read the book as a bird's-eye view of the operations of the intelligence community, it is valuable and, we trust, accurate. However, if we read the book hoping for an objective portrait of American policy in the Cuban Missile Crisis or in general, then we are going to be disappointed, for the author is a biased reporter

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ng information gained from the U-2 overflights he so lavishly praises, is neutral. It is first a matter of interpreting that data, of course, but more importantly it is a matter of how that data is to be used and what policy it is used to support. Buglioni appears to be clearly ignorant of the deeper moral questions at the core of policy-making, but he also seems to be unaware of the practical significance of the use of that data. If the author were open and candid about the moral and practical failures of the intelligence community, and did not blame everything on the politicians, then the reader would be more willing to accept his praise of that community and its truly amazing technical accomplishments. However, because Brugioni is so biased toward the intelligence community, the reader tends to be cautious about his overall assessment of the missile crisis or any other issue or event. Buglioni fails to even consider the possibility that the United States had no business invading Cuba---through the anti-Castro Cuban contingent---in the Bay of Pigs, that the Bay of Pigs led to the missile crisis, or that the agreement by Kennedy not to invade Cuba again, as a provision of the missile crisis settlement with the Soviets was not a

Category: Government - A