Abstract
After American officials staked out their initial positions on 16 October, two key debates took place in ExComm resulting in the decision to blockade Cuba. The battle between supporters of the air strike and blockade, in which the latter group prevailed, was the first. The second was the discussion on and unequivocal rejection of Stevenson’s 20 October proposals, which sought to resolve the crisis through mutual Soviet-American concessions, and in so doing represented the principal alternative to the air strike and blockade options.
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Notes and References
McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 399; oral history of Gilpatric, 81–2, JFKL; Bradlee, Conversations, 224–5. For a lucid portrayal of Acheson in his post-secretary of state years, see Douglas Brinkley, Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–1971 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Andrei A. Gromyko, Memoirs, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 176–7; Sorensen, Kennedy, 689–91.
David S. McLellan, Dean Acheson: The State Department Years (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1976), 225–6; Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, 492–3; Alsop, Center, 102.
Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, 492, 494; Acheson, Present at the Creation, 402. For evidence of the disdain with which Acheson viewed
Acheson to Manlio Brosio, 28 October 1959, in McLellan and Acheson, eds, Among Friends, 173; McLellan, Dean Acheson, 413–14; Johnson, ed., Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, VIII, xv; Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, 563, 579–81, 583.
McCone memorandum, 19 October 1962, in ibid., 184; Bundy, Danger and Survival, 400; Meeker, minutes of 11:00 a.m. ExComm meeting, 19 October 1962; Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, 224.
Kennedy, Thirteen Days, 26–7; McNamara, notes of National Security Council meeting no. 506 with JFK.
Quoted in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds, Dictionary ofAmericanBiography, supplement eight, 1966–1970 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 323; oral history of Robert Kennedy, vol. 1, 58, 65, JFKL.
Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds, Robert Kennedy in his Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), 335; Kennedy, Thirteen Days, 1, 25–6.
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© 1996 Mark J. White
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White, M.J. (1996). The Battle for Blockade: Bobby Kennedy versus Dean Acheson. In: The Cuban Missile Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374508_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374508_6
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