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Assessing Victory and Defeat
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14510 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1988 |
3,724 Words |
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Alan J. Levine
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THE PERFECT FAILURE
Trumbull Higgins
New York: Norton, 1987
224 pp., $17.95
REFLECTIONS ON THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Raymond Garthoff
Washington: Brookings Institution, 1987
159 pp., $8.95
The island of Cuba may not bulk very large on a map of the world, but it has been the occasion for two of the most crucial episodes of the Cold War. The failure of the CIA-Cuban exile attack on Castro's Cuba in April 1961 may not have been the West's worst reversal in the Cold War, but it was arguably one of the most humiliating and embarrassing defeats experienced by the Western powers prior to the loss of Vietnam. And, while a few optimists have managed to discern some dividends even from the Vietnamese catastrophe--arguing that it encouraged the Indonesian generals to overthrow the procommunist Sukarno, and that the struggle won time for the creation of a noncommunist Southeast Asia dominated by the ASEAN states--no one (except for Arthur Schlesinger) has ever found any redeeming features in the Bay of Pigs. It was, in the words of Trumbull Higgins' title, "the perfect failure." The sequel to the defeat of the invasion was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, widely believed to be the closest brush with a nuclear war that the world has ever had.
Higgins' study of the Bay of Pigs disaster and Garthoff's brief review of the missile crisis provide detailed and cogent accounts of the two Cuban crises. Both suffer certain inadequacies and fail to look beyond highly questionable ideas--in Higgins' case, stereotyped views of the history of U.S.-Latin American relations and the causes of revolution in the so-called Third World, in Garthoff's, an apparent insistence on the validity of liberal arms control orthodoxy and a view of détente that was popular in the early 1970s but that has not been sustained by events. But both books are informative, the products of well-informed and capable specialists who have provided food for thought about the two Cuban crises and the connections between them. Higgins has written a number of well-known studies of politico-military relations, notably Hitler and Russia, and a trilogy of works dealing with Winston Churchill and the Mediterranean campaigns of both world wars. Even those who disagree profoundly (as I do) with Higgins' interpretations of Churchill and the fighting in the Mediterranean have found his works extremely useful. Raymond Garthoff is a well-known Soviet specialist and former State Department official; his book Détente and Confrontation is the leading account of Soviet-American relations from 1969 to the present.
The Cuban conundrum
The landing at the Bay of Pigs, with the parallel effort to have Castro murdered, was the supreme attempt to prevent the establishment of a permanent communist regime in Cuba. The missile crisis was the first, and just possibly not the most unpleasant, consequence of its failure.
As Higgins shows, the Bay of Pigs defeat had roots deep in the CIA's earlier activities. The apparently easy success of the CIA effort to overthrow the procommunist Arbenz regime in
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