By Alicia Nemiccolo MacLeay '97

Most presentations of John F. Kennedy's handling of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis portray the president as either solitary and courageous or reckless and macho. History Professor Robert Weisbrot says that neither viewpoint ever sat right with him. "It seemed so focused on one man," he said. "Even when politics were acknowledged, they were a dramatic backdrop to one man's larger-than-life actions on the world stage."

So Weisbrot delved into the common interpretations to analyze Kennedy's decisions during the Cuban missile crisis -"the greatest collision in the history of the cold war"- within the framework of the country's values at the time. The result is Maximum Danger: Kennedy, the Missiles, and the Crisis of American Confidence.

"I didn't write a straight narrative of the missile crisis, despite some temptation to do so," Weisbrot said in a recent interview. "I think it's a great story, but it's been told so often and so brilliantly by eminent scholars and insiders." Instead, Weisbrot wanted to make a fresh contribution to scholarship and to place Kennedy's policy in proper historical context.

"On closer inspection . . . one finds that Kennedy explored no new policy frontiers," writes Weisbrot in Maximum Danger, "but rather etched a mainstream profile in caution, bounded securely by diplomatic precedent, partisan pressure, and the values of American political culture during the cold war."

The overwhelming focus of others who have written on the crisis has been on President Kennedy's decisions, said Weisbrot. It was Kennedy's personal admirers who helped craft his initial historical reputation. "First people lionized him, and suggested that his policies and leadership were magnificent, larger-than-life virtues," Weisbrot said.

By the 1970s America learned of the unseemly and even unsavory side of Kennedy's personal life and governance, including CIA abuses of power during the JFK era and plots against Castro. Revisionist writers inverted the previous heroic views of Kennedy and often psychoanalyzed his character. "Kennedy was seen as needlessly risking nuclear war because he was macho, reckless and irresponsible," Weisbrot said.

In researching Maximum Danger Weisbrot studied declassified transcripts of conferences during the crisis and later meetings between former American, Russian and Cuban officials. He then went beyond those internal dealings and examined the attitudes and beliefs of the day by reading what was expressed by newspaper columns, letters to the editor, community leaders and military and intelligence experts as well as by the Congressional Record and opinion polls. Weisbrot found that Kennedy was repeatedly more prudent than many civilian and military aides -"a moderate leader in a militant age."

Maximum Danger: Kennedy, the Missiles, and the Crisis of American Confidence by Robert Weisbrot (history) Ivan R. Dee (2001)

In his investigations, Weisbrot was surprised to learn how many ideas long attributed to John or Robert Kennedy were either the product of collaboration or were fairly commonplace ideas of the time. "The decision to blockade Cuba is often viewed as furtive, feverish brainstorming," Weisbrot said. But looking at speeches and newspaper reports, Weisbrot saw that for weeks it had been a commonly endorsed plan for dealing with Russian nuclear weapons entering Cuba. "It's a matter of putting things in context," he said.

The key to understanding Kennedy's leadership is an awareness of the pressures and constraints he had to work under-foreign policy, partisan politics, public opinion, the military, the CIA, cold-war attitudes of fear and insecurity. "With his keen sense of history, President Kennedy discerned that democratic leaders are subject to restraints that even scholars may find elusive," wrote Weisbrot.

Coming of age during the cold war contributed to Weisbrot's desire to study history, Kennedy's presidency and the missile crisis.  "To see how we got in a situation, we have to look at the past. Anyone who lived through the missile crisis was marked by it," he said, recalling weekly duck-and-cover nuclear drills in his Queens, N.Y., elementary school. "We were afraid the entire world would be destroyed."

Weisbrot argues that the debates over whether Kennedy was heroic or reckless, poised or impulsive, have misrepresented Kennedy's leadership. "Scholars have so focused on Kennedy's style, aura, temperament, and character as to slight, if not obscure, the crucial framework of national values that he necessarily accommodated and largely shared," Weisbrot writes.

"Kennedy did implement some policies that were dangerous, you could even say reckless," he said. "But given the time and attitudes, Kennedy was remarkably prudent."

In Maximum Danger, Weisbrot shows that a leader not only shapes history but is shaped by it.