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Assessing Victory and Defeat
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14510 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
3,724 Words |
| Author
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
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
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