The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality

Stanford Nuclear Age Series

by Sheldon M. Stern

This book exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies that have shaped the still dominant but largely mythical version of what happened in the White House during those harrowing two weeks of secret Cuban missile crisis deliberations. A half-century after the event it is surely time to demonstrate, once and for all, that RFK's Thirteen Days and the personal memoirs of other ExComm members cannot be taken seriously as historically accurate accounts of the ExComm meetings.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, Military Fiction, War

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 2012

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ask any Cold War buff for a good book about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, without doubt, he will recommend you Robert F. Kennedy's Thirteen Days. Published in 1969, Bobby's memoir, based on his private diary and papers, quickly became the definitive authority on the subject – probably because Bobby had been an insider, he had been "there." 

As Sheldon M. Stern argues, though, President John F. Kennedy's secret tape recordings of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council during that nightmarish week in October 1962 reveal that someone's insider status does not guarantee the authenticity of their claims. In reality, the ExComm recordings, which the author of this book has painstakingly examined, tell a whole different story than Robert Kennedy.

While Bobby presents himself as his brother's indispensable adviser, who helped Jack overcome the urgent demands for military action and rejected the crazy idea of launching air strikes against Cuba by contending that "[i]f you bomb the missile sites and the airports, you are covering most of Cuba. You are going to kill an awful lot of people and take an awful lot of heat on it," he actually was one of the most aggressively hawkish participants in the meetings. And he quoted his words misleadingly to make them seem dovish. In fact, as the tapes reveal, he was arguing that bombing the sites was a weak and inadequate response and demanding a full-scale invasion – a course of action even the hawkish chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, had warned the President not to take a few minutes before. 

Had Thirteen Days not been so popular, had it not been considered the most authentic source available for so many years, Bobby Kennedy's deception would not be such an issue. The trouble is that his memoir was perceived as truthful by historians and laymen – me among them – alike, thus giving birth to myths, which had permeated the public's consciousness and created a fictional Cuban Missile Crisis that has little to do with reality. And the reality, according to Stern, was that there was only one person at the intense ExComm meetings who consistently and persistently resisted the advocates of military escalation from the ExComm, the Joint Chiefs, and the Congress: President John F. Kennedy himself. Robert Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen, MacGeorge Bundy and everyone else from the administration who tried to portray himself as a staunch dove was of no help.

That is why, armed with the evidence from the tape recordings, historian Sheldon M. Stern sets out to debunk the many myths surrounding the week when the whole world held its breath. He has divided his book into chapters according to the key players whose actual stance during the crisis had been obscured by false or incomplete accounts. 

He begins, naturally, with Robert F. Kennedy, who played a unique role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, for he was both the President's brother and his most trusted adviser. "I can vividly recall, for example, first listening to their recorded telephone conversations and initially finding it difficult to even understand what they were talking about. Typically, as soon as the connection was made, the brothers, without so much as a hello or “how are the kids,” would burst into a staccato exchange of barely coherent verbal fragments and exclamations before abruptly concluding with “OK,” “Good,” or “Right” or just hanging up. Their intuitive capacity to communicate often transcended the limits of conventional oral discourse. They always understood each other," describes Stern the wonderful trust and loyalty that existed between the Kennedy brothers. If John Kennedy temporarily left the room or did not attend an ExComm meeting, the participants instinctively recognized Robert Kennedy as his brother’s substitute – his frequent disagreements with the President notwithstanding. 

But unlike John's, Robert's attitude during the ExComm meetings was like that of a bantam cock preparing himself for a fight. The tapes reveal that he avidly opposed the naval quarantine his brother eventually chose to impose (to the Joint Chiefs' of Staff dismay) and argued in favor of intercepting a Soviet ship that had approached the blockade, preferably one that might carry missiles. “My God,” he declares tastily in one of the recordings. “The point is to . . . intercept a ship that had something rather than a lot of baby food for children.” This is hardly a dovish remark!

Next comes Robert S. McNamara, John Kennedy's whiz kid of a Secretary of Defense. Aside from Robert Kennedy himself, McNamara was the participant whom Thirteen Days most consistently portrays as a dove. The President's brother writes that McNamara “became the blockade’s strongest advocate.” But the tapes paint a more complex picture. Two days later, on October 18, McNamara abandoned the caution he had recommended and boldly embraced the Joint Chiefs' demand for an air and land attack on Cuba: "In other words," he announced, “we consider nothing short of a full invasion as practicable military action.” 

President Kennedy was surprised by the Secretary of Defense's about-face and asked, "Why do you change? Why has this information changed the recommendation?" McNamara declared that there were too many targets, including many not yet located, to be realistically destroyed by air strikes, and there was a big chance of the loss of the Guantánamo base and/or attacks on the civilian population on the eastern coast of the United States from the new missile bases or the Soviet nuclear bombers. 

As can be concluded from Stern's quoting of the ExComm tape recordings, President Kennedy was the one to oppose McNamara staunchly. He reminded the Secretary of Defense that an invasion of Cuba could not be justified because most of America's allies regarded Cuba “as a fixation of the United States and not a serious military threat. . . . because they think that we’re slightly demented on this subject. . . . they will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn't change" the nuclear balance of power. And only minutes afterwards, Kennedy came up with the idea that would eventually resolve the Missile Crisis: "If we said to Khrushchev . . . 'if you're willing to pull them out, we'll take ours out of Turkey.'" At first, McNamara voiced his support for the President's suggestion, but later opposed it vehemently. 

Nor was MacGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, of any help to the President, who fought a lone battle against the gung ho Joint Chiefs. Interestingly, Bundy, who was another key player in the ExComm decision-making process, is hardly mentioned in Thirteen Days. Robert Kennedy was unimpressed by Bundy’s performance —accusing him privately of weakness and indecisiveness, of "strange flipflops. First he was for a strike, then a blockade, then for doing nothing because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of a strike – and a strike without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor."

First of all, the foremost advocate of a "Pearl Harbor" strike was Bobby himself. Second, calling the brilliant, self-assured, arrogant MacGeorge Bundy weak and indecisive is a description that strains credibility. 

In his own memoir, Bundy, in a Churchillian effort to make History kind to himself, describes himself as the coolly rational pragmatist of the group, but the tapes dispel this myth too. In fact, Bundy frequently clashed with the President and fiercely resisted the missile trade Khrushchev proposed on October 27: if the United States pledged not to invade Cuba and pulled its Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, the Soviet Union would pull out of Cuba. 

Bundy also joined the virtually unanimous demand for simultaneously announcing both a blockade and a declaration of war, insisting that a blockade alone was illegal and “an act of aggression against everybody else.” He lectured the President: “your whole posture” must reflect the fact that Khrushchev has done “unacceptable things from the point of view of the security of the hemisphere.” From the tapes it becomes clear that John Kennedy was more often annoyed with Bundy than with anybody else, for the National Security adviser frequently forgot he was not the President of the United States. And contrary to Robert Kennedy's claims in Thirteen Days, Mac Bundy was among Bobby's most outspoken allies in resisting Khrushchev's proposal.

Last but not least, Dean Rusk's role was tragically misrepresented in the Attorney General's memoir. The Secretary of State, whom Robert Kennedy disliked, was outright libeled by Bobby. According to Thirteen Days, Rusk had initially been in favor of air strikes at the ExComm meetings, and afterwards was missing because “he had other duties during this period of time and frequently could not attend our meetings.” 

As Stern points out, in this case, the recordings help catch Robert Kennedy in an outright lie. Dean Rusk attended nineteen out of twenty ExComm meetings. His presence and contributions were recorded. He only failed to attend the meeting of the evening of October 18 because he was required to host a dinner at the State Department for Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who had met with the President earlier in the day, and part of the morning meeting on October 23 because he was on one of the most difficult diplomatic assignments of the week: negotiating a unanimous vote in favor of the blockade. Furthermore, he was not silent, passive, indecisive, or reluctant to recommend tough decisions and did not have a mental breakdown during the crisis, as Bobby claimed. (If he had had a mental breakdown, it is doubtful that both Kennedy and Johnson would have chosen to retain him as Secretary of State.) He was actually an outspoken and influential participant in the discussions and was more often, except in the case of the Turkey-Cuba trade, a louder voice for caution and diplomacy than anyone other than President John F. Kennedy. He came closest to playing the dovish role that Robert Kennedy assigned to himself in Thirteen Days. That is probably the reason Bobby sought to discredit Rusk's importance so eagerly. 

Overall, Stern's analysis of the ExComm tapes persuasively confirms that nothing during the momentous week of the Cuban Missile Crisis was what it seems to be in Robert Kennedy's account. As it turns out, President John F. Kennedy used his intellectual and political skill to steer not only the Soviet Union but also his own brother and advisers away from a nuclear war. On his own. 

Note 1: Sheldon M. Stern began studying the tapes' contents after they were opened to all researchers. The crucial recordings were not, and are not, available to him only, which means that if his conclusions were untruthful, other historians would have drawn attention to this fact.

Note 2: As Stern mentions, some historians have cast doubts on the authenticity of John F. Kennedy's and Robert F. Kennedy's behavior during the recordings. Stern rejects their theory that the two brothers might have acted and talked calculatingly because they knew their words were being recorded. He explains that the Kennedy brothers could not have predicted Watergate and the Freedom of Indormation Act, so President Kennedy could not have imagined the tapes, which were his private property, would ever be revealed to the public. In addition, it was impossible for him to know how to make history kind to himself because he could not have known the outcome of the Crisis.

Note 3: John F. Kennedy's tapes are now universally available, at no cost, from the Presidential Recordings Program on the website of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia (http://millercenter.org/academic/pres...).

[CoachJim · Rating 3 out of 5]

In October of 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over the nuclear missiles in Cuba the world faced perhaps the most dangerous period in its history. John Kennedy in his campaign for the presidency had criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing a communist country to exist 90 miles off the coast of the United States. When the Soviet Union allied itself with Cuba over Cuba’s fear of an invasion by the United States, Kennedy warned the Soviet Union twice about placing any offensive weapons in Cuba. Now the CIA informed him that the Soviets were building nuclear missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy found himself in a real fix.

When I was looking for a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis this book appeared to be getting positive reviews. Upon getting the book it became apparent that Sheldon Stern’s main theme was showing that Robert Kennedy, in his book Thirteen Days , was presenting a myth of his role. The author stakes his authority on the fact he had listened to all the tape recordings President Kennedy had made of the meetings. There is a vindictive tone to this book. The evidence he states is either weak, vague or imagined.

Both the Robert Kennedy book and this book tread the same ground. They describe the meetings of the Ex Comm, an executive committee President Kennedy formed to come up with a response to this crisis. There were several options discussed and some members would change their position over the course of the two weeks. There was an initial and almost universal proposal for a military strike. Even the president’s brother Robert supported this option at first. The president feared any military strike on Cuba by the United States would lead to a move by the Soviet Union against West Berlin. Also Robert Kennedy feared that a surprise attack on Cuba would be viewed as an atrocity similar to that of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and there was always the fear of igniting a nuclear exchange.

The president moved for a blockade of Cuba to prevent any more weapons from reaching the country. This decision was heavily criticized by the military and congressional leaders when they were informed. This was the same military that had assured the president that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a sure thing.

Eventually the blockade option was adopted, although it was called a quarantine to avoid any militaristic overtone. Robert Kennedy helped negotiate a secret deal with the Soviets that in exchange for a promise by the United States not to invade Cuba the Soviet Union would removed the missiles. There was also a secret understanding that the United States would begin removing the nuclear missiles in Turkey. The understanding about the Turkey missiles had to be kept a secret because the president feared NATO and its European allies would view it as a betrayal. Europe had been living in the shadow of Soviet missiles for years and could not understand America’s fixation on Cuba.

I read both this book and Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days . In Sheldon Stern’s book he relies on the tape recordings. There are a few instances of differences between the two books, but not enough to warrant anointing the Stern book as the better account. I prefer the Kennedy book with its “I was there” feel.

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a matter of record, of history. From 16 October to 28 October 1962 the U. S. and the Soviet Union were nose to nose in a dangerous crisis brought about when the U. S. discovered that the Soviets had installed in Cuba ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to strike American cities. The subsequent confrontation and diplomatic maneuvering which resolved the crisis without a nuclear exchange, an invasion of the island, or a general war was brought about by the Soviet insistence that the U. S. remove their own ballistic missiles from Turkey and agree not to invade Cuba in exchange for their removing the offensive weapons from the island.

The White House meetings on the crisis were conducted by the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Without the knowledge of the members, the meetings were taped. All previous histories and material dealing with the crisis had been prepared from transcripts rather than a careful audio appraisal of the tapes which were declassified only in the mid-1990s. Stern's book is an account of the course of the crisis as revealed through the content of the tapes and is presented as a very general narrative. As he demonstrates, the tapes debunk some misinformation and myths which have persisted through the years. In some ways the book takes particular aim at Robert Kennedy's book about the crisis, Thirteen Days, published posthumously in 1969. One of Stern's points is that "History based on personal recollections rarely transcends the author's motives in writing it," and he calls RFK's book a self-serving distortion of the facts. Kennedy painted his position during the proceedings as that of a dove, but Stern writes the tapes reveal his arguments were for dealing firmly with the situation by the use of quick and comprehensive military means. The roles of others have been corrected as well. Thirteen Days portrays Secretary of State Dean Rusk to be a weak advisor; the tapes, which cannot slant their content, show Rusk to have been, instead, one of the president's more reasonable and consistently helpful members of the committee. The meetings of those 13 days are discussed from the perspectives and motives of the key players, from the hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff who urged immediate military action to the president himself who saw almost from the first day that a trade, U. S. missiles for Soviet missiles, was the quickest, most reliable solution. All the voices are here: Vice President Johnson, Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson, Mac Bundy, Paul Nitze, and others. One problem with the book is that as Stern focuses on the individual committee members to reveal their thinking and comments as the crisis progressed, main points become redundant, brought up in regard to Rusk, then with the Vice President, then Bundy, and so on. It's like stopping the tape to rewind and play again.

There are some surprises in the book. I'd not known the fate of Berlin was such a concern during the crisis. American fears were that bombing or invading Cuba would result in a Soviet overrun of West Berlin, thus involving all of NATO. In fact, any military action at all against the U. S. would have brought all 40 of America's allies directly into the conflict. And I was surprised at the almost unanimous disagreement of ExComm members at the president's decision to make the trade, Cuban missiles for Turkish missiles. It's an interesting book, and it provides new perspectives as our picture of those 13 days become clearer.

[Billy Hopkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have been fascinated with history and wanting to learn more about it and the Cuban missile crisis is one of the historical situations that has fascinated me the most since we were on the brink of an all out nuclear war and this shortly after World War Two and the bay of pigs failure.
I learned a little bit about it shortly before reading this book and discovered that the facts of the Cuban missle crisis are largely unknown or what is known is Misunderstandings, lost information or flat out lies with who was involved and to what capacity which was difficult to keep up with in this book but interesting because most everyone at the excomm meetings wanted a full air strike and invasion of Cuba!!!
I don't like how Sheldon Stern structured this book; I feel as though where he listed the EXCOMM participants and their stance should have been placed at the start of the book as well as the listed individual 13 day synopsis' so you have a reference point starting the book. Also the writing jumped around a lot and I feel like the information for each of the 13 days could have been condensed into a chapter each. It was a difficult read - considering it took me over a month to read a 172 page book lol - but an interesting read nonetheless.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth reading, even if it feels like a bit of a slog at times. The objective of the book, as you can probably tell from the subtitle, is to dispel commonly held "myths" concerning the 1962 crisis. The detailed accounting of the various players' attitudes, based on analysis of Executive Committee (ExComm) recordings, was not exactly the most riveting material, but in this manner, Stern does show that the self-serving narratives disseminated by many of the dramatis personae were grossly inaccurate in many ways.

Where the book really shines is in laying out clearly the sharp contrast between the drastic measures supported by most of the ExComm participants (plus the Joint Chiefs along with other parties that had the president’s ear) and JFK’s own more cautious perspective. Airstrikes on Cuban missile sites, a formal declaration of war against Cuba and of course a military invasion to topple the Castro regime were the other more belligerent options that were seriously and consistently advocated by many of JFK’s advisers, even if some of them later conveniently “forgot” they advocated them at all. RFK who portrayed himself as a dove in his memoirs, was among these. The reality, to quote Stern, was apparently quite different: “If RFK had been president, and the views he expressed during the ExComm meetings had prevailed, nuclear war would have been the nearly certain outcome.”

JFK’s concerns about these more hawkish proposals, that they may provoke escalatory retaliation from the Soviets in Berlin or closer to home, were brushed aside as unlikely since the Soviets would naturally respond by backing down if 'strength' was shown instead of the 'weakness' of a tepid naval blockade, or so the thinking of the hawks went. On top of that, removing the Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of a deal with the Soviets would basically be a form of appeasement, as General LeMay put it, that would only embolden them. JFK would then supposedly go down in history as a latter-day Neville Chamberlain if he didn’t take a stronger stand against Soviet provocations.

Now despite the dire predictions of what may have happened if JFK did not follow the advice of the hawks, the Cuban Missile Crisis is of course not generally thought of today as a strategic defeat for the U.S. A key take-away from this book is that it was instead an approach involving a compromise with Soviet interests that avoided a catastrophic nuclear exchange. The more hawkish ‘escalate to de-escalate’ type approaches that were in vogue during that time (and still are today in many foreign policy discussions) were certainly considered but were ultimately rejected by the president as being too risky.

Folks in the ‘compromise is weakness’ camp should ask themselves after reading this book: Would things really have turned out as well as they did had the president taken a ‘tougher’ course of action than the one he actually pursued, virtually alone against the sentiment of his circle of advisers?

It’s also interesting to learn from the book that Castro himself was also something of a hawk, but on the other side. He expressed gleeful satisfaction that Soviet officers had shot down an American U-2 spy plane (to Khrushchev’s apparent dismay and without permission from military higher-ups). He even attempted to pressure the Russians into permitting a nuclear first strike against American cities. Of course, cooler heads prevailed, but it seems fair to say that it could easily have gone another way with different leadership, both American and Soviet.

[Matt Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, author Sheldon Stern sets out to expose the “the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies” of the dominant yet largely mythical narrative surrounding the ExComm meetings during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the initial chapters, Stern identifies Robert F. Kennedy’s 13 Days as the distorted “template” for Cuban Missile Crisis/Excomm literature, an ostensibly “sketchy and extremely general” memoir, as charged by the author. However, this bold claim is not without warrant. Throughout the book, Stern implements the tape recordings of said Excomm meetings to irrefutably identify the true positions of advisors such as Robert F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara, and how they pale in comparison to their own self-spun accounts of the fiasco. Ultimately, Stern argues these self-purported memoirs were an effort to salvage, and thus benefit, personal and political reputations by appearing more “dovish” and aligned with President Kennedy than the aforementioned men actually were. Conclusively, Stern contends that the tapes “incontrovertibly” prove that President Kennedy was not guided by the “cumulative wisdom of the Excomm” but rather his own instincts to seek a diplomatic solution, a strategy which was opposed by virtually every member of the coterie.






Paragraph 2: RFK
Most egregious actor, spin to benefit himself politically; the most hawkish.
Attempted to silence voices critical to himself (Rusk)

Paragraph 3: Others
2-3 Sentences on McNamara
1-2 Sentences on Thompson
1-2 Sentences on Rusk
1-2 Conclusive Sentences on how nearly all opposed.

[Eric Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest with you, I know about the Cuban Missile Crisis from history books and frankly didn't think much of it. This book enlightened me on the subject and brought up some interesting things about the incident. While it claims to "set the record straight" (my personal view on the subject), there is some differences between the book Thirteen Days, which was also about the crisis. However, I feel that while I haven't read that book, this book uses the tapes that were recorded as the research to confirm this view. So while it is a short book, it is a good read and suggest if you want to learn more about the Cuban Missile Crisis, then you should check this book out.

[NICOLAS S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear and concise analysis of discussions held at the White House during the crisis, based on the audio recordings. It is an invaluable reference.

[Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an understudied topic in American History but important in so many ways. This book gives a startling new look at a subject that has been largely mishandled by the Hollywood and the ExComm players themselves who were looking to preserve and enhance their legacies. Taken from the actual audio recordings, this book challenges a lot of what we know. A great read.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terribly important book because it reminds us how much we cling to the story Bob Kennedy (Bobby was for family, and I am certainly not that) spun about the series of discussions JFK had with his chief advisors during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is just plain wrong, but was perpetrated for years by other members of the Ex Comm, including McGeorge Bundy, Ted Sorenson, and Robert McNamara. I think what struck me was how purposefully incorrect Thirteen Days was. I already knew he had dismissed the warnings DCI John McCone had been making since at least May 1962, but I had no idea how much he changed the story and positions of others - including himself. All for politics . . . sigh. Anyway, the good news is that we have recordings of the Ex Comm meetings and, as Stern points out, if you listen to them you can get at the truth. Stern does an excellent job explaining the "myth" and then step by step demolishing it based on the information from the recordings. A little repetitive at time, but that builds his case. Memory is a funny thing.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone interested in learning how the Cuban Missile Crisis really went down should take a look at this book. The author examines the public version of the crisis in the Kennedy White House against what was actually said in ExComm tapes that were later released. So many facts were hidden or misrepresented in the version we've all learned growing up. The tapes show that you can't trust the version Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy or even RFK have created. It really contradicts RFK's 'Thirteen Days' a lot.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

More a rebuttal of RFK's "13 Days". You know how it turns out. Premise is that a lot of what we think we know about the Cuban Missile Crisis is bunk and this is setting the story straight. I'd like to read another historian's take on the tapes before I express complete fealty to this interpretation. Author owes a bit too much to Camelot. Disassembles the Bobby-as-peacenik cult, perpetuates the JFK can-do-no-wrong veneer.

[Yossi Gurvitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was very good in dispelling the common myths about the Crisis. However, it suffered from almost endless repetitions: almost every chapter (with the exception of the last one) looked at the Crisis from the point of view of one of the main actors, yet time and time again it repeated information which was written in earlier chapters. This book looks like a series of articles which was not properly edited before publishing.

[Mike Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written, quick read. The meetings during the missile crisis were secretly recorded. According to this book Robert Kennedy was not the rational "dove" he portrayed himself as. Only JFK saved the world. I will have to read some scholarly reviews.

[Douglas Sellers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really a refutation of a lot of the traditional narrative about the Cuban middle crisis as put forward buy "thirteen days." It's also shocking him much worse RFK made his dead brother look in his book compared to what was on the tapes - all to further his own political career.

[John Melvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent

This book is an excellent check against distortions of the discussions around JFK, distortions by his own advisors after the fact, and also manages to illuminate critical moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[Ella Ferro · Rating 5 out of 5]

As informative and interesting this book is, brace yourself for patience because it is a slow and boring read at the same time. I gave it 5 Stars because the information presented is excellent. It’s really worth it if you are into this kinda history.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly timely considering the drums of war are being beaten yet again.