Memoirs: Bobby's View

October 1962. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, a session of the executive committee of the National Security Council breaks up at the White House. "After the meeting, the President, Ted Sorensen, Kenny O'Donnell, and I sat in his office and talked. A short time before, the President had read Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August, and he talked about the miscalculations of the Germans, the Russians, the Austrians, the French and the British. They somehow seemed to tumble into war, he said, through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur. He did...