At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in late October 1962, John F. Kennedy was very familiar with author Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August (1962), a popular history book chronicling the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Unsurprisingly, John F. Kennedy had a deep interest in history which was perhaps best represented by his Pulitzer Prize winning work, Profiles in Courage (1956). The book written by the then-senator Kennedy provides the reader with a series of eight historical biographies of U.S. senators who had committed a specific act of political courage. Kennedy was therefore no stranger of looking back at the past to draw lessons from it for the present day. Like Tuchman, Kennedy was arguably a kind of popular historian/biographer in his own right.

What, then, do we know about Kennedy's reading of The Guns of August and how did it effect his thinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

It is likely that JFK either purchased or received a copy of the book in the spring of 1962. Lord Harlech (William David Ormsby-Gore), who in 1962 was the ambassador of the United Kingdom to the United States, said in an interview from 1965 that:

That was an exceptionally enjoyable lunch because we discussed everything in the world; what we thought of each other’s politicians, which books we were reading, the President I think had just finished The Guns of August, about the first month’s campaign of the 1914 war and had been impressed by it. He gave [Harold] Macmillan, who hadn’t read it, a copy.

The lunch was dated to April 1962 by Lord Harlech. It is very evident in Lord Harlech's recollection that JFK was very impressed by the book, enough to gift Harold Macmillan, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, a copy of the book. In fact, the book didn't seem to leave the President's mind at all. Just two months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK met with General Douglas MacArthur and spoke to him about the book, which in turn prompted MacArthur to tell JFK about his own experiences during the First World War.

Indeed, the rumor that JFK loved The Guns of August reached all the way to Tuchman herself. In a letter dated June 1, 1962 written by the President's press secretary Pierre Salinger, one can read:

It is true that the President read your book with the greatest interest and felt that it would be extremely valuable for top officers in the Armed Services to read as well. He instructed General Chester V. Clifton, his Military Aide, to make arrangements for the book to be stocked in Armed Forces libraries. This has been done.

The book therefore held a very strong grip in the mind of the President by the time we reach late October 1962.

In his memoirs about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert F. Kennedy mentions a conversation that was held in the oval office during the crisis in which JFK talks about the lessons he had drawn from the book:

After the meeting, the President, Ted Sorensen, Kenny O'Donnell, and I sat in his office and talked. "The great danger and risk in all of this," he said, "is a miscalculation—a mistake in judgement." A short time before, he 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 the war, he said, through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur. We talked about the miscalculation of the Germans in 1939 and the still unfulfilled commitments and guarantees that the British had given to Poland.

At this stage of the crisis, while the discussion of whether or not to quarantine Cuba was raging, JFK turned to historical analogies to frame his thinking about the dangers of miscalculating the situation. Yet, the outbreak of the First World War was only one of many analogies that were used throughout the crisis. As we can see by the above quote, 1914 is placed alongside 1939 — a year whose impact both brothers would be very well aware of, having lived through it themselves. Yet RFK specifically mentions the book's impact on JFK:

As mentioned before, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August had made a great impression on the President. "I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October," he said to me that Saturday night, October 26. "If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary."

RFK's memoirs were written years after the fact and although we can never know the full accuracy of the private conversations between the two brothers during the crisis, it is certain that the idea of not repeating the apparent mistakes of the past had a firm grip on JFK during this time. The President's fascination with the book would continue well into 1963, as evident by his 26 April remarks Defense Department officials in which the lessons of The Guns of August is brought up once more.

In conclusion, we can accurately determine that JFK had read The Guns of August by October 1962. The lessons he drew from the book had an impact on his thinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis, drawing historical knowledge from Tuchman's book to accompany other historical analogies in a warning of the dangers of misunderstandings and missteps that could occur in a time of crisis. What one needs to keep in mind in this context, beyond basic source criticism of RFK's reminiscences, is the fact that JFK drew his knowledge about the events of 1914 from Tuchman's own constructed narrative about the events. It didn't necessarily reflect the broad contemporary scholarship of the time (nor that of the present) about the First World War's outbreak, nor does it represent the actual past. It would make for a fruitful research project to deeper analyze the narrative constructions of The Guns of August vis-a-vis JFK's understanding of the First World War and how it applied to the present.

Sources:

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy (1969).

Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy by Ted Widmer (ed.) (2012).

Harlech, Lord (William David Ormsby-Gore): Oral History Interview - JFK #1, 3/12/1965, JFKOH-LWH-01, JFK Library.

Pierre Salinger to Barbara Tuchman, 1 June 1962, JFKWHCSF-0722-035-p0006, President (PP): 15-5: Preferences and Hobbies: Books-Authors-Poetry-Prose-Fiction, 11 May 1961-30 September 1962: General, JFK Library.

Remarks to Defense Department officials, 26 April 1963, JFKPOF-043-041-p0005, Papers of John F. Kennedy. Presidential Papers. President's Office Files, JFK Library.