The emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba in October of 1962 and the American response to this action thrust the world into its first major nuclear crisis. Because this American-Soviet confrontation seemed to propel the antagonists to the brink of nuclear holocaust, at least in appearance if not also in fact, a vast amount of history has been written on this brief but crucial episode in the Cold War. The purpose of this study is to examine the development of the various historiographical perspectives of the Cuban missile crisis.The traditionalists view President John F. Kennedy as responding by necessity to a Soviet threat to alter the balance of power via the Russian missiles in Cuba. The American response in the form of a quarantine was superb as President Kennedy successfully terminated the crisis by compelling Nikita S. Khrushchev-to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba. The traditionalists praise the President for his exceptional skills in crisis management and for his superb leadership which ultimately resulted in a victory for America as a period of detente ensued between the United States and the Soviet Union.The right wing revisionists accuse President Kennedy encounters with the Soviet Union. They also accuse the President of seeking conciliation with the Russians during the crisis rather than seeking a military victory in the confrontation. According to the right wing perspective, the President suffered a defeat .in the aftermath of the crisis, for his policy of accommodation allowed Castro to continue his dictatorship over Cuba and permitted communism to become entrenched firmly in the Western Hemisphere.The left wing revisionists accuse President Kennedy of rejecting a diplomatic approach to the crisis and initiating the confrontation. For the sake of personal prestige and political expediency, the President arbitrarily transformed an international political problem into an international military crisis. According to the left wing perspective, the aftermath of the crisis instilled in Americans an arrogance of power and resulted in the advancement of the nuclear arms race.The Sovietologists' perspective differs from the other interpretations in that it neither praises nor condemns President Kennedy. The Sovietologists are concerned primarily with the Soviet motives for emplacing missiles in Cuba and for eventually withdrawing them. The Sovietologists ascribe multiple motives to the Russians for their decisions both to of contributing to the instigation his ineptness and lack of decisive of the crisis situation by leadership in previousemplace and to withdraw the missiles in Cuba.The concluding interpretation accuses both Khrushchey and Kennedy of initially acting irresponsibly, the former creating a situation subject to crisis and the latter by creating a needless confrontation. Once the crisis was initiated, the two leaders generally behaved responsibly and cautiously as they attempted to control the crisis. Yet, despite the efforts of Khrushchev and Kennedy, the nuclear confrontation was terminated successfully without armed conflict or catastrophic consequences as much by fortune as by human design.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (January 12, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-107).

Robert S. McNamara served as U.S. Secretary of Defense (SOD) for Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara participated in the Cuban Missile Crisis negotiations in 1961 and became a key formulator of Vietnam policy. This thesis challenges scholarship that characterizes McNamara as a fierce hawk who relentlessly executed military escalation in Vietnam. By drawing parallels between McNamara’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, and by exploring how McNamara’s concept of loyalty to the presidency influenced his decisions, this thesis argues that the SOD was willing to escalate the situation militarily as a form of political communication with the adversary. To McNamara, military pressure was a means to create avenues for diplomacy. McNamara became increasingly uncomfortable – and ultimately resigned in 1968 - when the Johnson administration pursued military escalation without an organized campaign towards negotiations. He was therefore not as hawkish as other scholars have claimed. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (Master of Military Studies)-Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 2008. / Title from title page of PDF document (viewed on: Feb 2, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation offers a novel quantitative method for assessing an actor's subjective temporal orientation. Our method involves the use of supervised machine learning techniques in concert with natural language processing tools and linguistic principles. We suggest our method may offer a clandestine technique for extracting aspects of an actor’s temporal orientations from right behind their back. This capacity occurs because of the unique ways time references are reflected in language syntax. This reflection does not simply occur in face-to-face spoken interactions, but also resides in recorded vocal transcripts and within textual documents articulated by speakers for a social audience (e.g., political speeches). . From a social theory point of view, we argue that our technique can help objectify some of the major links theorists have long made between the temporal features of mind, subjective meaning, and social processes. Temporal orientation has long been defined as a tripartite mental process. Edmund Husserl famously defined this process as involving retention (a mental focus on past), presentation (a mental focus on the present) or protention (a mental envisioning of the future). From a pure phenomenology perspective, Husserl’s innovation was to link this mental interlocking process with meaning-making. For Husserl, it was directly through an actor’s temporal orientation that meaning became variably constituted and the problem of subjectivity emerged. From a sociological point of view, it is primarily through Alfred Schutz’s formulation of social phenomenology that Husserl’s tripartite system was opened to accommodate the influence of the social in meaning-making. This opening has possessed a long-standing contradiction. For Schutz, endogenous social structure could affect where an actor temporally orients. The resulting implication is that social structure could have a direct effect on how actors assign specific meanings in social systems. Even more, social structure could facilitate shared temporal orientations among actors. However, Schutz also promoted the idea that different temporal orientations could explain how different meanings could be assigned to the same social object by disparate actors. This possibility served as the centerpiece of Schutz’s well-known methodological critique of Max Weber’s direct linkage between subjective meaning, motive, and empathetic based interpretations of social action. To carry out our efforts to quantify how the subjective processes of temporal orientation appear to be influenced by endogenous social processes, we employed our algorithm on three different text-based data sets. We suggest these datasets possess strong reflections of the social world. The first dataset entails a collection of matched twitter tweets that correspond to Trump’s reelection bid and Biden’s challenge during the 2020 period. In this dataset, our method illustrates how both candidates appear to have different temporal orientations despite being bounded by a similar social event. We suggest this finding may reflect the relationship between what Schütz called inner duration and the influence of external stocks of knowledge (i.e., external structures.) The second dataset corresponds to a recorded conversational transcript of the Cuban missile crisis, taken from President Kennedy’s Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) on the 6th of October in 1962. Using our algorithm, we offer objective measures of homogenous temporal orientations of committee members that are consistent with meso-group conformity. We suggest that our method may offer a novel way of measuring group conformity in general. The third dataset consists of the State of the Union Corpora (SOU). In this dataset, we apply our algorithm to identify changes in temporal orientation occurring among a single President’s entire collection of SOU speeches. Furthermore, we compare the average temporal orientation of the Presidents in relation to various social categories, such as party affiliation and societal events. The scope of the Presidents inventoried for temporal orientation is restricted from Eisenhower to Biden.

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