Book Review: ‘The Missiles of October: The Declassified Story of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis’

The Missiles of October: The Declassified Story of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

By: Robert Smith Thompson

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year of Publication: 1992

🧨 Revisionism Run Amok: A Look at Robert Smith Thompson’s The Missiles of October

History, especially the kind still warm to the touch, is a fragile thing. It bends under pressure—political, personal, ideological—and sometimes snaps altogether. Take the Kennedy assassination. Some authors, like Jim Bishop and Gerald Posner, stick to the lone gunman theory. Others, like David Lifton, spin elaborate conspiracies involving body doubles, doctored autopsies, and a coup to install Lyndon Johnson. I don’t subscribe to grassy knoll mythology, but plenty of readers do. That’s the danger: with enough selective sourcing and rhetorical sleight of hand, even the most outlandish claims can be made to sound plausible.

Which brings us to Robert Smith Thompson.

His book, The Missiles of October: The Declassified Story of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, isn’t just revisionist—it’s revisionism with an axe to grind. Thompson isn’t interested in nuance or balance. He’s here to dismantle the familiar narrative of JFK as the cool-headed statesman who stared down Khrushchev and saved the world from nuclear war. Instead, he paints Kennedy as a political opportunist who allegedly knew about the Soviet missile buildup well before October 1962 and used the crisis to score domestic points.

Thompson’s toolkit includes everything from Cold War foreign policy missteps to the influence of United Fruit, the TFX scandal, and even Kennedy’s 1960 campaign tactics. It’s a tangled web, and while Thompson writes with the pacing of a technothriller, the conclusions feel speculative at best, cynical at worst.

I’ll give him this: he’s a capable prose stylist. But style can’t compensate for a thesis built on insinuation. The book leaves a bitter aftertaste—not because it challenges the official story, but because it does so with half-baked theories and a tone that feels more prosecutorial than scholarly.

If you’re looking for a sober, emotionally literate account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this isn’t it. Thompson’s version is all smoke, mirrors, and revisionist bravado. Not my kind of historian—and not a book I’d recommend to anyone seeking clarity over controversy.