ABSTRACT
Mr Barnet does indeed document most damningly the terrible oversimplifications that informed American policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and the brash self-confidence of the young men who believed that all the problems of the world would yield to technology and systems analysis. He shows the extent to which electoral considerations influenced foreign policy decisions, of which the Cuba crisis was only one example. The Kennedy Administration’s handling of that affair may indeed have been an exercise in ‘coolness’ and ‘toughness’ of the kind on which the Establishment prided itself and Mr Barnet excoriates; but if it had handled matters any less toughly it would have been out on its ear in 1964. The mass of the American press was basically conservative, hysterically anti-Communist, and clamouring for dramatic action; and in doing so it reflected public attitudes which sometimes had to be ‘managed’ if the United States were not to blunder into world war.
