FROM WATERLOO TO PEARL HARBOR: HOW WE UNDERSTAND NATIONAL SECURITY EVENTS
JOSEPH CADDELLMARCH 3, 2022
BOOK REVIEWSpeal
Takuma Melber (translated by Nick Somers), Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Attack and America’s Entry into World War II (Polity Press, 2020).
Although there’s no shortage of hot takes and policy prognostications, it will be a long, long time before national security scholars can hope to derive enduring lessons about the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War. The historiography of major national security events unfolds as an evolving, multi-decade affair. The distance of time, growing availability of new sources, and interpretation of those sources advances and improves our understanding of such events — and reminds us of their complexity as we seek to learn enduring lessons from them. Though published eight decades after its subject, Takuma Melber’s history of Pearl Harbor is a useful contribution to our evolving understanding of the attack as an event and as a case study.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the lesson that policymakers drew from the event as a case study seemed to be “firm resolve is the best approach.” After more became known, firm resolve was joined by “and hope you get lucky.” The Missile Crisis is an illustrative example of how historiography evolves following major events in national security. In its immediate aftermath, instant histories were limited largely to newspaper and magazine accounts. These were woefully incomplete compared with our modern understanding, not least because many details were either politically sensitive, formally classified, locked away in Soviet or Cuban files, or some combination of the three. Western accounts tended to repeat the official U.S. version of events: surprise Soviet aggression, determined U.S. response, Soviet capitulation. Correspondingly, lessons drawn from the crisis have shifted on the strength of new, more complete information. This was particularly true once more became known in the West about Soviet and Cuban leadership actions — and the presence of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in and near Cuba. Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days claimed to offer the first truly comprehensive insider account of the political, military, and intelligence elements of the crisis just seven years on. Yet it would essentially serve as a key pillar of what Thomas Blanton calls the Cuban Missile Crisis “myth, midwifed by the Kennedy family and its hagiographers.” Various myths put forward in Thirteen Days and by other Kennedy administration insiders would sidestep, among other things, the direct quid pro quo agreement to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and administration complicity in intelligence collection limits that forestalled American discovery of the missiles. Indeed, it would take (among others) Michael Dobbs’s One Minute to Midnight (2008) and David Barrett and Max Holland’s Blind Over Cuba (2012) to provide a thorough accounting for many of the omissions and errors of Thirteen Days.
https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/from-waterloo-to-pearl-harbor-the-evolving-historiography-of-national-security-events/
