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comparisons between the nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles targeting the USSR from U.S.-controlled launch sites in Turkey and Italy and the subsequent Soviet decision to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba. That a causal relationship might exist between the two, with U.S. actions inspiring or provoking a Soviet response, was not something they were prepared to consider. Kennedy’s advisers deemed the Jupiters another part of the Eisenhower legacy, unworthy of anyone’s serious attention. The U.S. missiles, wrote Sorensen, “had practically been forced on Italy and Turkey by an administration unable to find any worthwhile use for them.” They were “obsolescent and of little military value.”43 That the Kremlin might see matters differently—that the Jupiter’s very vulnerability might persuade the Soviets to see it as a first-strike weapon—was inconceivable.

Even as the administration sought to widen its edge over the Soviet Union in nuclear striking power and worked feverishly to subvert the Cuban Revolution, the men of Kennedy’s inner circle remained certain of their good intentions. They abhorred war and yearned for permanent peace. If peace somehow remained elusive, the fault must necessarily lie with others—with the recklessness (or malevolence) of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden at a later date, all of whom maliciously misconstrued America’s motives or stubbornly refused to endorse America’s benign vision for world order.

When some event disrupts the American pursuit of peace—the missile crisis of 1962, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, Saddam Hussein’s assault on Kuwait in 1990, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11—those exercising power in Washington invariably depict the problem as appearing out of the blue, utterly devoid of historical context. The United States is either the victim or an innocent bystander, Washington’s own past actions possessing no relevance to the matter at hand. Critics of the reigning national security consensus—skeptical scholars or political radicals—might suggest otherwise, but in the corridors of power such dissenters have no standing.

So although the dots connecting Zapata and Mongoose to the missile crisis were plainly evident, the Kennedy administration professed not to see them. In much the same way, the administration of George W. Bush would ignore the chain of events that paved the way for September 11, 2001: the overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and the fervent U.S. embrace of the shah in 1953, its deference to Israel since the 1960s, its marriage of convenience with Saddam in the 1980s, its support for jihadists in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during that same decade, and its military occupation of the Persian Gulf after Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s—each one eminently justifiable according to the established precepts of national security policy, but together producing an explosive backlash. To acknowledge the relationship between these policy initiatives and 9/11 would be to call into question a national security tradition going back decades—this American leaders still refuse to consider.

To his enduring credit, in this moment of maximum peril, President Kennedy suspended that tradition, even if only briefly. For public consumption, the administration insisted—and never ceased to insist—that the surprise sprung by Cuba and the Soviet Union had come out of nowhere and was utterly without justification. Privately, however, Kennedy was willing to acknowledge the causal relationship between past U.S. actions and the problem he now confronted. Those on the other side had their own gripes, not least of all the relentless U.S. campaign to destabilize Cuba and the presence of U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles along the perimeter of the Soviet Union. Castro and Khrushchev were acting in ways that Kennedy himself would have acted, had circumstances been reversed. Negotiating a peaceful resolution of the missile crisis, therefore, required that Kennedy take their