Kennedy Administration

There have been obsessive anticommunists and responsible ones, and it is important to keep the two straight. Richard Gid Powers does and then doesn't.

Like Jews, Armenians, and White Russians, Cuban-Americans see themselves as exiled members of a diaspora, not simply immigrants. From Kennedy's Bay of Pigs plan through Clinton's continuation of the trade embargo, U.S. administrations have encouraged the hope of return to a democratic homeland. Every hour of the last 36 years has meant added suffering for the Cubans across the Florida Straits. But Clinton's reversal of the policy of political asylum for all Cuban migrants signals that the Cold War is over, even with Cuba. Cuban-Americans have become just another immigrant group. For Miami, the exile is over.

Finally we have a book on espionage with the flavor and texture of the truth. Peter Grose brings us a biography of Allen Dulles, founder of the modern CIA.

"Mikhail Gorbachev's team of official intellectuals is engaged in a program of historical revisionism serving Moscow's interest", by means of exaggerating Khrushchev's 'reasonable flexibility' in averting nuclear war. The superpowers were not at the brink of nuclear war, and took great care not to be. The Soviet purpose in deploying the missiles was not to defend Castro, but to force a change in US perceptions of strategic superiority over the USSR, and thereby to de-stabilize US commitment to NATO and the FRG.