The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited Book

This book has to be read very carefully to gather the useful material (of which there is a great deal); Prouty has an agenda, and after a couple of rereadings it becomes pretty clear as to what the agenda is. Basically, Prouty blamed the entire Vietnam debacle on the CIA (most likely at the behest of his patrons in the uniformed services, the Joint Staff, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense). This book was published at the beginning of the national recriminations over Vietnam and how we got there.

When Prouty discusses the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how the CIA worked during the Cold War, he's mostly accurate (the notion of an entire aircraft without ANY serial numbers on its parts strains credulity). When he gets into who did this, said that, or made a key decision, he's less reliable. The military made a series of bad judgments and worse decisions over how to handle Vietnam, and they do deserve censure for these mistakes--but Prouty blames it all on the CIA.

Again, his goal is to uphold the honor of the military--which, at the time this was written, was taking a beating in the press (interestingly enough, many of those administering said beating had extensive ties to the CIA).

Overall, this book is an interesting account of what sorts of things the CIA did and the mechanics of how they did it, and an artifact of a particularly fractious time in the national security establishment. As an account of Vietnam, it suffers from the defects mentioned above.