On Tuesday evening, renowned historian Sheldon M. Stern gave a lecture on the duties of historians in connection with specific historical events, in particular, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Mr. Stern was the chief historian of the John F. Kennedy library for 23 years before his retirement in 1999. Stern was also the first exterior person to hear thousands of hours of tapes from secret ExComm meetings that took place during the crisis. In 2003, Stern’s book, “Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the secret Cuban Missile Crisis meetings” was published by Stanford University Press. Invited by longtime friend, colleague and member of the history department Dr. Quattlebaum, Stern has spoken at Andover once or twice almost every year since 1984. His visit is planned to coincide with American history classes’ studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis and John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy. Stern also headed a program at the Kennedy library, known as the American History Project for High School Students, in which he visited up to 20 schools each week to speak with students. Stern first addressed the question, “What should historians do?” He stressed the importance of history being obtained through facts and evidence, without influence of politics and ideology. Stern gave several examples of instances in which facts have been distorted, sometimes done so with a deliberate purpose, and other times, due to ignorance. Stern attended a conference on the Cold War in which a colleague spoke about the United State’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Stern was concerned that this information was incorrect and discovered that the speaker’s source for the information was a book by Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky’s cited information, through a succession of footnotes, can be traced to one of his own speeches. The invasion, which was of Japanese, American, French and British troops, was distorted in history records by Stalin to appear to be an invasion of the United States, and according to Stern, Chomsky was doing “nothing more than spreading and parroting Stalinist propaganda.” Stern gave another example in which an individual has distorted historical truth. Stern attended a speech by the famed lawyer Clark Clifford, who served both Presidents Truman and Kennedy among others. The gathering was in honor of the 100th anniversary of President Truman’s birth, and Clifford spoke about his relationship with Truman, recalling the particular day in which Truman was told that he would succeed to office after the death of FDR. After Clifford described the day in detail, a student in the audience remarked that he had recently read Truman’s memoirs, and that Truman’s account of the day differed completely from the story just told. According to Stern, “Clifford gave the boy a horrible look of scorn—it was an unforgettable look, and said, “I know what happened, I was there!” After some of his own research, Stern discovered that Clifford’s recollection was a falsity. The day that Truman was told of FDR’s death, Clifford was miles away in San Francisco; it was not until a few months later that Clifford met Truman in Washington for the first time. In Stern’s opinion, the lesson to be learned from these instances of historical distortion is that one must be vigilant when researching. “A true historian will analyze in depth the person who is doing the recording and writing and think about what he is trying to prove. A real historian goes by the evidence and the facts and refrains from changing or ignoring parts of history to fit a desired result or conclusion,” he said. According to Stern, new problems with historical modification arise due to our increase and dependency on technology. These issues are of major concern to historians. It is now possible for individuals to “control” history by creating multiple databases of information and varying accounts in different historical records. Later, when the conflicts are resolved, the individual can destroy the records that may reveal errors in his or her judgment and therefore appear to have been “right all along”. In terms of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Stern was given a vast amount of responsibility as a historian when he was asked to listen to the secret ExComm tapes, which amount to slightly under 5,000 hours total running time. “Who owns this evidence?” and “What is it, and who gets to interpret it?” were among the questions Stern posed during his speech, and that came up during the gradual release of the tapes—question that still persist, to some extent, today. Stern said he knew immediately after first hearing the recordings that it would consume the rest of his career and that he wished to write a book about the events and conversations captured on the tapes. He said, “[Listening to the tapes] was a life changing experience, and I thought, this could make a great book.” Stern informed students that the tapes of the meetings are all available online through the “Presidential Recordings Program” at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia’s Research Center. Stern encouraged students to listen for themselves to the tapes documenting the presidencies’ of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Students were impressed by Stern’s speech. Maxwell Meyer ’08 said, “Events like this truly embody the Andover spirit. I felt tonight was highly intellectually beneficial.” Tiffany Li ’09 said she learned “how unreliable sources can be. Maybe what we’re reading today will be found to be false 50 years from now. It’s also amazing how accessible information is; we can verify information ourselves through a little research.” Stern encouraged students to do so, and to examine and analyze all that they read as a “real historian.”
