The definitive accounts until the mid-1980s were two memoirs by JFK advisers—Kennedy by his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen and A Thousand Days by the "palace historian," Arthur Schlesinger. Sorensen, who sat in on the ExComm meetings, later admitted that he deliberately falsified the section on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which reports that Kennedy rejected Khrushchev's missile-trade offer as "propaganda." Schlesinger, who took no part in the meetings, simply wrote down the lies that Sorensen and others told him. The impression one gets from these accounts is that Kennedy simply stared Khrushchev down, and Khrushchev surrendered. There is no talk of a bargained settlement. Robert Kennedy's memoir, Thirteen Days, which was published after RFK was assassinated in 1968, was based on diaries that he kept during the crisis. Sorensen told me a few years ago that he had edited the diaries and deleted some of the material on the missile trade. For example, in the section on the Saturday night meeting with the Soviet ambassador, the memoir as edited gives the impression that RFK brought up the matter of a missile trade informally. One almost gets the sense that it's his own idea. Ironically, in a 1971 revised edition of his scathingly revisionist book The Kennedy Imprisonment, Garry Wills cites this chapter as evidence of RFK's incipient dovishness, contrasting him to his hawkish and macho brother. The irony is that in October 1962, RFK was the hawkish Kennedy and JFK, by comparison, the dove. Wills' view of JFK is based on a libertarian reading of Sorensen's fabrication.