In his 1988 memoir, Danger and Survival, McGeorge Bundy, JFK's national-security adviser, lamented the secrecy about the negotiation that settled the Cuban missile crisis: "We misled our colleagues, our countrymen, our successors, and our allies that it had been enough to stand firm on that Saturday" (the last night of the crisis).

Only seven of Kennedy's advisers knew about the trade for the missiles in Turkey. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was not among them, nor—apparently—did Bundy or any of the other "New Frontiersmen" divulge the secret after Kennedy was assassinated and LBJ became president. Bundy suggests in his memoir that Cuba's false lessons may have encouraged LBJ (and Nixon, after him) to push hard—and never show signs of conciliation—on the war in Vietnam.

As we now know, Kennedy secretly taped all the Cabinet sessions during the Cuban missile crisis. (The best account of the tapes is Averting "The Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings, by Sheldon Stern, former historian of the JFK Library.) Bundy and his comrades revealed the secret deal over the Turkish missiles in 1982, near the 20^th anniversary of the crisis, in Time magazine. They did so only because Bundy, in the course of researching his memoirs, listened to the tapes, realized what they revealed, and decided to pre-empt the revelation. Bundy & Co. did not reveal, either in Time or in any subsequent memoir, that they all bitterly opposed the trade. John F. Kennedy was one of just two people in the room who favored making the deal. The other was Assistant Secretary of State George Ball—who, in the next few years, became the only senior official in the Johnson administration to argue against the Vietnam War.