Talk:EXCOMM

Reliable vs. Unreliable Sources

This book Sheldon Stern - The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) is skeptical of some accounts of ExComm meetings presented by ExComm members themselves in the years after the crisis. In particular he is hard on RFK's account in Thirteen Days, and he writes "some writers [...] have chosen instead to use the extremely inaccurate 1997 Harvard Press transcripts, the more reliable 2001 Miller Center/Norton transcripts, or my own 2003 narrative of the meetings." (p.3)

Anyway, his point is that much eyewitness testimony of the ExComm meetings is not to be trusted and contradicts the audio tapes which are, in his opinion, the definitive primary source.

Here's where I'm going: under normal circumstances, fact vs. fiction can be discussed on talk pages, but in this case there is a massive dust cloud surrounding the topic, so I think helping the reader appreciate the size and shape of this dust cloud is going to make for a better article. I'm pretty sure this is against standard Wikipedia policy—under normal circumstances, content that depends only upon unreliable sources should be removed—but I think there is reason to believe that this is an exceptional case. DavidBrooksPokorny (talk) 18:28, 18 November 2012 (UTC)