GRE Reading Comprehension

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Source: Kaplan

Declassification of government documents has shed new light on the events comprising the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Prior to the accessibility of these records, the only sources of account of the Crisis for scholars and historians were the personal memoirs and narratives of the officials who served under Kennedy and Khrushchev during this period. Many of the declassified documents are transcriptions and notes of meetings between members of the CIA and President Kennedy's cabinet, as well the president himself. The revelations in these documents have demonstrated the inadvertent inaccuracies and intended obscurities inherent in the first-person narratives of the Crisis and have aided historians from all three countries involved in the Crisis to get a more authentic representation of what truly transpired, and for what reasons. Of perhaps the most interest to historians are declassified correspondences between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev that challenge the idea that the height of the Crisis extended only over the course of thirteen days. Indeed, these letters indicate that the Crisis was far from resolved by Khrushchev's October 28 decision to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba; instead it endured far into the following month, while America slept fitfully under the illusion of peace.

Question List: 1 2 3

The author is mainly concerned with

  • A petitioning the government to make all classified documents of historic interest accessible to the general public.
  • B discounting the sense of danger many Americans felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  • C revealing a calculated deception perpetrated by members of Kennedy's cabinet.
  • D illustrating how previously accepted ideas based on hearsay are being refuted by concrete evidence.
  • E portraying in detail the events that transpired during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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