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THIRTEEN
DAYS RELIVES A TIME WHEN THE WORLD WAS AT THE BRINK OF
NUCLEAR WAR
 A
nuclear winter nearly began in October 1962, when American
leaders pondered a military response to the installation of
more than two dozen offensive SS-4 nuclear missiles in Cuba
that could hit nearly every city in the United States. The
television docudrama The Missiles of October
(1974) was based largely on Robert F. Kennedy’s book Thirteen
Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971). With
the publication in 1997 of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the
White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, edited by
Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, previous accounts have
been revised. The film Thirteen Days, directed
by Roger Donaldson, is the cinematic reworking of the events
of October 1962, based on the May and Zelikow book, but a
drama with less effective acting than the star-studded docudrama;
the tagline is "You'll Never Believe How Close We Came." Filmed
in Washington, D.C., the Philippines (to approximate a Cuban
terrain), and the waters off Newport, Rhode Island, Thirteen
Days focuses primarily on the tension between the
civilian leadership of the Kennedy administration and the
military brass, whose preferred option was for an air strike
and ground invasion of Cuba in the belief that the Russian
and international response was of no consequence. A major
revelation in the new account is the central role played by
Kenneth O’Donnell (played by Kevin Costner), who was Special
Assistant to President John Kennedy (played by Bruce Greenwood),
with an office next door to the Oval Office. Screenwriter
David Self constructed much of the story from tapes of interviews
with O’Donnell by journalist Sander Vanocur. O’Donnell spelled
out the political consequences of every option considered
by Kennedy and even gave his boss a pep talk at a low point
in the crisis. A second major revelation is how top military
commanders and Central Intelligence Agency director John McCone
(played by Peter White), who had given bad advice the previous
year in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, tried to subvert Kennedy’s
pursuit of a nonviolent, peaceful solution to the crisis.
Efforts of Air Force General Curtis LeMay (played by Kevin
Conway) to send low-level reconnaissance aircraft to Cuba,
hoping that one such airplane would be shot down so that an
outcry in the United States would call for a major military
solution, were foiled when O’Donnell called the pilots in
charge of the missions with personal instructions from Kennedy,
resulting in a cover-up of the antiaircraft shooting and of
one death. Yet another provocative move occurred when General
Maxwell Taylor (played by Bill Smitrovich) ordered military
exercises in Puerto Rico (codenamed ORTSAC, transparently
Castro spelled backward) in preparation for the invasion,
a clearly insubordinate escalatory move.
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Although most Soviet ships bound for Cuba turned back after
Kennedy announced a quarantine, two Soviet ships, accompanied
by a submarine, were "lost" at night by naval reconnaissance,
proceeded past the 500-mile quarantine line, and were rediscovered
in the morning, whereupon Admiral George Anderson (played
by Madison Mason) ordered shots fired at one of the Soviet
ships, the Marcula, in the presence of Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara (played by Dylan Baker). Although the shots
were merely aerial clusters, McNamara then flew into a rage,
telling Anderson that no shots of any kind were to be fired
without his approval, which in turn awaited a direct order
from President Kennedy. Two other hostile signals, which
Kennedy found out after the fact, were the detonation of
a hydrogen bomb at Johnston Island and the dispatching of
a U-2 spy plane to Siberia, where it was shot down. Thirteen
Days makes much of the confusing Soviet response
to Kennedy’s quarantine ultimatum and the important meeting
between Attorney General Robert Kennedy (played by Steven
Culp) and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin (played by
Elya Baskin) which served to bring the crisis to an end.
Thirteen Days also depicts United Nations
Ambassador Adlai Stevenson (played by Michael Fairman) as
politically isolated in his preference for a diplomatic
solution, whereas The Missiles of October
gives him a more crucial role in raising issues that had
not previously been considered seriously. Although The
Missiles of October version provided a more informative
glimpse into Soviet decisionmaking, Thirteen Days
highlights the uncertainty of dealing with Premier Nikita
Khrushchev, whom many American top officials believed might
have been ousted midway through the crisis. In Thirteen
Days President Kennedy comes across as a cautious,
pensive primus inter pares who was consciously trying to
avoid World War III, having learned well the lessons of
Barbara Tuckman’s The Guns of August (1962), which
demonstrates that World War I began because leaders in several
countries, on the basis of incomplete information, gave
irreversible orders that unleashed military moves that could
not be later recalled. The drama of the film appears to
teach lessons to Americans who perhaps should reconsider
the legitimacy of recent wars against Iraq and Serbia, where
diplomatic options may have been pursued much less carefully.
Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Thirteen
Days as best exposé and best film on peace for the
year 2000. MH
ONE
WEEK LEFT TO NOMINATE FILMS
December 31 is the deadline for nominating films for the
year 2000 for awards in the four Political Film Society
categories -- democracy, exposé,
human rights, and peace. So far, more than twenty films
have been nominated.
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