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. 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
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