Thirteen Days Analyses. Cuban Missile Crisis

Ernest May (historian; 1928-2009) When I learned that bakers dozen long time . the hot movie dramatizing the Cuban projectile Crisis of 1962, would take on til nowts through the eye of Kenneth ODonnell, commode F. Kennedys appointments secretarywho would be played by the movies headliner, Kevin CostnerI had strong misgivings. In 1997 I had get down and edited (with Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia) some(a) of the tape recordings incur secretly by JFKand nonhing in these tapes, in different documents, or in the recollections of Kennedys key advisers gives ODonnell an consequential or hitherto conspicuous map in the crisis. \n subsequently Harvard University Press published our transcripts as The Kennedy Tapes: wrong the albumin brook During the Cuban Missile Crisis . Beacon communication theory bought the movie rights, and the films director, Roger Donaldson, came to run through me in Cambridge. We had a long talk, and after someone else at Beacon move me a facsimile of the script, written by David Self. Kenny ODonnell saves the world was what I feared I would find. save as it turns out, that is non the movies theme: only(prenominal) once or twice in Thirteen Days does ODonnell do or say anything that he business leader not actually shake up done or said. He was a long-term secretive associate of John and Robert Kennedy and an all-important(a) prognosticate in the white-hot House, and the tapes do limn that he tended to(p) some of the meetings concern with the crisis. At one, he raised an important question that was then(prenominal) pressed insistently by JFK: sightly what were U.S. naval vessels to do if they encountered a Soviet submarine? At another meeting, in a shrill exchange with depositary of Defense Robert McNamara, ODonnell convey rude condescension for General Lyman Lemnitzer, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. \nWhat the filmmakers put one over done in their deployment of ODonnell/Cost ner comes much contiguous to speculative historic fiction of the break up practiced by Simon Schama in abruptly Certainties (a fictionalized reconstruction of an eighteenth-century execution based closely on historic fact) than to whole-cloth fantasy much(prenominal) as Edmund Morriss Dutch (Morris inserted himself as an invented disposition in this animation of Ronald Reagan). Still, why make ODonnell our window on events? When I try to think how else the producers might call for pulled in a throng audienceas opposed to a PBS-documentary-sized audienceHenry Jamess principle of having a single placement on events make sense. But that eyeshot couldnt easily generate been JFKs; and had it been that of a major adviser, the movie would have or so unavoidably depicted him- McNamara, repository of State dean Rusk, National earnest Adviser McGeorge Bundy, White House advocate Ted Sorensen, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, or whomever- as the somebody who saved the world. ODonnell was a reasonable choice, for he was in a position to call for much or all of what went on, provided was not a policy protester or even a person particularly modern on the issues; he was an inside Everyman, evaluating the crisis almost as an ordinary citizen would. \n