13 Days
Directed by Roger Donaldson and written by David Self
with Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood, Steven Culp, Dylan Baker, Kevin Conway,
and Michael Fairman, color, 145 minutes, 2000
By Carter B. Horsley
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, I was working as
the news assistant on the night city desk of The New York Times and I vividly
recall the tension in the newsroom the few days prior to the public
announcement of the crisis.
All we knew in the newsroom was that the President of the
That would seem to have offered a good clue to what was going on. The column was pulled, but no one at the paper, including James "Scotty" Reston, the paper's top Washington correspondent at the time, who would later go on to become the executive editor, had any idea what the President was concerned about as the column was relatively innocuous.
While waiting for the calls to the correspondents to go through, everyone in the newsroom speculated on what would cause the President to make such an extraordinary request.
It came down to three possibilities:
Three days later, President Kennedy went on television to
announce that the Soviet Union had shipped and was installing intercontinental
ballistic missiles in
This was serious.
"13 Days" is the superb film that recreates the crisis as seen through the eyes of Kenny McDonnell, a former classmate of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at Harvard who was serving as a special assistant to the President, John F. Kennedy. The President and the Attorney General were very close with Mr. McDonnell, though the movie probably overemphasizes the relationships to a certain degree.
Kevin Kostner, who had been directed by Donaldson in
"No Way Out," a political thriller about spies in
John F. Kennedy is played by Bruce Greenwood and Robert F.
Kennedy is played by Steven Culp. Both
are excellent but
In his December 25, 2000 review in The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell makes the following observation:
"Mr. Donaldson has embraced the notion of depicting many moments as either shouting matches or snatches of tense contemplation behind closed doors. No one creeps on eggshells here; characters stomp on them hard enough to detonate them. It's possible that the screenwriter David Self chose the 'Clash of the Titans' school of drama to give the material a rumble and try to shake away the stench of history."
Mr. Mitchell is right about the eggshells but the script is intelligent and intelligible and has just the right amount of elegant and restrained hysteria: we catch the President looking out a window at the White House at his wife and children and Mr. O'Donnell visiting his son at football practice.
In the December 12, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote that:
"Galloping into the holiday season with a cloud of dust
and a hearty 'Hi-yo, Silver,' Thirteen Days evokes a thrilling yesteryear of
beehive hairdos, afternoon editions, and open-top limousines - when being
president of the
Hoberman adds that:
"Thirteen Days adds little to what is known about the missile crisis but subtracts quite a bit. The Cubans are barely a factor - although, according to Russian archival material published in 1997, Castro panicked and began agitating for a nuclear first strike. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, the man who blundered into the crisis and who, more than anyone else, found a way to blunder out, is totally invisible."
The film plunges right into the crisis without giving the
background of the aborted invasion of
Perhaps most importantly, the firm makes no reference to the fact that Adlai E. Stevenson had twice been the Democratic Presidential candidate and was widely regarded as the most intellectual liberal in the country. A great many liberals had anticipated that President Kennedy would appoint Stevenson as Secretary of State and were shocked that he was named Ambassador to the United Nations, a much less important post.
It does, however, very clearly depict the antipathy that the President had for Stevenson and the concerns of the Attorney General that he would not be strong enough to confront the Russians at a very critical juncture in the crisis at the United Nations. Stevenson, of course, would show his mettle with his famous "I wait til hell freezes over" comment.
The crisis has more ups and downs than the public was then aware
of and if the movie has a major flaw it is that it wastes little time in
analyzing whether there were other choices than a blockade since American
missiles in
The President and the Attorney General and Mr. O'Donnell were heroic in their patient search for a way out of the crisis, which was very real.
Khrushschev's decision at the last winter to withdraw in
exchange for an unannounced plan by the
The fact that the nation's defense alert status was upped without the President's consent and that the rules of engagement were being tested and that coups were not easy to analyze were elements that the general public was not alert to at the time.
The Infinifilm DVD includes several documentaries on the crisis.
This is a very important film that not only terrifies fail-safe scenarios but also gives a lot of insight into the character of both President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy and they come off admirably under pressure.
This film ranks 97th in Carter B. Horsley's 500 Top Sound Films