Thirteen Days

[thetrooper]

I saw "Thirteen Days" (2000) yesterday. Yes - the one with Kevin Costner.

What I want to know is how historically accurate this movie is - and what is fiction/manure?

If you haven't seen the movie please abstain from posting here. Thank you!

 

[Jawz II]

as far as i know, its pretty accurate

thats a good movie

 

[thetrooper]

Yes - it was intriguing.

However, I've been told that the character Kenny (Special Assistant to POTUS) was not a real person. I have been to lazy to check this.

 

[wilbill]

Here's a website that goes into detail about the movie crisis vs. the real crisis. The short answer is that for a movie/tv show it's fairly accurate. On the site, a historian has this to say...

The film is not a documentary. Rather, it is a dramatization. Compressing Thirteen Days into 145 minutes necessitates distortion of many specific historical facts. But the central themes of the movie and the principal “takeaways” are essentially faithful to what happened when JFK and Khrushchev stood “eyeball to eyeball” in 1962...

Thirteen Days’ dramatization gets a number of specific historical facts wrong:

inflating O’Donnell’s role to that of elder brother of President Kennedy – stiffening the president’s spine, on the one hand, while corralling military leaders bent on war, on the other;

caricaturing the military leadership as a war-mongering monolith;

miniaturizing most of the other advisors, particularly Bundy, Sorenson, and Dillon.

In what Charles Krauthammer has called an “ideological lie,” the movie portrays military leaders seeking to maneuver the President into war. The image of Kevin Costner, as Kenny O’Donnell, calling pilots flying over Cuba to persuade them to lie to the chain of command for the larger good of the country is unreal.

The more important question, however, concerns the film’s central messages. How faithful is the movie to the central truths about this historical event? Here, I believe, the producers deserve high marks. They have not only attempted, but succeeded in entertaining in ways that convey messages that resonate with the central truths of the crisis.

 

[thetrooper]

@wilbill: Thanks!

 

[JohnRM]

The immediate thing that I noticed was that the television speech by President Kennedy to the American people was not the full complete speech. It was a mish-mash of the original, basically abridged.