Thirteen Days and History
Graham T. Allison*
Thirteen Days
recreates for this generation of Americans much of the reality of the most
dangerous moment in human history. It
recalls vividly a confrontation in which nuclear war was really possible,
reminding us of an enduring truth about the nuclear age. It invites viewers “into the room” as a
president and his advisors struggle with a seemingly intractable problem that
offers no good options. It allows the
audience to experience vicariously the irreducible uncertainties, frustrating
foul-ups, and paralyzing fear of failure in deciding about actions that could
trigger reactions that killed 100 million fellow citizens.
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.
My book on the Missile
Crisis, Essence of Decision, offers a Roshamon-like account of the
actual events, highlighting ways in which the lens through which one views the
facts shapes what one sees. As
President John F. Kennedy observed with specific reference to the Missile
Crisis: “the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer
– often, indeed, to the decider himself… there will always be the dark and
tangled stretches in the decision-making process – mysterious even to those who
may be most intimately involved.”
Co-producer Peter Almond
raises the tough question about standards in cinematic dramatization. By what standards should accuracy and
fidelity in Hollywood history be judged?
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.
At its best the film should
prick the curiosity of viewers about the actual history of the Cuban Missile
Crisis and lead them to reflect on its lessons and implications. To that end, with associates at the Belfer Center
for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government, I have helped create this associated web site.