Costner, Cuba, and the Kennedys
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Costner, Cuba, and the Kennedys Hollywood takes a stab at the Cuban missile crisis— and almost gets it right. BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER The Cuban missile crisis is the closest the human race has...
...The problem, the perennial problem of the docudrama, is historical accuracy...
...The film deftly intersperses the decision-making with a few beautifully staged action sequences of reconnaissance planes: U-2s under harrowing missile attack, more nimble jets flying dangerously low to get the pictures to bring the proof to force the issue...
...For a new generation, its gravity is unappreciated...
...Napoleon once said that the quality he valued most in a general was luck...
...It shows them not only trying to cajole and bully Kennedy into war...
...O'Donnell towers in Thirteen Days...
...It is historically true that they favored an attack on Cuba...
...The Kennedy brothers decided to simply ignore the second and respond positively to the first...
...Not all the action in Thirteen Days is cerebral, however...
...With the American blockade tightening around Cuba, Kennedy received two cables from the Soviets: one conciliatory, hinting at a solution...
...As we have learned during the last eight years, the gratuitous lie can be the most maddening of all, precisely because it is unnecessary: The lie in Thirteen Days is ideological— and thus typically Hollywood...
...Two and a half hours of mostly talking heads is not the usual formula for riveting entertainment...
...For those who can't, the film is ruined...
...For those who can look past it, the movie is quite satisfying...
...How unnecessary...
...That was the beginning of the way out of the abyss...
...Historian Graham Allison has pointed out that our great good luck in this crisis was timing...
...It shows them trying to trump, even usurp, civilian authority and trap Kennedy—force him into a war against his will—by sending reconnaissance planes low over Cuba for the purpose of getting them shot down, thus creating irresistible pressure on Kennedy to counterattack...
...That was the luck...
...The more conspiratorially inclined will be disappointed to learn how much sheer happenstance and screw-up shape crises...
...In the climactic scene, Bobby Kennedy is negotiating the final Turkish deal with the Soviet ambassador in Washington...
...What if it had happened in, say, April 1961...
...In Thirteen Days, these devices are in the service of producing yet another set of cardboard caricatures of the usual suspects: Americans with medals on their chests...
...This would be bad enough...
...It does it so well in so many ways that one can only regret that in the end it fails...
...BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER The Cuban missile crisis is the closest the human race has come to Armageddon...
...He explained it as "dramatic compression...
...But while Nick is a participant in F Scott Fitzgerald's novel, he is a fairly minor one as he narrates and observes...
...They invented the Cuban missile crisis...
...Clearly, the Kennedy brothers and O'Donnell and Dobrynin and Khrushchev (who supposedly is fighting down hard-liners at his end) are the good guys...
...Kennedy, for example, changed course several times...
...The O'Donnell character is preposterously expanded to become the consigliere, the fixer, the psychic counselor, and the guiding spirit of the crisis...
...So what's wrong with this picture...
...Other parts of the government, for example, conducted routine missile testing during the crisis, and a U-2 flight inadvertently strayed over Soviet territory...
...Filmmaker Roger Donaldson manages to illustrate brilliantly the essential elements of crisis, the fluidity of decision-making under crushing pressure and incomplete knowledge...
...The public quid pro quo was that the Americans would not invade Cuba, in return for the removal of Soviet missiles Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Thirteen Days quite brilliantly creates drama out of mere meetings, phone calls, and deep thinks...
...It is so thick and implausible as to make you think in the movie's opening dialogue that he is doing a Saturday Night Live parody of a Boston Brahmin...
...His presence inevitably connects Thirteen Days to his other docudrama, about an event that occurred just thirteen months after the Cuban missile crisis...
...Oddly though, like the moon landing—another 1960s event of millennial importance—it has faded from our historical imagination...
...If you wanted that kind of dichotomy in this movie, the solution was simple: The bad guys are Khrushchev and Castro (who doesn't play any part in the film at all, but who we know urged Khrushchev to attack the United States...
...Historically, if not filmically, it appears that Khrushchev might have settled without it...
...In the end, however, Kennedy added the Turkish concession...
...The film does cover itself by saying that it is "based" on the actual Cuban missile crisis and thus does not pretend to be a historical record...
...Particularly because Kevin Costner is the star...
...You want to intensify the drama, so you shape the characters to produce dynamic tension—in this instance, a good-guy bad-guy dynamic...
...But here it works because of the material: thirteen days of unimaginable tension, from the first discovery of U-2 evidence of Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba to the secret Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement to dismantle obsolete Jupiter missiles in Turkey...
...But it is a lie nonetheless...
...In this case, there are two major deviations from historical truth...
...He dominates Jack and Bobby in the film, the same way his face overshadows that of the Kennedy actors in the publicity photo for the picture...
...The character presented in David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia is far different from the T.E...
...Another annoyance is Costner's attempt at a Boston Irish accent...
...After eighteen months of experience, however—partic-ularly after the Bay of Pigs—Kennedy had acquired the depth and confidence that enabled him to navigate the most fateful crisis of them all...
...Tolerable is the centrality of Kennedy aide Kenny O'Donnell, the character played by Kevin Costner...
...in Cuba...
...A plain reading of the text (as David Boies might say) would show, first, that Khrushchev recklessly started the crisis, and, second, that he backed down in the end not because he was a good guy but because he had the weaker hand...
...Most of all, the film shows how historical success is a product of both genius and luck...
...The real problem with the film is that it found it necessary to portray the American military brass, as represented in Generals Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor, as unredeemed warmongers...
...After a screening of the film, I asked the producer about this distortion...
...Kennedy encountered his supreme crisis in October 1962...
...It is unfortunate that a movie otherwise so good, about an event so important, should perpetuate so pernicious a lie about the American military...
...How perverse...
...What's right about the film is its technique...
...It was not a deal Kennedy wished to tout...
...and the second, uncompromising...
...These dramatic failures can be tolerated...
...At the time, the Soviets were far inferior strategically to the United States...
...But in Lean's movie, concision, simplification, and dramatic invention are in the service of psychological depth...
...It fails because it tells a lie...
...There's nothing wrong with that in principle...
...But when you do it in a historical context, you have an obligation to be careful about the identity of your good guys and bad guys...
...He is the one who navigates the Kennedy brothers through the shoals...
...Donaldson also deftly demonstrates the role of coincidence...
...After the deal has been struck, the sympathetically portrayed Dobrynin rises and praises the work of the "good men" who saved humanity...
...The bad guys are the shadowy Moscow hard-liners, and the Strangelovian American generals...
...One is tolerable, the other is not...
...Ironically, the lie is not central to the story...
...It is not as if dramatic compression is not permitted in films...
...Thirteen Days, the new Kevin Costner docu-drama about to open in theaters, tries to remedy that deficit...
...The genius occurred at the most crucial moment...
...This is Hollywood, after all...
...Kennedy feared that these extraneous events might be misinterpreted by the Russians as aggressive signals from him...
...He was on the verge of ordering, and then decided against, attacking Soviet air defenses in Cuba...
...Costner's presence here—together with the caricature of the military as war hungry and reviling President Kennedy's weakness—turns Thirteen Days into an ideological prequel to JFK, the egregious Oliver Stone film starring Kevin Costner...
...Moreover, he came away with a fairly good deal: a guarantee of a Communist Cuba and the removal of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey...
...Lawrence who emerges from the pages of his autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom...
...The administration and the participants managed to deny it for twenty years...
...This is a little like making Rosencrantz or Gilden-stern the lead character in Hamlet: When Tom Stoppard did that, the play became a comedy...
...It is hard to imagine, contends Allison, that we would have had a peaceful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis had it been faced by the young untested president who authorized the Bay of Pigs...
...Deciding one's obligation to truth is always a tricky question in this genre...
...But in a typical Hollywood act of moral equivalence, the movie compounds the travesty by making "moderate" Russians into good guys...
...Indeed, in order to obscure the link further, the Turkish withdrawal did not take place for six months after Khrushchev withdrew his missiles from Cuba...
...But the film goes far beyond that...
...CDonnell has to be the central character because he is played by Costner, and Costner is the box office star...
...The original idea was for O'Donnell to function as a kind of narrator, like Nick in The Great Gatsby...
Vol. 6 • January 2001 • No. 16
