The Cuban Missile Crisis Of 1962 - 1796 Words

When I learned that Thirteen Days, the new movie dramatizing the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, would follow events through the eyes of Kenneth O Donnell, John F. Kennedy s appointments secretary--who would be played by the movie s headliner, Kevin Costner--I had strong misgivings. In 1997 I had transcribed and edited (with Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia) some of the tape recordings made secretly by JFK--and nothing in these tapes, in other documents, or in the recollections of Kennedy s key advisers gives O Donnell an important or even conspicuous role in the crisis. After Harvard University Press published our transcripts as The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Beacon†¦show more content†¦At another meeting, in a tart exchange with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, O Donnell expressed rude contempt for General Lyman Lemnitzer, a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. What the filmmakers have done in their deployment of O Donnell/Costner comes much closer to speculative historical fiction of the sort practiced by Simon Schama in Dead Certainties (a fictionalized reconstruction of an eighteenth-century murder based closely on historical fact) than to whole-cloth fantasy such as Edmund Morris s Dutch (Morris inserted himself as an invented character in this biography of Ronald Reagan). Still, why make O Donnell our window on events? When I tried to think how else the producers might have pulled in a mass audience--as opposed to a PBS-documentary-sized audience--Henry James s principle of having a single perspective on events made sense. But that perspective couldn t easily have been JFK s; and had it been that of a major adviser, the movie would have almost inevitably depicted him--McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, White House Counsel Ted Sorensen, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, or whomever--as the person who saved the world. O Donnell was a reasonable choice, for he was in a position to see much or all of what went on, but was not a policy contestant or even a person particularly sophisticated on the issues; he was an inside