By Todd S. Purdum.
The New York Times. November
5, 2000
LOS ANGELES -- It was a fortnight so fraught as to seem surreal, a standoff
scholars have come to call the most dangerous moment in recorded history.
Thirty-eight years ago this autumn, as the United States and the Soviet Union
stood on the brink of nuclear conflict over missiles in Cuba, John F. Kennedy
and his men groped for a way to avoid the end of the world as they knew it.
Those two weeks in October 1962 are among the most analyzed hours in
American diplomatic and political history, the subject of reams of scholarly
books and articles, memoirs, oral histories and a television docudrama, "The
Missiles of October" (1974). Many of the deliberations among the president
and his advisers were recorded verbatim. So recapturing the taste and feel and
rhythms of that time in a way that seems both faithful and fresh is no easy
effort. But that is the task that "Thirteen Days," a big-budget
Hollywood film opening Dec. 20, sets for itself.
The movie has thrilling sequences of spy planes and enemy missiles, as well
as period New Frontier atmosphere. It has scenes of drama on the high seas and
in the Cuban jungle (actually shot in the Philippines). But mostly it has talk —
tense, frustrated, articulate, suspenseful talk about what the Soviets are doing
and why they are doing it, and what the United States can and should do to
counter the threat of offensive missiles secretly placed just 90 miles from
American shores.
The early and mid-1960s saw numerous cinematic treatments of the nuclear
threat, from "Fail-Safe" to "Dr. Strangelove," but the
missile crisis must have seemed too close for comfort. Now the story is told
obliquely, through the eyes of the president's friend and political adviser,
Kenneth P. O'Donnell, who watched most of the deliberations. O'Donnell is played
by Kevin Costner, who was also one of the producers.
"It's hard to do a movie like that in this climate of Hollywood,"
Mr. Costner said of the film, which went through a couple of studios and several
potential directors over four and a half years before finding financing. "People
say: 'What's going to happen? You mean, they don't blow up the world?' It was
very difficult because the feeling was, 'Who wants to watch people talking about
saving the world?' "
But for Mr. Costner (who in 1991 played Jim Garrison in "J. F. K")
and the film's other producers, Armyan Bernstein and Peter O. Almond —
former journalists who got their start in documentaries and public television —
the challenge of doing something different was precisely the point. Mr.
Bernstein, the chairman of Beacon Pictures, developed "Thirteen Days"
from scratch. He had previously produced more conventional thrillers like "End
of Days" and "Air Force One."
"One of the things we were really struck by is that there are so many
stories that are told about men fighting," Mr. Bernstein said. "But
there are so few, if any, stories about men trying not to fight. We just felt
when we actually explored the idea of men struggling not to fight, not to use
the weapons they had developed, not to use the firepower, that it was very
powerful."
At first blush, the idea of telling the tale through the prism of O'Donnell,
a Harvard football teammate of Robert F. Kennedy's and a man not known for his
involvement in foreign policy, may sound like telling the Monica Lewinsky story
through the eyes of President Clinton's national security adviser. But in fact,
Mr. O'Donnell, who died in 1977, was a fly on the wall in most of the
deliberations of ExCom, the executive committee of President Kennedy's National
Security Council, which met in secret to consider the crisis. Using the known
record of those formal discussions, and imagining how O'Donnell and the
president might plausibly have reacted afterward in the privacy of the Oval
Office, the screenplay by David Self makes O'Donnell into a kind of Ishmael,
surviving to tell the tale of the Kennedy brothers' grace under pressure.
Indeed, the film does its bit to return some luster to the legend of
Camelot, which has been so diminished by a generation of tell- all books, tawdry
mini-series and tabloid surmise. In this treatment, Jack Kennedy (played by
Bruce Greenwood) is palpably human, wincing in pain from his bad back, worrying
privately that he will be seen as either weak or a warmonger. But he is the
clear hero of the piece, along with his brother Bobby (played by Steven Culp),
whose 1967 memoir gives the film its title. Mr. Costner's O'Donnell is the
audience's Everyman, drawing the brothers out and giving them the kind of honest
counsel that only the oldest buddies can. At one point in the movie, when a
Russian attaché asks who he is, Mr. Costner replies simply, "The
friend."
In fact, this device removed one of the moviemakers' biggest quandaries: how
to tell the story without having to find a bankable star willing to play J. F.
K., one of the most familiar faces and voices of the 20th century. Instead, Mr.
Costner, in a period crewcut and essaying a Massachusetts accent, has what
amounts to a meaty part in a rich ensemble stew.
"It seemed to me like an interesting way to go beyond the dramatized
documentary," said the Australian-born director Roger Donaldson, who first
worked with Mr. Costner in the 1987 political thriller "No Way Out." "And
then going behind the scenes to create, fiction's not the right word, but to
extrapolate the things that might have been said and put them around the things
that are known."
The producers initially struggled for a dramaturgical device, considering
and rejecting a romantic subplot involving two young aides, before lighting
almost by happenstance on the O'Donnell character. Mr. Bernstein is a social
acquaintance of one of O'Donnell's sons, Kevin, a venture capitalist here and a
founder of the Internet company Earthlink. The younger O'Donnell, who is also an
investor in Beacon, mentioned a cache of tape-recorded interviews conducted in
the 1960's with his father by the television journalist Sander Vanocur for a
never-written book on Kennedy's "Irish mafia." Those tapes, and other
voluminous historical records, became the basis of a film that, within the
constraints of its genre, strives for considerable fidelity.
"Obviously, our standard has to be one of mass entertainment,"
said Mr. Almond, who once taught city planning at Yale and worked with Mr.
Bernstein nearly 30 years ago on WNET-TV's Emmy-winning nightly newsmagazine "51st
State." "It is, after all, a major motion picture, with all that that
implies. But as filmmakers, we hope that we get the story and its big themes
right, and that we get the rhythms of the crisis laid out in a way that might
make a 15-year-old who's turned on by the rockets or the jets get a little bit
interested in the political and diplomatic themes."
Mr. Bernstein, who also produced "The Hurricane," about the legal
travails of the boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, was badly stung by the
controversy over its loose handling of some facts. So to smooth the film's path
with a Washington political and journalistic establishment whose graybeards
remember the real thing all too well, Mr. Bernstein retained the former White
House press secretary Michael D. McCurry to talk the film up. There have been
screenings for historians, journalists and old Kennedy hands in an effort to
spread positive word of mouth.
"I could give you a hundred quibbles," said Philip D. Zelikow, a
historian at the University of Virginia. But, he added, "The fundamental
structure of the narrative and the overarching themes of the narrative are
sound." Mr. Zelikow, an expert on the crisis, is the author with Ernest R.
May of "The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile
Crisis" (Harvard, 1997), an annotated history of secret White House
recordings. The filmmakers bought the rights to the book, and Mr. Zelikow, a
member of the national security staff in the Bush White House, watched a couple
of days of filming, but he had no consulting role and no financial ties to the
film.
In fact, the film condenses and conflates characters and dialogue (including
that of correspondents and executives of The New York Times), builds up the real
tensions between Kennedy and his more hawkish military advisers for dramatic
effect (sometimes to near-cartoonish oversimplification), makes educated
suppositions about private conversations no one now living can be sure of, and
utterly invents one plot conceit in which O'Donnell personally telephones
surveillance pilots on the president's behalf, imploring them not to get shot
down.
"But basically if people remember a broad narrative, which is that it
was really dangerous, that it was a close call, that there was a real argument
between Kennedy and his military advisers, that the Russians were hard to figure
out, that leadership really mattered — all those points are true," Mr.
Zelikow said. "And the movie is never omniscient about the Russians, which
is great," added Mr. Zelikow, who used to teach a course at Harvard on "The
Uses of History," in which students were asked to study historical films
and write essays about how they reflected the climate and politics of the
periods in which they were made.
"Because you feel a lot of the suspense of the movie derives from that
puzzlement and bafflement that this was for these men."
THE film faithfully recounts Kennedy's agonizing over whether to launch a
surprise, pre-emptive air strike to destroy the Soviet missiles before they
become operational (as most of his military advisers urge) or impose a naval
blockade (described at the time as a "quarantine" to sound less
belligerent) with the threat of an American invasion hovering over the Russians'
heads. In the back of his mind at all times is the biggest cold war
battleground, Berlin, and the fear that the Soviets might retaliate there and
put the whole world at war.
Some of the most seemingly scripted moments come straight from the White
House tapes. At one point, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the bellicose chief of staff of
the Air Force, reviews the options and tells J. F. K. condescendingly, "You're
in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President." Kennedy pauses, eyes narrowing, and
asks, "What did you say?" LeMay repeats himself, and the president
says coolly, "Well, maybe you haven't noticed you're in it with me."
It may be that sense of same-boat suspense that will resonate most with
moviegoers too young to remember the only time in the nuclear age that the
superpowers stood eyeball to eyeball. The filmmakers are quick to say they will
not be disappointed if that is the lesson viewers take all these years later,
when, after all, the nuclear threat persists.
In the film, the O'Donnell and Robert Kennedy characters muse about what
will happen to their wives and families if they and other aides are evacuated
with the president to the emergency government command post. At the time, that
was no idle question.
At one point during the crisis, Mr. Vanocur, who was then a White House
correspondent for NBC News, got a call from the press secretary, Pierre
Salinger, asking him to leave his whereabouts with the White House operators at
all times.
"He said, 'In case of an evacuation of the president, you're to be the
radio and television pool correspondent,' " Mr. Vanocur recalled from his
home in Santa Barbara, Calif. "I did not know what I was going to do. And I
did not know anything about what was going on, because nobody was answering
phone calls.
"As I look back now, I see myself as a character in a Pirandello play,"
Mr. Vanocur continued. "What is the truth? I don't know today what the
truth is. But I watch TV, and an awful lot of people seem to think they know."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company |
