Thirteen Days

Pseudoerasmus

January 22, 2001

Return

I saw Thirteen Days at the weekend. I rather liked it as suspense drama, despite the undiluted and undisguised pinko peacenik bias of the movie. Of course I would have opted for the immediate invasion of Cuba and the extinction of the Castro regime, but were the military people really so mindlessly aggressive and the Kennedys so thoughtful, as portrayed in the movie? The military men were all such caricatures, and the Kennedys were given an aura of hitherto unknown pensiveness and wisdom.

Toward the end, Costner's character said something like "we can't trade our Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba, because they'll keep coming back for more trades and one day they'll ask for something we can't trade". That nearly happened, thanks to the Kennedys.