Thirteen Days describes the meetings held by the Executive Committee (ExComm), the team assembled by US President John F. Kennedy to handle the tense situation that developed between the United States and the Soviet Union following the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles (140km) from Florida. Robert Kennedy, who was the US Attorney General at the time, describes his brother John's leadership style during the crisis as involved, but not controlling. Robert Kennedy viewed the military leaders on the council sympathetically, and recognized that their lifelong concentration on war was difficult to set aside.
The book was used as the basis for the 1974 television play The Missiles of October. In 2000, the theatrical film Thirteen Days was produced using the same title, but based on an entirely different book, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. That book contained some information that Kennedy was not able to reveal because it was classified at the time.
Notes
↑ Haruya Anami, "'Thirteen Days' Thirty Years After: Robert Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited," Journal of American & Canadian Studies (1994) Issue 12, pp 69-88.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis [of 1962] in Cuba, the Caribbean Crisis in Russia, or the Missile Scare, was a 35-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba. Despite the short time frame, the Cuban Missile Crisis remains a defining moment in national security and nuclear war preparation. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson II was an American politician and diplomat who was twice the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. He was the grandson of Adlai Stevenson I, the 23rd vice president of the United States.
Operation Anadyr was the code name used by the Soviet Union for its Cold War secret operation in 1962 of deploying ballistic missiles, medium-range bombers, and a division of mechanized infantry to Cuba to create an army group that would be able to prevent an invasion of the island by United States forces. The plan was to deploy approximately 60,000 personnel in support of the main missile force, which consisted of three R-12 missile regiments and two R-14 missile regiments. However, part of it was foiled when the United States discovered the plan, prompting the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Brinkmanship is the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. The maneuver of pushing a situation with the opponent to the brink succeeds by forcing the opponent to back down and make concessions rather than risk engaging in a conflict that would no longer be beneficial to either side. That might be achieved through diplomatic maneuvers, by creating the impression that one is willing to use extreme methods rather than concede. The tactic occurs in international politics, foreign policy, labor relations, contemporary military strategy, terrorism, and high-stakes litigation.
Thirteen Days is a 2000 American historical political thriller film directed by Roger Donaldson. It dramatizes the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, seen from the perspective of the US political leadership. Kevin Costner stars as top White House assistant Kenneth P. O'Donnell, with Bruce Greenwood featured as President John F. Kennedy, Steven Culp as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Dylan Baker as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Valerian Aleksandrovich Zorin was a Soviet diplomat best remembered for his famous confrontation with Adlai Stevenson on 25 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis is book by political scientist Graham T. Allison analyzing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Allison used the crisis as a case study for future studies into governmental decision-making. The book became the founding study of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and in doing so revolutionized the field of international relations.
The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians and covert operations carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. It was officially authorized on November 30, 1961 by US President John F. Kennedy. The name Operation Mongoose had been agreed at a prior White House meeting on November 4, 1961. The operation was run out of JM/WAVE, a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station established a year earlier in Miami, Florida. It was led by United States Air Force General Edward Lansdale on the military side and William King Harvey at the CIA and went into effect after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov was a Soviet Naval officer credited with preventing a Soviet nuclear torpedo launch during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such an attack likely would have caused a major global thermonuclear response.
In the United States, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR's missiles in comparison with those of the U.S.. The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR's weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional.
A Trollope ploy is a negotiation technique named after an incident from an Anthony Trollope novel, in which a woman interprets a casual romantic gesture, such as squeezing her hand, as a marriage proposal.
Llewellyn E. "Tommy" Thompson Jr. was an American diplomat. He served in Sri Lanka, Austria, and for a lengthy period in the Soviet Union, where his tenure saw some of the most significant events of the Cold War. He was a key advisor to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A 2019 assessment described him as "arguably the most influential figure who ever advised U.S. presidents about policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War."
The Executive Committee of the National Security Council was a body of United States government officials that convened to advise President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was composed of the regular members of the National Security Council, along with other men whose advice the President deemed useful during the crisis. EXCOMM was formally established by National Security Action Memorandum 196 on October 22, 1962. It was made up of twelve full members in addition to the president. Advisers frequently sat in on the meetings, which were held in the Cabinet Room of the White House's West Wing and secretly recorded by tape machines activated by Kennedy. None of the other committee members knew the meetings were being recorded, save probably the president's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The Missiles of October is a 1974 docudrama made-for-television play about the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The title evokes the 1962 book The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the missteps amongst the great powers and the failed chances to give an opponent a graceful way out, which led to World War I.
William Ecker was a United States Navy officer.
Arthur Charles Lundahl KBE was a forerunner of American Cold War imagery intelligence (IMINT) and aerial reconnaissance known for his discovery of Soviet missile installations in Cuba in 1962 which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was responsible for establishing the Central Intelligence Agency's National Photographic Interpretation Center, a forerunner of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and led the photointerpretation section of the U-2 reconnaissance program. Analyzing reconnaissance films, he briefed presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy as well as the nation's top military and diplomatic officials. Lundahl provided critical intelligence on the arms race and many other international crises, including the Suez Crisis; Quemoy and Matsu, islands controlled by Taiwan; Tibet; Lebanon, and Laos.
John F. Kennedy's tenure as the 35th president of the United States, began with his inauguration on January 20, 1961, and ended with his assassination on November 22, 1963. A Democrat from Massachusetts, he took office following the 1960 presidential election, in which he narrowly defeated Richard Nixon, the then-incumbent vice president. He was succeeded by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Ernest Richard May was an American historian of international relations, whose 14 published books include analyses of American involvement in World War I and the causes of the Fall of France during World War II. His 1997 book The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis became the primary sources of the 2000 film Thirteen Days starring Kevin Costner that viewed the Missile Crisis from the perspective of American political leaders. He served on the 9/11 commission and highlighted the failures of the government intelligence agencies. May taught full-time on the faculty of Harvard University for 55 years, until his death. May was also a recipient of the 1988 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, co-authored with Richard Neustadt.
Roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a 48-minute 2001 Cold War documentary by New Line Home Video with "film footage from the era [and] newly created interviews covering U.S./Soviet relations from post-WWII Europe through the end of the crisis". The documentary is a "Beyond the Movie feature" on the infinifilm DVD for the movie Thirteen Days and synthesizes archival footage and still photography, interviews, Trinity and Beyond documentary scenes, and Thirteen Days movie scenes and sequences.
Edge of Eternity is a historical and family saga novel by Welsh-born author Ken Follett, published in 2014. It is the third book in the Century Trilogy, after Fall of Giants and Winter of the World.
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