Thirteen Days deals with what many consider to be the height of the cold war: the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, before the movie’s perspective is reviewed I believe that its reliability should be evaluated. The main audience of Thirteen Days is the American public, which means that it will likely have some bias towards the American side, which could devalue its view that the US won the Cold War. Also, since Thirteen Days is a movie it is likely that the story has been sensationalized to draw a larger audience. However, many critics have given Thirteen Days a lot of credit for trying to make the movie as historically accurate as possible. I have even heard that movie posters were recalled to remove jets that had not been invented at the time of the missile crisis. I have little knowledge of the Cold War at this point so I have little to compare it to, but based on this evidence as a historical source Thirteen Days can at most be called a mediocre source.
The basic message at the conclusion of Thirteen Days was that the United States was the winner after a very close battle. JFK said, it was “just as much a victory for them as us,” yet this was an attempt to calm down an overly excited crowd of officials who were clearly acting like they were the winners. So the real, hidden winner seemed to be the U.S. One official said, “We’ve got a lot of new clout right now. We can run the table on Kruschev in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.” This win was basically because the U.S. went “eyeball to eyeball and the other fella just blinked.” This quote was in reference to U.S. ships forcing ships from entering Cuba. This was perceived as Russia backing down to the U.S. increasing pressure. Later, in what seems to be the movie’s biggest argument for a U.S. victory, the Russians submitted to the US’s terms, which seemed to favor the U.S. The U.S. pledged a no-invasion policy in Cuba for missile removal and the U.S. made a secret promise to remove their missiles in Turkey in six months. These terms seem to favor the U.S. government because Russia was going to lose their military power and they still had a gun pointed at their heads in Turkey. In addition, they only had an unofficial promise that the U.S. would remove missiles from Turkey and that was going to be six months in the future. If these terms are accurate, then the U.S. probably won the Cuban Missile Crisis, and moved a step ahead of the Russians in the Cold War.
For thirteen extraordinary days in October 1962, the world stood on the brink of an unthinkable catastrophe. After the discovery of Soviet weapons in ...More at HotMovieSale.com
Kevin Costner stars in Thirteen Days, an inside look at how the Kennedy Administration responded to the discovery of offensive Soviet weapons in Cuba,...More at Buy.com
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