Thirteen Days: Witness to history

“They want a war, Jack, and they’re arranging things to get one.”

In a pivotal early scene in Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days, Kevin O’Donnell, the Kennedy aide played by Kevin Costner, confronts a reporter questioning why U.S. forces are massing in Florida and the Caribbean. Is it an invasion of Cuba, he asks? O’Donnell tells him off, saying he’s being irresponsible.

Of course, O’Donnell was lying. The United States was indeed developing plans to invade Cuba in order to neutralize the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles parked just 100 miles from the southern coast.

Lying to reporters – and trying to throw them off a story – was nothing new for John Kennedy’s White House or any other since. As long as there have been White House correspondents, there have been presidential aides telling them they’re wasting their their time.

Still, that scene hit me differently during this viewing of the film. You see, I quit my job last month, one I had for more than a decade. Reuters is often where I held a front-row seat as a witness to history. And brother, was there a lot of history. Sometimes, history beat the living hell out of me.

The feature attraction in all that time was, naturally, one Donald J. Trump. You may have heard of him. If you haven’t, he’s willing to come to your house and tell you all about himself and will bring visual aides. But I’m getting off-track. I started covering Trump as a political correspondent in 2015. It’s 2026, and I was still writing about him. It was time to do something else.

Political reporting, beyond Trump, has changed in ways that make it less rewarding. Seemingly every candidate down to the county level recites the same party talking points. Given their ability to reach voters directly through social media and text messaging, campaigns place less value on relationships with the press. What are considered scoops in political journalism typically are scraps of information that most voters would never care about. Gerrymandering has winnowed down the number of pivotal races. Cable news is a wasteland of pundits on both sides screaming at each other. The public doesn’t trust us and many prefer partisan podcasts to now what is derisively referred to as the legacy media.

Taken together, it was a dynamic that seemed unalterable. My stories began to feel stale – like I wasn’t covering the news, I was writing in a genre.

I’m not sure how I feel about a period of my life ending that was so encompassing, so total. Part of me feels like I’m quitting at a time when the job really matters. I’m running away from the fire. But another part, the wiser part, says I have done my bit for queen and country. I didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to do in that job, but I did enough.

I did, however, manage to interview Trump a couple of times at the White House. During one, I remarked after we were served beverages that you would think the Resolute Desk would have coasters. I’m not sure he appreciated the remark – if he heard it at all. ¹

You might know who famously first used the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. John Kennedy. He brooded over it during his greatest challenge of his short presidency: The Cuban Missile Crisis. Those two weeks in October are still regarded as the closest the United States and the Soviet Union have come to a shooting (or nuclear) war. It was a lot of history, all at once.

Thirteen Days, released in 2000, is a mostly successful attempt at telling the story for generations that weren’t around to sweat the confrontation out. The movie uses the odd device of placing a side character, O’Donnell, as a driver of the narrative, a choice that was criticized at the time for several reasons. One was that those involved in the crisis didn’t recall O’Donnell doing as much as the film portrays him as doing, and second, and most important, Costner’s Boston “accent” is a war crime.

I don’t say that lightly. And look, you gotta give Costner his due. The man is a force of nature. He has survived thermonuclear detonations that would end a normal actor’s career (Waterworld! The Postman! Wyatt Earp!) He’s played a man-fish, an Elvis impersonator, Superman’s father, and the GM of the Cleveland Browns. He just walked away from a TV show beloved by millions. He’s beaten the odds again and again.

But the man can’t do accents. Anything that pushes him past his flat California/Midwestern tint and it’s game over. Worries first surfaced when Costner dipped into a New Orleanian dialect in JFK. It was a bigger issue in his epic Dances with Wolves, when his character, John Dunbar, occasionally sounded as if he had come to the prairie by way of Pasadena. It grew more worrisome in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, when his English swashbucker sometimes read lines as if he couldn’t remember where he parked his Camaro. And it culminated in Thirteen Days, in which O’Donnell is the former Hahvard quahterbahck who pahrked his brahn cah in Hahvard Yahard. O’Donnell is written like a such a Boston Irish Catholic pol that every time he comes home, there’s another kid. And he says things like, “If the sun comes up tomorrow, it is only because of men of good will. And that’s - that’s all there is between us and the devil.” Aye, ‘tis true, Kenny!

But the device itself makes some sense. Cinematic chronicles of history often fare better when the person at the center of the storm is not the same as the person telling the story. This is especially true for quasi-mythic figures such as the Kennedys. Too tight a focus on Jack or Bobby would rob them of their power to command our attention. Better they stay off screen for extended periods. And in this case, Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp perform their roles so adroitly that, as a filmmaker, you don’t want to risk the movie tipping over into hagiography.

Even so, it’s clear that the Kennedys are the heroes of the film by standing up to a U.S. military (including Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay) seemingly starved for another war, with O’Donnell left to mediate between the camps.² Neither side trusted the other in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961. The president and his brother were intent on not allowing the crisis to give rise to an incident that could trigger a full-scale war.

That forces O’Donnell, acting on orders, to at times avoid the Pentagon chain of command and speak directly to the pilots flying patrols over Cuban airspace in one the movie’s best scenes:

Kenny O’Donnell: The president has instructed me to pass along an order to you. You are not to get shot down.

Commander William B. Ecker: Uh, we’ll do our best sir.

O’Donnell: I don’t think you understand me, Commander. You are not to get shot down, under any circumstances. Whatever happens up there, you were not shot at. Mechanical failures are fine. Crashing into mountains, fine. But you and your men are not to be shot at, fired at, or launched upon.

Ecker: Excuse me sir, what the hell is going on here?

O’Donnell: Commander, if you are fired upon, the president will be forced to attack the sites that fire on you. He doesn’t want to have to do that. It’s very important that he doesn’t, or things can go very badly out of control.

Ecker: What about my men? We don’t have anyone to protect us, I don’t want to be writing letters home to parents.

O’Donnell: If the president protects you, Commander, he may have to do it with the bomb. Now I’ve known the man for fifteen years. The problem is... he will protect you. So I’m asking you, don’t make him protect you. Don’t get shot at.

O’Donnell’s efforts eventually go for naught when an American U-2 is shot down over Cuba and the pilot is killed. It had the makings of the kind of precipitating act the generals were looking for, but Kennedy chooses to keep the death quiet and not escalate the situation. Rather than use the downed airman as a political prop in order to justify whatever decision he made, the president showed restraint on at time when cool heads were hard to come by.

The film in that regard serves as an excellent study of a leader desperately trying to find options others than the ones with which he is presented. We can feel JFK’s anxiety at being reluctantly dragged toward launching a strike that could result in World War III. He wants another way.

And this is where the decision to keep O’Donnell as the film’s lead really pays off. We feel the weight of the crisis on Kennedy the way most did — by observing him from a distance. At one point late in the story, O’Donnell tells his wife that while he is smart, Jack and Bobby Kennedy are on another level. At that moment, O’Donnell becomes all of us, a spectator, a powerless witness to history who can only hope his elected leaders do the wise thing.

I can relate to that. I have been that spectator many times over. But now I’m surrendering my front-row seat even if I am not leaving the stage entirely. After a decade in the trenches, some distance might be a very good thing.

WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Thirteen Days is rentable on all major platforms.

HEY ISN’T THAT: One of the generals, Marshall Carter, is played by Ed Lauter. You might know him best as the sadistic captain of the guards in The Longest Yard (1974).

ARMAGEDDON INDEX: (8/10): It doesn’t get cuspier than this.

DUST CLOUDS: On October 27, 1962, the height of the standoff, Soviet submarine B-59, cut off from Moscow, overheated, and under pressure from U.S. Navy depth-charge signals, believed war might already have begun; its captain ordered a nuclear-armed torpedo readied for launch. Firing required the consent of three officers, and while two agreed, the flotilla commander aboard, Vasily Arkhipov, refused, insisting there was no confirmation of war and urging the submarine to surface instead—an act of restraint that almost certainly prevented a nuclear detonation and makes Arkhipov one of the most consequential, and least-known, figures in Cold War history.

TOP OF THE POPS: The number-one song on the Billboard pop chart when the movie was released in the U.S. was: “Independent Women, Part. 1” by Destiny’s Child. Befitting the time period, there are no independent women in Thirteen Days save perhaps for a few White House switchboard operators.

WHAT ELSE AM I WATCHING: TV: The Pitt (S2, HBO), Landman (S2, Paramount); Movies: Eephus (Lund, 2024), The Mastermind (Reichardt, 2025), Train Dreams (Bentley, 2025).

LAST ENTRY: Logan’s Run (1976)

NEXT ENTRY: The Dead Zone (1983)

1. My interactions with Joe Biden were quite different. Maybe I’ll write about them sometime.

2. Unhappy with the way it was portrayed in the script, the Defense Department did not cooperate with the filming of the movie.