UF Professor: New Film Falsely Heightens Tensions In Cuban Missile Crisis

January 17, 2001

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — In depicting the Cuban Missile Crisis, the movie “Thirteen Days” strives to be realistic in portraying the Kennedy brothers, but its dialogue unfairly portrays the military as pushing the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, says a University of Florida researcher who has written a new book on the confrontation.

In a recent study of the rhetorical elements in the official transcripts of President Kennedy’s ad hoc advisory committee and White House meetings, UF English Professor Ronald Carpenter focused on the communication between President Kennedy and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Maxwell Taylor.

The film shows the actor playing John F. Kennedy sitting in his rocking chair in the same position as in famous photos of the period and Robert Kennedy’s character with rolled- up shirt sleeves in true-to-life form, Carpenter said.

And although much of the dialogue in the movie is quoted directly from the actual transcripts of the advisory committee, known as “Excom,” that is the end of similarities to the real confrontation that thrust the United States and Soviet Union to the edge of nuclear war, Carpenter said. Taylor, for instance, wore civilian clothing to Excom meetings, but to heighten the tension between the president and the Pentagon the movie shows Taylor wearing a uniform, he said.

“For the sake of drama, the film tries to make the president seem at odds with the military and tries to make the Pentagon look bad,” said Carpenter, who analyzed government transcripts and oral histories for a chapter on the Cuban Missile Crisis in his new book “Rhetorical Dynamics of Communication in Martial Deliberations and Decision-Making,” now being reviewed for publication.

The movie shows two Army generals and a couple of Air Force generals in the Excom meetings. In reality, the only military representative in all Excom meetings was Taylor, who seemed more concerned with retaining his favorable impression with Kennedy than with representing the Pentagon’s assessment of the situation, Carpenter said.

“The chiefs of staff at the Pentagon were quite concerned that Taylor was acting in the role of gatekeeper in that their recommendations and assessments of the situation were not being filtered through to Excom, and in turn, what Excom and Kennedy were saying was not being completely related back to them,” he said.

To make matters worse, Taylor had a hearing impairment and apparently out of vanity refused to wear his hearing aid in Kennedy’s presence, Carpenter said. “At the Excom meetings, a lot of the discussion revolved around moveable missiles as opposed to mobile missiles,” he said. “For someone who’s hearing impaired, that’s a potential problem.”

In the transcripts, as Excom deliberations began, Taylor agreed with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s recommendation favoring the use of air strikes followed by an invasion, which Taylor went on to describe as “our unanimous position at the Pentagon,” Carpenter said.

“When Kennedy responds by saying, ‘Let’s not let the Joint Chiefs knock us out on this one, general,’ Taylor suddenly changes his pronoun from ‘we’ to ‘they,’ and tends to go on that way for the remainder of the deliberations,” he said. “Instead of saying, ‘We at the Pentagon think’ and ‘we at the Pentagon recommend,’ it became, ‘they at the Pentagon think’ and ‘they at the Pentagon recommend.’”

Another facet of the Hollywood version of events is the absence of the words “Pearl Harbor,” which in reality figured prominently in Excom deliberations, he said.

“When talking about committing air strikes on the Cuban missiles, Bobby Kennedy passed a note to his brother saying, ‘Now I know how Tojo felt when the Japanese were planning Pearl Harbor,’” Carpenter said. “The notion that we were doing a Pearl Harbor on Cuba in the form of a surprise attack was very persuasive to members of the Excom.”

One Excom member, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, wrote that committing such an act would create worldwide disdain for the United States, while another went so far as to compare it to carrying the mark of Cain for the rest of one’s life, he said.