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Posts posted by Joseph McBride
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The ending of my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT:
THE WHISKEY INCIDENT
An obscure, long-forgotten incident that took place during an earlier motorcade could shed some light on how Kennedy might have reacted to what happened in Dallas. His words in response to the previous assault were ones he might have felt or uttered if he somehow could have come through Dealey Plaza alive.
This October 23, 1960 incident in downtown Milwaukee, which I learned about while going through microfilm of old newspapers during my research for this book, occurred late in the presidential campaign when Kennedy visited my home town. I don’t know why I had something better to do that Sunday evening, but it was a "school night” and I was thirteen years old and in my final year of Catholic grade school, so I was not there as a witness. Both of the major local papers, the Journal and the Sentinel, covered the incident in detail. This day was Kennedy’s only visit to Wisconsin in the general election campaign, a whirlwind thirteen-hour trip to four cities to give speeches televised throughout the state and to raise funds in smaller, private groups. His concluding speech at the large Milwaukee Arena would be a paid political broadcast on two local TV stations. Riding in an open convertible, the presidential candidate was making a slow-moving progress through heavy crowds to give his speech at the place where I would later hear him speak as president and exchange greetings with him for the last time as he walked toward the limousine in which he would be murdered.
On the Sunday evening of the campaign event in October 1960, Kennedy was riding in the front passenger seat of a rented convertible. Sitting in the back were his sister Eunice Shriver, Congressman Clement J. Zablocki, and, between them, William J. Feldstein, chairman of arrangements for the rally. The driver was a police detective, August Knueppel. After a rally at the airport, Kennedy had the top of the convertible raised because of the autumn chill, but he changed his mind on the way downtown and had it lowered because of the enthusiastic crowds, estimated at between thirty and forty thousand people.
The Journal reported that Kennedy’s aides had asked the Milwaukee police not to interfere with the crowds so the candidate could shake hands and sign autographs. But that backfired. Many people were pressing dangerously in on the motorcade in the jammed downtown area along the city’s major thoroughfare, Wisconsin Avenue. Teenaged girls running alongside Kennedy’s car were screaming, some crying hysterically, and throngs of others were stretching out their hands to the candidate. Not wanting to risk pulling anyone toward the car, he touched the hands gingerly “using an up and down chopping motion,” all the time wearing “a small, fixed smile,” the press reported.
As the candidate’s car edged to the corner of East Wisconsin Avenue and North Water Street, a crowd of about fifty Nixon supporters were among those waiting. Many were holding glasses of liquor, as if they’d come from a cocktail party. Some were chanting “We want Nixon!,” and some chanted obscenities as the rival candidate’s convertible drove slowly past. This location was just blocks from the spot where former president Theodore Roosevelt had been shot while campaigning in October 1912 but survived the bullet in his chest. At the time Roosevelt was shot he was getting into his car, en route to his speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium, much as Kennedy was doing forty-eight years later while heading to the Auditorium and Arena.
Suddenly someone in the crowd that night in 1960 reached into the car preceding Kennedy’s and grabbed the Western-style hat of the Milwaukee County Sheriff, Clemens F. Michalski, flinging it into the air. An unidentified man standing with a blonde woman stepped forward and hurled a heavy Old Fashioned glass filled with
whiskey at Kennedy’s head. “My God,” exclaimed Congressman Zablocki, “who’s throwing whiskey at us?” One of eighteen police officers nearby tried to jump into the fray, but the police were unable to stop the crowd as it spiraled out of control.
“Then, wham,” recalled William Feldstein, “the glass came.” It hit the campaign worker in his head, causing swelling that lasted until the following day. “Kennedy was very incensed. He turned and asked me, ‘Are you all right?’ Then he turned to his sister and said: ‘Can you imagine anything like that?’”
The windshield was splashed with booze, most of it landing on the driver, who responded with professional sang-froid, “It was cheap whiskey.” Kennedy was splashed too. He wiped his face and, reaching across the width of the car, handed back the glass to the man who had thrown it. Witnesses said Kennedy remained calm, but he said to his unknown assailant,
"Here’s your glass, sir. You’re not fit to be an American.” -
http://fightbox.com/en/podcast/item/...joseph-mcbride
My two-hour-plus interview is now online (since it's already Nov. 22) in Europe
with the well-informed Daniel Austin on his FightBox podcast. If you have
trouble playing it with Safari, as I have so far, try Chrome. We discuss
the murders of JFK and Tippit, new document releases, and much more.
It's good to see a channel that's mostly devoted to sports focusing
on the assassination to help broaden the listeners' perspective. Dan
is a student of the case as well as of boxing and wrestling. There is
also a shorter version on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7RrhgbqF50. -
We will have to wait for the publication of Lifton's FINAL CHARADE or further Lifton interviews and lectures to get the evidence on his claim about McNamara. He made it on the Brent Holland podcast. He has been doing interviews with Holland recently hinting at some of the revelations in his book. He also claims Oswald might have survived Ruby's gunshot but was deliberately killed on the operating table at Parkland. And he says he has eyewitnesses to a body transfer at Love Field.
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The Pentagon Papers says explicitly that South Vietnam was a creation of the United
States. Since they had Leslie Gelb on the series, they could have asked him to say that. But no.
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The heading, "Ken Burns' Vietnam," leaves out his co-director, Lynn Novick. She went to Vietnam; he didn't.
She conducted 85 of the 100 interviews. And so on. She is at least as much the auteur as he is.
Women directors often get ignored. Jim DiEugenio doesn't ignore her in his fine articles on this deplorable, mendacious series.
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A lot of this back-and-forth is erroneous. I am the one who found the FBI memo about George H. W. Bush
revealing and discussing his early CIA ties and interviewed the "other" George Bush the CIA falsely claimed
was the one referred to in that memo and wrote about these matters for The Nation in 1988, etc. I have 35 pages in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE on the G. H. W. Bush connections to the assassination. In it I discuss the third article I wrote for The Nation in 1988, in which
I went deeply into Bush's involvement with James Parrott and his rightwing cronies, who were
investigated for six months by the FBI after the assassination. The Nation refused to run that
well-documented article, which I submitted in time to run before the 1988 election.
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In Berkeley, as one might expect, people flock to truly good political movies (and there
is a theater that plays a lot of offbeat documentaries on social issues). I remember the jammed
house for FAHRENHEIT 9/11 at a large theater when I went with my brother Tim, who looks a lot like Michael Moore
and was wearing a baseball cap. People were doing doubletakes in the lobby as we walked past.
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When I saw PARKLAND during its first week in Berkeley, there were three other people in the theater. A fiasco. One subversive thing Oliver Stone
managed to slip into WORLD TRADE CENTER was someone shouting that there were explosives going off in the basement. Otherwise it seemed
to be a case study in how to make an "apolitical" film about a political subject, which means it was political by not challenging the official myth. I saw it at a preview in San Francisco and was surprised when Stone himself showed up with one of his stars. The discussion didn't amount to much, nor did the film.
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See my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE for an account of my two Bush
articles I managed to get published in The Nation during the summer of 1988, and some of their
questionable behavior during that period (including their connections with U.S. intelligence), and how they
killed the third article I wrote in time to be published before
the 1988 presidential election, a well-documented piece about Bush and James Parrott and his rightwing cronies,
after they commissioned me to do two months of additional research in D.C. and Texas.
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From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT: Later on November 22, [Bill] Alexander [one of Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade's top assistants] was agitating for a filing against Oswald by the DA’s office as a member of a communist conspiracy to kill the president. According to Manchester’s Death of a President, Alexander “prepared to charge Oswald with murdering the President ‘as part of an international Communist conspiracy.’” When I asked Alexander if he did advocate such a charge, he replied, “Yes, I did, directly due to the fact that we seized all that communist material and his correspondence with a guy named Stone nobody knew was a Communist at the time.”
Alexander identified this man as I. F. Stone (1907-89), the leftwing independent journalist who had been accused earlier in 1992, apparently falsely, of having been a Soviet agent. This charge was made by a KGB major general Stone may have known as an innocent press contact. Somewhat surprisingly given his iconoclastic reputation as an independent investigative journalist, Stone vigorously defended the Warren Commission against its critics in 1964. Like many others on the American left, he may have been felt threatened by the fact that a supposed leftist was charged with the crime and have been anxious to dissociate himself and others from Oswald by helping stigmatize him as an aberrant loner with no coherent political motive or agenda. No correspondence between Oswald and I. F. Stone has ever been entered into evidence in the assassination case.
On October 5, 1964, shortly after the publication of the Warren Report, Stone wrote in his publication I. F. Stone’s Weekly:
All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report. I believe the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. I regard the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of the President as conclusive. By the nature of the case, absolute certainty will never be attained, and those still convinced of Oswald’s innocence have a right to pursue the search for evidence which might exculpate him. But I want to suggest that this search be carried on in a sober manner and with full awareness of what is involved.
It is one thing to analyze discrepancies. It is quite another to write and speak in just that hysterical and defamatory way from which the Left has suffered in the last quarter century or more of political controversy. . . .
While Stone went on to attack such pioneering and iconoclastic assassination books as Joachim Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? and Thomas Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy? as examples of the tendencies he deplored, it is clear that what made him most concerned about criticism of the Warren Report was that undermining its official conclusion would mean a possible reopening of McCarthyite witch hunting, or, as Stone put it, “conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology.” The same anxiety is obvious in Richard Hofstadter’s highly influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which also appeared around that time and seemed similarly motivated. Both authors wanted to maintain an unquestioning climate in which the Warren Commission and other elements of the U.S. government, at the end of their sham investigation in 1963-64, would exonerate the left in general from suspicion by conveniently placing all the blame on one lone nut (albeit a seemingly leftist nut) for the assassination.
Stone even took it upon himself to defend the dubious behavior of individual commission members. He denied a charge by British philosopher and historian Bertrand Russell that Gerald Ford was “an associate of the F.B.I.,” which turned out to be true, since it eventually became known that the future president was the FBI’s inside man on the commission, leaking its doings to Hoover and his minions. Stone seemed especially outraged by Lord Russell’s temerity in including in his attack on the probity of the commission the name of former CIA director Allen Dulles. Even though Stone admitted that he had criticized Dulles over the years, he insisted, “I would not impute to him or any other member of the Commission conduct so evil as to conspire with the secret services to protect the killers of a President.” This blank check to exonerate the agency Dulles formerly headed rang especially odd in light of Stone’s willingness to attack the CIA in other cases. With seemingly unconscious irony, he put in a box on the front page of his first issue after the assassination (on December 9, 1963, an issue headed, “We All Had A Finger on That Trigger”):
The Real Test of Our Morality
One way to demonstrate to the world in the wake of the President’s assassination that we are a civilized people would be to pass a law forbidding the CIA ever, directly or indirectly, to finance or plan the killing of a foreign leader we dislike.
I. F. Stone’s position on political assassinations, however, was more malleable than that statement would make it seem. When he was interviewed on camera by Ken Burns for his 1985 documentary Huey Long, about the U.S. senator and former Louisiana governor who was assassinated in 1935 under still-mysterious circumstances, Stone made this statement about Long: “I was very impressed with him. But it’s a terrible thing to say, I was really glad when they shot him. I don’t believe in terrorism or assassination, but he could have become an American dictator.”
Stone’s befuddled defense of the Warren Commission bore out the truth of what Lord Russell had written in his provocative article “16 Questions on the Assassination,” published in the independent American journal The Minority of One on September 6, 1964:
The methods adopted by the Commission have indeed been deplorable, but it is important to challenge the entire role of the Warren Commission. It stated that it would not conduct its own investigation, but rely instead on the existing governmental agencies -- the F.B.I., the Secret Service and the Dallas police. Confidence in the Warren Commission thus presupposes confidence in these three institutions. Why have so many liberals abandoned their own responsibility to a Commission whose circumstances they refuse to examine?
From factually unsupported finger-pointing at I. F. Stone in our 1992 interview, the disgraced former assistant DA Bill Alexander went on to describe other materials he said were found in Oswald’s possession that he considered reason to file a charge of conspiracy against the prisoner: “We picked it up, we had all the Communist literature. It had the right names and the right phone numbers, including the Russian embassy. What else are you supposed to think?” Where did they find the material?, I asked. “Oak Cliff,” he replied, referring to Oswald’s rooming house, adding, “I don’t know what they got out of Irving,” where other authorities said they found much more leftwing material among Oswald’s belongings at the Paine residence. When the Dallas sheriff’s and police departments first searched the Paine residence on November 22, they reported seizing file cabinets of information on alleged Cuban sympathizers from the garage, possibly evidence of Oswald’s infiltration activities (or information collected by Ruth Paine and her husband, Michael Paine, who was known to attend both left/liberal and rightwing political gatherings), but those files soon vanished from the evidence. Sheriff ’s Deputy Buddy Walthers reported that the local authorities confiscated, along with “Cuba for Freedom” literature, “a set of metal file cabinets containing records that appeared to be names and activities of Cuban sympathizers.” Deputy J. L. Oxford reported that they seized “about 7 metal boxes which contained pamphlets and literature from abroad.” My telephone interview with Alexander ended with him indicating that he’d be happy to talk again the following week, but when I called him then, he refused to meet with me or talk further.
Word about Alexander’s plan to charge Oswald as part of a communist conspiracy quickly made its way back to Washington on the day of the assassination. Manchester reports that since such an indictment “could have had grave repercussions abroad” (and domestically, with calls for retaliation against Cuba and the USSR), “when [U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, based in Dallas] Barefoot Sanders heard of it from the FBI he phoned [U.S. Deputy Attorney General in Washington] Nick Katzenbach, who persuaded two members of the Vice President’s Washington staff to have their Texas contacts kill it.” It became known later that Henry Wade received three telephone calls that day from President Johnson’s aide Cliff Carter (a prominent Texas fixer for LBJ who had traveled in the Dallas motorcade) urging the district attorney not to include the conspiracy charge in the filing against Oswald for murdering Kennedy. Wade confirmed in our interview that Carter had called him about the matter on November 22. Although Manchester reports that the indictment “had already been drawn up,” Wade claimed to me that he wasn’t sure whether Alexander was going to push that charge: “I think some of the press got the idea he probably [would], but they didn’t know Bill.” But Wade said Carter also urged him to correct that misapprehension by holding his own post-midnight press briefing after Oswald made his few remarks before the media on Friday night before being hustled away by the police.
“Apparently they [the Johnson Administration] were afraid that if we took a charge on Oswald, we were going to take one that led to a part of a Russian conspiracy, which was kind of silly,” Wade told me. “I mean, even if he was part of it, you don’t allege anything in an indictment that you can’t prove. You have to prove everything in a case. All a murder indictment says is that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy by shooting him with a gun. That’s all you gotta prove. From all the evidence that indicated if he had any connection with a foreign government, it was with Castro’s Cuba, because he had that literature all over his room out there he had rented and also out at his wife’s house. And I never saw any evidence that -- the only evidence you had about Russia, he lived over there two years or something. I don’t know whether they ever found out anything about as much.” . . .
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My January 24 interview about the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit is now archived on host Brent Holland's NIGHT FRIGHT website. We talk about issues I discuss in my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT and what I have learned in my continuing research into the case.
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Chris, have you watched Doug Horne's interview with Brugioni? Doug's
research and account of the alteration of the film is detailed and convincing.
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I hope you find time to listen to it.
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I did a 23-minute interview today on the assassination
with Jim Engster in Louisiana, an open-minded interviewer
who approaches the subject from various angles. My
interview is preceded with one with Alexandra Zapruder,
whose deplorable new book I dispute in my segment.
http://www.jimengster.com/jim-engster-podcasts/ -
I think Meagher's is the best book on the assassination. Her analysis
is so lucid and cutting.
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SUNDAY UPDATE:
I've just been informed that today's planned podcast with former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden (whom President Kennedy called "the Jackie Robinson of the Secret Service") has had to be rescheduled. I am sorry it won't be on today as planned but will update you. I am looking forward to doing the interview with Mr. Bolden with host Bob Wilson on Bob Wilson's Antennae Radio podcast for Debbie Scott's Radio Network.
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Former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden will be interviewed this Sunday,
Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. Eastern time by me and host Bob Wilson on Bob Wilson's
Antennae Radio podcast for Debbie Scott's Radio Network. We will discuss the November 2, 1963, Chicago plot, Bolden's attempts to tell
the Warren Commission about it and Secret Service racism and misconduct, and his
trumped-up bribery conviction. President Kennedy called Bolden "the Jackie Robinson
of the Secret Service." It will be an honor talking with him and hearing
more of his thoughts on these and other subjects.https://www.spreaker.com/sh…/bob-wilsons-antennae-radio-show
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That is intriguing -- I would like to hear the interview. Leavelle was the lead
detective in the Tippit case, so he may well have been thinking about Tippit.
He indicated to me in an interview for my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE that Captain Fritz wanted him to make a strong case
against Oswald for killing Tippit because they didn't have a case against
him for killing Kennedy. Of course, they didn't have a case against Oswald
in the Tippit killing either, and Leavelle, in his guarded way, admits some
of the problems with what Oswald called "the so-called evidence" regarding the Tippit murder.
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Now archived: Bob Wilson's interview with me about the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and related topics (the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Lincoln et al). We went for three hours and forty-five minutes, so we dug into a lot of topics in depth. This segment starts about 86 minutes into the program. Sinatra returns from time to time to lend that Rat Pack/Kennedy vibe. https://www.spreaker.com/user/tfok_florida/the-plastic-ono-band-ed-klienman-joseph-
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I will be talking about the murder of Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit (the "Rosetta Stone" of the events of November 22, 1963) this evening (Sunday, Sept. 11) with host Bob Wilson on his Antennae Radio show on Debbie Scott's Radio Network. My segment of the show begins about 8 p.m., Eastern time, with a song or two before we talk. We will discuss my research into the Tippit murder for my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT (2013), including my finding that Tippit and another officer were assigned by the DPD to hunt down Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald's identity was officially known to the police, how Tippit drove into a police ambush, and why Oswald was not guilty of killing him. We will also discuss the continuing controversies surrounding the case and recent developments in it. https://www.spreaker.com/show/bob-wi...nae-radio-show
Here's a print interview I did with Bob Wilson on Tippit and JFK: http://garyrevel.com/jfk/mcbride2.html
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That comment by the Washington Post is the reductio ad absurdum of
lone-nut theorizing.
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Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding with LBJ
two cars behind President Kennedy, told me in 1988, "The first shot I heard I thought was a rifle shot.
The second shot, the motorcade almost came to a halt. They said later that the president‘s car slowed
to something like five miles an hour. I wondered what the hell they were stopping for when somebody is shooting.
People were jumping out of the car in front of me [the Secret Service followup car] and running to the president‘s car.
I thought maybe somebody had thrown a bomb in there. The third shot I heard was a rifle shot."
The Whiskey Incident
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted · Edited by Joseph McBride
Thanks for that kind mention of my new book, Joe. TWO CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD:
JOSEPH McBRIDE ON FILM, has sixty-four
essays, articles, and interviews from my fifty years covering films,
including a new Introduction and five new articles. It contains one article
about JFK, my review of THIRTEEN DAYS, which caused a lot of controversy
with Irish America magazine. Here it is, from
the April/May 2001 issue of that magazine, with my commentary preceding it:
EYEBALL TO EYEBALL: JFK VS. THE JOINT CHIEFS IN
THIRTEEN DAYS
I was the film columnist for Irish America magazine for three years, and it was a mostly enjoyable outlet, allowing me to cover both new and classic films on Irish subjects and issues surrounding the movies’ depiction of our ethnic group. But this column on the 2000 film Thirteen Days, published in the April/May 2001 issue, shortly after George W. Bush became “president,” caused an uproar at the magazine. My bio under the column about this film about the Cuban Missile Crisis noted that I had been a volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign. For many years I had been working on a book dealing with the president’s assassination. The magazine’s editor, Patricia Harty, had been a guest of President Bill Clinton in the Lincoln Bedroom, and after Bush moved into the White House, she expressed a hope in the magazine that he also would invite her to stay overnight. My negative comparison in the column between Bush and President John F. Kennedy, suggesting that we might not be here if Bush had been president instead of JFK during the Missile Crisis, did not go down well at the magazine in the tense days following the stolen 2000 election.
I also managed to express some of my views on the assassination, its causes, and JFK aide Kenneth O’Donnell, who is played by the film’s star, Kevin Costner. Further research for my 2013 book Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit convinced me that O’Donnell was disloyal to JFK. He was about to be fired for corruption upon the completion of the Texas trip and was an inside man in the White House performing vital tasks for the conspiracy; he also lied to the Warren Commission about the sources of the shots. There were rumors that O’Donnell’s son Kevin had helped finance Thirteen Days, but those were not proven at the time of the film’s release, so I went along with the editor cutting that suggestive piece of background information. The film gives an absurdly hagiographic portrait of Kennedy’s special assistant and appointments secretary, who actually played only a minor role in the crisis; JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen described Thirteen Days as “Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.” It later emerged that this distorted focus was indeed due in part to Kevin’s involvement in the financing. According to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “His son Kevin, an internet tycoon, helped bankroll a buyout of Beacon Entertainment, which made the movie, and appears to have been the partial inspiration for promoting his father -- played by Kevin Costner -- to the role of the ‘ordinary Joe’ hero audiences identify with.” O’Donnell’s daughter Helen was more forthright in taking credit for two books (published in 1998 and 2015) intended to rehabilitate her father’s reputation.
Another element of my Thirteen Days column the editor wanted to change was my insistence on putting quotes around “president” before Bush’s name, since I don’t believe he was ever president of the United States, only an unelected usurper. Somehow I won that battle, referring to him as “our new non-elected ‘president’ George W. Bush,” but she refused to let me refer to General Curtis LeMay as a “madman,” a word restored here and a judgment I believe is abundantly warranted. I knew my days as the magazine’s film columnist were numbered because of these fundamental political disagreements, so a few months later I resigned. But it was worth it to express my revisionist views on these controversial matters in Irish America. A lawyer I know who worked for the U.S. government told me at the time, “I can’t believe you got that printed.”
*****
On the morning of Saturday, October 20, 1962, I was in a station wagon with my family en route to Milwaukee’s General Mitchell Field to hear President John F. Kennedy make a campaign speech for Democratic congressional candidates. As we moved slowly in a long line of cars to the airport, the radio reported that JFK had come down with a “slight cold” in Chicago and was returning directly to Washington. We didn’t know then that the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching its boiling point.
Even after Kennedy revealed in a television address two days later that the U.S. and the USSR were staring each other down over nuclear missiles in Cuba, I don’t recall being worried about the possibility of world annihilation. As a devout Catholic boy, I was mostly concerned that the president had lied to us. My naïveté over what the French call a “cold diplomatique” is a measure of how far we’ve come since that more innocent era; today we tend to assume the president is lying unless we can be convinced otherwise.
The stirring new lm about the Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days, can’t help seeming somewhat old-fashioned in stressing the importance of thoughtful presidential leadership. The crisis actually had two heroes: President Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev. Their prior recklessness over Cuba precipitated the crisis, but in the end both had the wisdom to save the world from destruction. Khrushchev is not depicted in Thirteen Days, but he is a powerful off-screen presence. In the 1974 TV movie on the crisis, The Missiles of October, he is memorably played by Howard da Silva.
Missiles is more a chamber play than a realistic recreation, but it works superbly on those terms while thereby avoiding the pitfalls of impersonating famous characters. Surprisingly, so does the far more elaborately produced Thirteen Days, which boasts an extraordinarily fine performance by Bruce Greenwood as JFK. Greenwood captures Kennedy’s body language and the timbre of his voice while avoiding the usual caricature. Most importantly, Greenwood conveys the thoughtfulness and prudence that enabled Kennedy to resist the pressures of his Joint Chiefs of Staff to escalate the crisis by attacking Cuba. Thirteen Days is unexpectedly timely now, since “thoughtfulness and prudence” are not words that spring to mind in discussing our new non-elected “president” George W. Bush.
Steven Culp smoothly impersonates Robert F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days, although the characterization is somewhat sentimentalized, portraying Bobby as less “ruthless” than he actually was, thus missing some of his complexity. The film alludes only briefly to RFK’s plotting against Castro, which continued even after the missile crisis, and while emphasizing his gradual dovishness, it does not include his rash suggestion early in the crisis that the U.S. stage a provocation, “[Y]ou know, sink the Maine again or something.”
Both actors playing Kennedys act rings around the nominal star, Kevin Costner, who affects a laughably bad Kennedy accent as the president’s appointment secretary, Kenneth O’Donnell. Costner doesn’t seem to realize that a Kennedy accent, which has strong traces of England, is not the same as a Boston Irish accent. Despite Costner’s efforts to be relatively self-e acing, his star power imbalances the film, since his O’Donnell is basically a glorified courtier. But it was only Costner’s clout as star and producer that made this film possible. (The unofficial sequel to Thirteen Days has already been made, and it also stars Costner -- Oliver Stone’s JFK. Maybe next he can play George H. W. Bush in the prequel, The Bay of Pigs.)
Thirteen Days screenwriter David Self ably edited the riveting dialogue derived from the 1997 book of transcripts of the White House deliberations, The Kennedy Tapes, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. Unfortunately, that marvelous book is given ungenerous acknowledgment in microscopic type near the close of the end credits (the film’s title is cribbed from RFK’s posthumously published book on the crisis, on which The Missiles of October was based).
Director Roger Donaldson, an Australian who began his filmmaking career in New Zealand, is not seduced by any American flag-waving rhetoric, and he vividly depicts the ominous military preparations for an invasion of Cuba, an element unseen in Missiles. But Thirteen Days, for all its aura of authenticity, misses the ultimate point of the crisis. The filmmakers went eyeball to eyeball with some of the darkest truths about modern American history -- and they blinked.
The strange decision to tell the story from O’Donnell’s viewpoint led Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen to mock Thirteen Days as “Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.” Journalist and Kennedy confidant Ben Bradlee described Costner’s heart-tugging portrayal of Kenneth O’Donnell as “exaggerated and fictionalized. To me, he was the enforcer, he kept everyone in line. He was a tough guy and totally loyal servant and friend.” It’s significant that the more convivial Kennedy aide Dave Powers, JFK’s closest friend and O’Donnell’s collaborator on the 1972 memoir Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, is not portrayed in the film, for Costner’s character resembles a combination of Powers and O’Donnell.
I find it hard to accept O’Donnell as a loyal, sympathetic figure because I can’t overlook his role in covering up the truth about Kennedy’s assassination. O’Donnell and Powers were riding in the Secret Service followup car behind JFK’s limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Asked by Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter for his “reaction as to the source of the shots,” O’Donnell testified cryptically, “My reaction in part is reconstruction -- is that they came from the right rear. That would be my best judgment.” However, House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill revealed in his 1987 autobiography, Man of the House, that O’Donnell and Powers told him they heard two shots from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll in front of the president.
O’Donnell explained to O’Neill, “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the [Kennedy] family.” Powers more truthfully told the commission, “My first impression was that the shots came from the right and overhead, but I also had a fleeting impression that the noise appeared to come from the front in the area of the triple overpass. This may have resulted from my feeling, when I looked forward toward the overpass, that we might have ridden into an ambush.”
Thirteen Days is most valuable for reopening for a wide audience the question of civilian control of the military, a topic as important today as it was in 1962. The heart of the film is JFK’s confrontation with his Joint Chiefs, particularly General Curtis LeMay, the madman who at the time was U.S. Air Force chief of staff. Not content with incinerating cities in Germany and Japan during World War II, LeMay subsequently headed the Strategic Air Command and wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against the USSR. He helped inspire not one but two characters in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper and George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson.
The most stunning revelation in The Kennedy Tapes is the exchange between LeMay and JFK on October 19, which is recreated onscreen. On the tape itself, the insubordinate general angrily reminded Kennedy that “you've made some pretty strong statements about [the Soviet missiles in Cuba] being defensive and that we would take action against offensive weapons. I think that a blockade and political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
Kennedy responded incredulously, “What did you say?”
LeMay repeated, “You’re in a pretty bad fix.”
The Kennedy Tapes reports that Kennedy then made “an unclear, joking, reply.” According to RFK’s Thirteen Days, which incorrectly ascribes LeMay’s remark to another general, the president retorted, “You are in it with me.” On the tape, what Kennedy says is, "You're in there with me. [Forcing a laugh] Personally." The film’s JFK says, “Well, maybe you haven’t noticed you’re in it with me.” The departing LeMay (played by Kevin Conway) fumes, “Those goddam Kennedys are gonna destroy this country if we don’t do something about this.” No wonder the actual President Kennedy worried at one point in that crisis, “Suppose Khrushchev has the same degree of control over his forces as I have over mine?”
Khrushchev’s own anxiety over the situation, expressed in his moving letter to Kennedy on October 26, receives insufficient emphasis in the film. The Soviet leader wrote: “If you have not lost command of yourself and realize clearly what this could lead to, then, Mr. President, you and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly what dread forces our two countries possess.”
Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s famous comment, “We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked,” referred to the Soviets, but he could have been describing JFK’s relationship with the Chiefs. After Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a secret deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and a promise not to invade Cuba, Kennedy wrote him, “I think that you and I, with our heavy responsibilities for the maintenance of peace, were aware that developments were approaching a point where events could have become unmanageable.”
The turning point of the crisis was Robert Kennedy’s meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on October 27, delivering an ultimatum from the president while offering the other terms as olive branches. As reported by Khrushchev in his 1970 autobiography Khrushchev Remembers, the scene was considerably more dramatic than the one in the film, which chickens out at this critical moment of revelation by having Dobrynin, not RFK, bring up that some in the U.S. military “wish for war.”
According to Khrushchev, what RFK told Dobrynin was: “The President is in a grave situation, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. . . . Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.”
Kennedy’s friend Paul B. (Red) Fay Jr., the under secretary of the navy, had a similarly chilling conversation with JFK in the summer of 1962. It took place the day after Kennedy finished reading Seven Days in May, the popular novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II about an attempted military coup against a ctional president. “It’s possible,” Kennedy told Fay. “It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.
“Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen.” Kennedy added defiantly, “But it won’t happen on my watch.” He felt so strongly about such a threat that he regarded Seven Days in May as “a warning to the nation” and in 1963 allowed director John Frankenheimer to shoot scenes for the film version in the White House. A full-page ad for the film appeared in the New York Times on the day of the president’s assassination.
The American public, unaware of the trade of the missiles in Turkey, generally considered the Cuban Missile Crisis an unalloyed Kennedy triumph, but from the viewpoint of the Chiefs it was a failure of presidential will, “another Bay of Pigs.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalled in 1987, “After Khrushchev had agreed to remove the missiles, President Kennedy invited the Chiefs to the White House so that he could thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. LeMay came out saying, ‘We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock ’em off!’’’
Some have suggested that the nuclear test ban treaty with the USSR in 1963 may have been regarded by military leaders as the “third Bay of Pigs,” requiring a violent seizure of power to ensure U.S. superiority over the USSR. LeMay was not alone in his advocacy of a first strike. At a July 1961 meeting of the National Security Council, the Chiefs outraged JFK with a presentation suggesting that the rates of missile production in the two countries would allow a “window of opportunity” in “late 1963” for a “surprise” U.S. nuclear attack on the USSR.
Kennedy’s most eloquent statement on the danger of nuclear war was his speech at American University in Washington on June 10, 1963, which Khrushchev described as the greatest speech ever given by an American president [in the postwar era]. Part of that speech is played over the ending of Thirteen Days. The original text reads: “What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. . . . Our problems are manmade -- therefore, they can be solved by man. . . . For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
Khrushchev was equally eloquent when he reflected to Norman Cousins shortly after the crisis, “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?”
Both leaders paid dearly for their principled restraint. Khrushchev was deposed by his Presidium colleagues in October 1964, eleven months after Kennedy was murdered. Indira Gandhi observed, “Kennedy died because he lost the support of his peers.” Those who continue to believe that a coup d’état can’t happen in this country are ignoring not only the truth about November 1963 but also the events surrounding our last presidential election.