Thirteen Days (film) - Historical Accuracy

Historical Accuracy

The Missile Crisis was first publicly dramatized in the 1974 made-for-television play The Missiles of October. Thirteen Days portrays some incidents based on newly unclassified information not available in the earlier work, such as the shooting down of a U2 reconnaissance aircraft over Cuba during the crisis. In an interview provided on the DVD version, the director touts the meticulous attention to historical accuracy of Thirteen Days.

However, several still-living (as of the film's release) Kennedy administration officials and contemporary historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Special Counsel Ted Sorensen, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, have criticized the film for the depiction of Special Assistant Kenneth O'Donnell as chief motivator of Kennedy and others during the crisis. McNamara reacted in a PBS NewsHour interview:

"For God's sakes, Kenny O'Donnell didn't have any role whatsoever in the missile crisis; he was a political appointment secretary to the President; that's absurd."

According to McNamara, the duties performed by O'Donnell in the film are closer to the role Sorensen played during the actual crisis: "It was not Kenny O'Donnell who pulled us all together—it was Ted Sorensen."

In the book Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, Matthew Alford criticises the film for side-lining "the real-world Kennedy administration's preoccupation with launching secret attacks, including an attempted invasion, against Cuba, which persisted into the crisis and beyond".