The Washington Post
February 8, 2001
On the long bus ride back from their weekend retreat in Pennsylvania, despondent Democrats watched “Thirteen Days,” the somber and gripping dramatization of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. After it was over, they asked themselves: “Would he do what Kennedy did?”
“He,” of course, is George W. Bush, who in his second week in office held a high-profile White House screening of “Thirteen Days” to which he invited the Kennedy family — having first had a friend screen it to make sure nothing would dismay them. Indeed, there was nothing, except the exaggerated portrayal of Kenneth O’Donnell, Kennedy’s appointments secretary, as the man who saved the world from annihilation. Crowning the unlikelihood, the film has O’Donnell calling the president “Jack.” On the New Frontier, everyone from family to staff called him “Mr. President.” It was a must because of his youth and his win-by-a-whisker.
But O’Donnell’s son owns a hunk of the film company, and producer-star Kevin Costner needed a fat part.
This does not detract from the essence of “Thirteen Days,” which celebrates Kennedy’s remarkable grasp of two iron truths: He knew he was commander- in-chief — Gen. Curtis LeMay, bellowing and roaring at him to bomb and invade Cuba, was wasting his breath. The second principle Kennedy never let go of was that nuclear war, which is what unrestrained military action would lead to, was unthinkable.
Kennedy relied far more on his brother Bobby, the attorney general, than he did the brass who had told him he had no choice but to go forward in the Bay of Pigs. From the first heart-stopping moment when he saw the photographs of missiles in Cuba, Kennedy insisted there had to be an option other than what his closest aide Ted Sorensen called “humiliation and escalation.” He tried diplomacy and a blockade.
Washington and the world wonder about our new and untried president. Could Bush stand up to the chiefs? Or, more importantly, could he stand up to the strong-minded hawks around him, the Ford alumni like Vice President Cheney and his defense secretary? Donald H. Rumsfeld is just back from a Star Wars-selling trip to Europe, which is not all that keen about the nuclear missile shield that is the most visible part of Bush’s nuclear thinking.
It’s a little ironic that Hollywood is nudging Washington to do some Doomsday thinking. The fate of Earth did not figure in the presidential campaign, and was not mentioned in the debates. George W. Bush expressed enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars and hopes of building it. He coupled this with a declaration of his intent to reduce our nuclear arsenals, even unilaterally.
Rumsfeld’s European weekend produced new expressions of doubt from our allies. They are leery of a nuclear missile defense, fearful that a new system, which would require the elimination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Russians, could destabilize the nuclear arrangements now in effect. Russia and China refused to accept our assurances that the shield is not against them but against nasty little countries that we used to call “rogue” states but now call “states of concern.”
Moscow and Peking have threatened an arms buildup if we deploy a defensive system. Rumsfeld told the dubious Europeans they just better get used to the NMD. They will be consulted, but they will have no veto power over its deployment.
Rumsfeld tried to seduce the infidels with promises of sharing our missile defense secrets with them. They did not succumb. As of now, our system doesn’t work.
On Tuesday, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) sponsored a showing of “Thirteen Days” at the Library of Congress for House members. The Coolidge Auditorium was packed with staff members, many of whom looked as if they had been in kindergarten when the world lurched to the brink of nuclear confrontation — and was pulled back by a pair of brothers from Boston who understood power and politics.
Markey was a leader of a highly popular grass-roots uprising called the nuclear freeze movement, which seized the country in 1982, and was put down by Reagan. Reagan so prized his Star Wars dream that in 1986, he turned down Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer of eliminating all nuclear weapons on condition that Reagan abandon Star Wars. This he refused to do.
Is Bush as gung-ho? We’ll know more later. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, at his confirmation hearings, sounded less keen than his Cabinet mates, and may represent our best hope of sensible options. Meantime, Markey hopes that Bush and other people in charge learn lessons from “Thirteen Days.” He hopes they will see the crisis as Kennedy did — a “conversation” between him and Nikita Khrushchev. It was a dialogue of submarines and U-2s, missiles and warplanes, but two great powers were telling each other that they didn’t really want to blow up the world.