The ’13 Days’ Taught Seven Truths

Arecent bulletin from Washington reports that the Bush White House plans to screen the movie “13 Days,” the real-life dramatization of John F. Kennedy’s ultimately peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. President Bush himself intends to watch it. Good.

The movie is not a documentary. For dramatization (and marketing) purposes, it inflates the role of appointments secretary Kenny O’Donnell, played by Kevin Costner, and shortchanges the contributions of Adlai Stevenson, McGeorge Bundy and Gen. Maxwell Taylor. But it is a vivid and valuable reminder that those 13 days demonstrated seven basic truths for every future president:

* There is no substitute for presidential leadership, no matter how experienced and brilliant the president’s top advisors may be. It is the president’s own judgment, his own knowledge of his adversary and allies, and his ability to guide his advisors and weigh conflicting advice that matter most in the end.

* A negotiated solution, when possible and reasonable, always serves the interests of both parties better than a military solution, particularly in an age of proliferating weapons of mass destruction. Presidential firmness, flexibility and a willingness to maintain a confidential dialogue with the other side--even during the worst times of tension and confrontation--are indispensable.

* In world affairs, a U.S. president’s every word to another nation’s leader, whether written or spoken, private or public, is weighted with meaning and consequence. Drafting a letter that could mean the difference between life and death for one’s countrymen, or even the planet, inspires clear and careful phrasing that leaves no loopholes but burns no bridges.

* When dealing with an aggressive adversary, a measured and limited first step that leaves both the president and the other side with an option other than humiliation or escalation is preferable to an unlimited surprise attack that invites both a belligerent response and the condemnation of history.

* A president’s military advisors are likely to trust only military solutions; his diplomatic advisors are likely to see merit only in diplomatic solutions; his legal, economic and spiritual advisors are likely to focus primarily on the tools of their respective trades, etc. A presidential solution, possibly drawing upon the best elements of all the others, including a combination of fair-minded diplomacy with a threat of superior military force, is most often the right answer. Thrusting forward the olive branch and the arrows grasped by the eagle represented on the presidential seal requires an ambidextrous president with exquisite timing. But it sure beats the alternatives.

* For all the terrible power and deterrent value of nuclear missiles, our highly trained conventional forces, alerted and informed by a high-tech, highly skilled intelligence community, are the most likely and most practical weapons for a president to use in a military crisis.

* However slow and divided the United Nations Security Council may be at particular times, no one is better positioned to serve as an independent (not necessarily neutral) and invaluable channel of confidential communications and cool reflection than the secretary-general of that oft-maligned organization.

All these lessons and more come through in the movie as well as the published tape transcripts of that harrowing 13 days. My role, as portrayed in the film and as transpired in 1962, was comparatively light. But the heavy sense of weight I felt when asked by the president to draft the penultimate letter to Soviet Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev--with Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy at my side, with anxious “hawks” and “doves” scratching for more, with nuclear war around the corner and one brave American U-2 pilot already down--was seared on my memory long before that moment was depicted on the screen. That was a moment that neither I nor any American would ever want to experience again.

Maybe the Bush team should see the movie twice.