THIRTEEN DAYS (2000) | FIRST TIME WATCHING | MOVIE REACTION

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Enjoy my reaction as I watch “Thirteen Days” for the first time!

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//📖 C H A P T E R S
00:00 – Intro
02:06 – Reaction
45:09 – Review

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33 thoughts on “THIRTEEN DAYS (2000) | FIRST TIME WATCHING | MOVIE REACTION”

  1. I was a baby at the time. My parents later told me that, yes, the American people deeply feared nuclear war. And the country breathed a sigh of relief that Kennedy reached the best possible solution. Yet the military leaders still viewed him soft on Communism and after his assassination a year later, they convinced Pres. Johnson to increase support for South Vietnam fighting communist invasion from North Vietnam and to send in ever increasing numbers of American troops. Thus, our Vietnam War that was such a disaster that after being elected in 1964, Johnson decided not to run for reelection in 1968.

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  2. Hi Cassie! I agree with everybody else here – very good & accurate movie (the JFK speech is word-for-word with the actual one) I did want to add a couple things.
    One reason the military brass wants to go to war so badly is – beyond the Bay of Pigs fiasco – WWII was only over for 17 years when this happened, and they'd all fought in it. That was a really traumatic event for everybody (Like when I was 7, in 1965, the war has been over for 20 years, but everyone behaved like it had ended the previous week) and these men had been upper-rank soldiers and sailors when the survival of the USA was on the line.
    Nobody today (even for 9/11) has ever really had to confront the feeling that America might possibly disappear off the map – but they did. So I think a big part of their motivation is "not this again, we've got to stop the bastards *now*."
    On a completely different topic, I imagine that the script is written from Kevin Costner's point of view is because he was a co-producer, and I think Costner just set out to get a movie made that he could star in.

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  5. Thanks for reacting to this movie, not your usual and I really appreciate it. I was just starting High School in 1962. Our family was stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Fl. When the Defcon 3 order went out my dad disappeared into the base operations which then locked down. We didn't see him for days. We did see the President on TV, and were glued to the news. I was pretty sure this was it. And, since we were located so close to Cuba and a military target, I was sure that it was the end. When it was over enough for my dad to come home we all cried. He told me this was the closest we ever had gotten to WWIII.

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  11. The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is… complicated. It's hard to know where to begin. Probably the most important thing to add to the film's telling of the story is that, as we've learned more — particularly from the opening of Soviet archives after 1992 — it turns out to have been much worse and more dangerous than anybody knew at the time. For example, the Soviet submarine that was the target of the depth charge attack turns out to have been carrying nuclear torpedoes (!!!), and its captain and political officer both believed that they were under attack and that nuclear weapons should be used. Only the fact that the flotilla commander happened to be aboard as well, and vetoed the decision, prevented the first use of a nuclear weapon since Nagasaki.

    The USSR believed — correctly, it turns out — that the United States intended to invade Cuba, sooner or later. (It's not clear whether JFK would ever have authorized the invasion as a unilateral act — he'd been badly burned by the Bay of Pigs debacle, and he never trusted the uniformed military or CIA after that. But the Pentagon was actively planning invasion scenarios, including developing pretexts in case Cuba itself failed to provide a suitable provocation.) The Soviets hoped to have nuclear missiles operational before they were discovered, in which case the US would, they believed, not risk military action to remove them or Castro. What nobody in the US knew at the time was that the Soviets had, in effect, succeeded: something like 100 tactical nuclear weapons had already been delivered to Cuba by the time the intermediate range missiles were photographed. Those weapons would certainly have been used in the event of an invasion and could have been used to retaliate for airstrikes on the missile sites. The "window of opportunity" to take out the missiles and/or invade Cuba which LeMay and others in the Pentagon believed in had never existed. (This is something we learned post-1992.)

    About JFK: he had a certain kind of popularity — people who liked him, liked him a lot. At the same time, he only very narrowly defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1960 (49.7% to 49.6% of the popular vote). Kennedy ran as a hardline hawk on the USSR and Cuba, blaming the Eisenhower administration for allowing the Soviets to badly outproduce the US in strategic nuclear missiles (the "missile gap"), and, in office, he inaugurated the Minuteman missile program, a massive expansion of America's land-based ICBM force, ultimately adding 1,000 missiles (and 3,000 warheads) to the arsenal. (The Jupiter missiles in Turkey were outdated… and became even more so under Kennedy's missile development program.)

    Anyway… it's complicated. And very, very scary.

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  13. What context is missing from this dramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis was that both the West and the Russians had (and still have) submarine-based ballistic missiles which could operate undetected just miles off the coast of any target they wanted to strike. Putting missiles in Cuba was essentially just a power move but such a visible one that failure to respond would have signaled weakness on the part of the U.S. It was a massively stupid move on the part of the Soviets to risk thermonuclear war just to test our resolve and in the end it helped get the Soviet leader, Khruschev, removed from his leadership position.

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  14. I was 7 years old when this took place. I remember my parents were subdued during this 2 week period and "duck and cover" drills took place nearly every day at school. The t.v. was always on in case of a Civil Defense Warning. I also was living in Dallas, where 13 months later John Kennedy was assassinated.

    As a rule the Kennedy's were loved by America and yes – even in Texas. That is why the Kennedy's time in the White House is known as "Camelot". But the people that hated the Kennedy's were factious and violent. Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General and went after high profile Mob figures, arresting many and jailing them. He was well on the way to dismantling the Mob nationwide. Vice-President Johnson hated Bobby as well because Bobby was Jack's brother, protector and attack dog. Johnson was envious that Jack took his brother's advice over his.

    The C.I.A. had reason to hate Jack (John) Kennedy because it ws his stated goal to dismantle them now that WW2 was over. He felt there was no need for them since they were created (O.S.S.) for the express purpose of the World War. The C.I.A. and the Military both had reason to hate Jack because of the "Bay of Pigs" fiasco the C.I.A. botched. Before Jack was sworn in the C.I.A. had gained tacit approval from the previous administration to create a "False Flag" event and blame it on Cuba as a pretext for invasion. JFK nixxed the idea but approved the support of anti-Castro Cubans to land with U.S. support. The invasion failed and JFK never trusted the C.I.A. again.

    Finally, the military was pushing Kennedy to place more "Advisors" in Vietnam – which he initially did. But he reversed course later that same year and decided to pull all troops out of Vietnam. This incensed many in the Pentagon who wanted to ramp up the war against Communism. So, these are the various players mentioned when theories are put forth regarding Kennedy's assassination. Me? My money's on the C.I.A.

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  17. What a great week of films, and what a great way to end that week. There is no fictional film that is more suspenseful than this reality-based one, and no one more fun to watch it with. Thank you, Cassie.

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  23. This event occurred 6 years before I was born and we were taught about this in grade school during the 1970's. Life during the Cold War was seriously tense to say the least.

    When speaking to younger Americans it's amazing to me that many don't know about the Cuban Missile Crisis or the 2-3 other times in the last 60+ years that World War III almost took place. A couple of these incidence were almost by accident.

    We spend everyday of our lives focused on seriously silly things while the vast majority of the human race could be ended inside of 30 minutes.

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  26. I was 6 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, living in Saskatoon. We were doing duck and cover exercises at school. There was an air raid siren in our school yard. Yes people were well aware of how close it came.

    The Soviet decision to place missiles in Cuba was related to two major events: the attempt by the United States to launch an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles (the Bay of Pigs invasion) and the decision of the Americans to place Jupiter missiles in Turkey which borders the Soviet Union. These missiles were largely obsolete but were capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The Jupiter missiles were in fact removed from Turkey in 1963, as an unwritten but mutually understood part of the deal that removed the Soviet missiles from Cuba.

    Kenny O’Donnell’s wife Helen died in 1977 as a result of alcoholism. O’Donnell died a few months later, shortly after marrying his second wife. He was 53, and it is generally accepted that he also died of the effects of alcoholism that began following the assassinations of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

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  29. No doubt somebody has already mentioned this, but the US had missiles in Turkey, so the Soviets were kind of trying to level the playing-field. In fact, the missiles in Turkey ended up being quietly removed too. And Washington and Moscow installed the hotline to make sure it couldn't happen again.

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  31. What a time when we had such competent, rational and logical leaders on both sides of the curtain that did everything to avoid conflict, even at a micro level. Kennedy was the last great president of the US after he was assassinated by the CIA and the military coup that followed. Since then every president after him was controlled by the generals in the Pentagon and the military industrial complex. Shame America became an empire ruled by billionaire oligarchs.

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