'Thirteen Days' embellishes crisis roles
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WASHINGTON - Moviegoers who buy a ticket for "Thirteen Days," the Kevin Costner film about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and stay for the credits can eyeball a list of more than 800 names involved in making the $80 million movie, from Costner, who plays presidential aide Kenneth O'Donnell, right down to various dolly grips and payroll clerks.
But there's one name they won't see there: Kevin O'Donnell, whose Beacon Pictures produced a film inflating his father's role light-years beyond that actually played by the dour, taciturn Kennedy loyalist in the most crucial days of the JFK White House.
Much has been written about the way the genuinely gripping movie conveys the mood and substance of those days of nuclear brinkmanship, despite the distortion of numerous substantive details, allegedly for dramatic effect.
On-screen promotion
But the greatest distortion is the cinematic canonization of the senior O'Donnell from domestic presidential appointments secretary, sounding board and political fixer into a crucial instrument of world peace at the flash point of the Cold War.
In the film, O'Donnell isn't just the international player he never was during the Cuban missile crisis. The former Holy Cross coach's son, famous for his economy with words and his working-class sensibility, becomes a loquacious surrogate priest and psyche prop for John and Robert Kennedy, two silk-stocking Harvardites shaky in the face of Soviet pressure.
As political-science professor Michael Nelson of Rhodes College, in Memphis, points out in the current Chronicle of Higher Education, "You come away thinking that President Kennedy could never have made his televised speech to the nation and Robert Kennedy would have flubbed his presentation of the administration's crisis-ending compromise to the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, if O'Donnell hadn't pulled them aside for pep talks."
Just how much of a hands-on role Kevin O'Donnell had in shaping the "Thirteen Days" script and Costner's performance is not altogether clear. Though he denies having any sort of approval rights, he acknowledges advising scriptwriter David Self even before he and producer Armyan Bernstein purchased the company producing it.
"My involvement in the film was almost incidental," he said, speaking by phone from California. "I didn't put a penny into it."
The real guiding force in the portrayal of Kenneth O'Donnell, he and the film's co-producer, Peter Almond, both declare, was not the character's real-life son but "the demands of dramatic narrative and efficiency."
Hollywood shapes history
Nevertheless, the scope of Kevin O'Donnell's participation in the production of "Thirteen Days" remains an intriguing window into the way Hollywood shapes history and vice versa.
The younger O'Donnell, 57, is one of the improbable tycoons of the Internet revolution: a Scientologist and college dropout-turned-software salesman who, with $48,000 in 1982, founded mega-million-dollar Government Technology Services, a Chantilly, Va.-based computer reseller. He capped that several years ago by turning a $100,000 investment in the Internet-service provider EarthLink into a fortune estimated as high as $130 million.
In 1999 he and producer Bernstein bought controlling interest in Beacon Pictures, a motion-picture and television development, production and financing company. Beacon was already at work on "Thirteen Days," O'Donnell and Almond say.
O'Donnell had been associated with the movie before the purchase, but he says that association was largely happenstance.
While skiing in Aspen in 1995, he says, he met Bernstein socially, and over the next few years learned that he and Bernstein and Almond were exploring ways to develop a film based on the Cuban-missile crisis.
O'Donnell said he volunteered that his father had been a White House aide at the time and, before his death in 1977, had recorded some 100 hours of oral history on tapes. "What comes across (in the tapes) in an overpowering way is how these very young guys in the White House, who had a very mixed record earlier dealing with things like the Bay of Pigs, handled this enormous problem," O'Donnell said.
"I was in school at the time, trying to figure how to get some 12-year-old girl to go out with me. And they were stopping the world from blowing up."
He also resists the notion that the film distorts in any substantial or meaningful way his father's role in either the White House or the missile crisis.
No one argues that the senior O'Donnell was anything but a highly influential insider in the Kennedy White House. A key member of JFK's "Irish mafia," skilled in both organization and detail, he was, according to a 1963 profile in the Wall Street Journal, "the first person the president sees in the morning and the last one he sees at night."
President Kennedy "thinks aloud a lot, and Kenny is the guy who most often thinks aloud with him," one White House adviser explained in the article.
But in the same year, a similarly admiring profile in the Chicago Tribune declared O'Donnell "not an adviser on major policies of state. ... In addition to acting as traffic superintendent" for the Oval Office, "he keeps the president abreast of sentiments and opinions that reach his ears."
As for his role in the showdown with the Soviets, as Kennedy historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. told the Boston Globe, "Kenny was an admirable man, but he had nothing to do with the Cuban missile crisis."
Similar sentiments have been expressed by Theodore Sorensen, JFK's speechwriter, alter ego and, according to almost every historian and White House authority at the time, the president's closest adviser other than Robert Kennedy on all issues, including the missile crisis.
Sorenson, who like Schlesinger consulted on the film, says: "In reality Kenny didn't play that sort of role, ... but (given Kevin's relation to the film), you can understand how things turned out. I'm reluctant to criticize the film, however, because it got the most important issues right. And I want young people in particular to go to that movie. And to understand how John F. Kennedy saved the world."