So last night I watched a movie on Youtube thinking, I know from the title what this is about, there have been other movies about it so how could they possibly find a new take?
Well.
They did a beautiful job of picking what events to show and interleaving them to intensify the message, which is something I'm familiar with from oral traditions studies. And what is it I keep saying? Film is oral literature. So a little about that and then on to the REAL history lesson.
The film has three (!) repeating themes. One is what is going on at the White House, of course, and the three (!) main characters involved. The second is how sidebar events ratcheted up the tension. The best example is, we're in the middle of a nuclear crisis and the AEC picks this moment to test a thermonuclear warhead. The WH was still keeping the crisis under wraps but it points out that unless you know everything people have on their schedules, this kind of thing will happen.
The third theme gets me to my history lesson. The Pentagon kept pushing Kennedy to make a first strike. It was in the Rules of Engagement. Every last one of them knew that nukes were involved, but they had what I call "nuclear psychosis". They believed whoever has the most nukes wins. That's bullshit. Nobody survives a nuclear war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCTKcd2Ko98
Kennedy issued an order that NOBODY was to fire off ANYTHING without his explicit order. So when the ship sent to deal with the Grozny cleared tubes by firing star-shells, that was a standard practice and the guy who allowed it got his ass chewed out by McNamara because it could have been mistaken for an attack.
During the movie there is a scene where Kennedy says he read The Guns of August, published that same year, by Barbara Tuchman. And she pointed out that WWI would never have gotten started except that every last government involved operated by their Rules of Engagement. Some years after her book, the BBC series Upstairs Downstairs had a character discussing the 1914 events with "Richard Bellamy" who explains that once the Central Powers declared war on Russia, its allies had to "behave like gentlemen" and meet their treaty obligations. It's another way of saying the same thing. If you don't put your brain in and use it, but follow some old plan, you could be heading for disaster.
Why?
Because every RoE in the world has "lessons learned" from the LAST conflict. And that conflict always involved the weapons OF THOSE TIMES. When the new crisis occurs, technology has moved on. And in this case, everybody involved had nukes, which was not true at the end of WWII. And like I said, the Pentagon had nuclear psychosis.
So Kennedy rewrote the rules based on, I must point out, the work of a woman writer.
How does that involve Ukraine?
As soon as the Russians started digging trenches, I said, that's WWI thinking. WWII showed that an air war trumps trenches every time. So Putin wasn't even using an RoE with lessons learned, his brain was back in 1914. And the drones of Ukraine have been racking up body counts of over a thousand Russian troops (whatever their real nationality) EVERY SINGLE DAY for at least a year and a half. Now Russia has had some 900,000 combat deaths, and up to 500,000 more from causes like rotten logistics.
Which was also what made Russia so unsuccessful in WWI.
No lessons learned. Russian strategy doesn't even qualify as RoE.
Poland and UK leaders also are not using an RoE. I have seen posts where each of them talked "boots on the ground". It's like they're not even reading reports on the Russian deaths in Ukraine.
It also shows they are lousy managers. When you have a crisis and the boss just throws bodies at it, that is a lousy manager. It never works. You have to analyze the crisis and look for the smart fit or things blow up in your face.
Like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Guns of August is on Internet Archive to borrow free with an account.
https://archive.org/details/gunsofaugust0000unse_m6s1
Youtube has a film version which is not on Internet Archive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4zPg5Kv_ug
The British series The Great War is on Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/the-great-war-1964
Youtube also has the Fall of Eagles mini-series, named for the fact that the three Continental powers all had eagles in their crests and each of those governments was swept away.
Frank Herbert Simonds published a five-volume history of the war. Its table of contents is strangely reminiscent of the one in Winston Churchill's six-volume history of WWII. Simonds' work is here.
https://archive.org/details/history-of-the-world-war-volume-3/History%20of%20the%20World%20War%20Volume%201/
Churchill's work is here.
https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarga0001wins
https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarth0002wins
https://archive.org/details/secondworldwargr0003wins
https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarhi0004wins
https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarvo0055wins/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.536497/page/n3/mode/2up
Somewhere about the middle of the movie, either Jack or Bobby says something that sounds as if they think that the Pentagon's behavior was an attempt at a military coup. They used that actual word in the script. It explained to me perfectly well why the Kennedys promoted the making of Seven Days in May by John Frankenheimer and Burt Lancaster, about an utterly fictional coup attempt.
Which is available on Internet Archive free without ads. I'd post the link but IA is having gateway problems now. If you really want it, check back with me later because I wrote a review and I can find the link quickly by going through my reviews. I think Youtube has it free with ads.
What's important about that scene in Thirteen Days, is that it's repeated at the end where they think Khrushchev has been overthrown in a coup because the back-to-back messages do not match stylistically. Another feature of oral literature is having two episodes about the same issue, looking at it from different angles. It's all over the Tanakh.
I love tightly crafted movies like this. Lancaster's Lawman is another and it's full of things I recognize from my oral literature studies.
OK I've taken up way too much of your time, I can't help it when I write about some of my favorite things. You have a lot of reading to do.
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