Real Life Of O Donnell example essay topic

THIRTEEN DAYS The reason Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had a dispute with Admiral Anderson when the "Grozny i" took place was because the Admiral told the people on the destroyer to "fire", this caused McNamara to get angry because this could be seen as an attack on the ship and in which case could have started a war. McNamara said that only the President had the authority to attack the ship. McNamara said that this whole thing is a new way Kennedy and Khrushchev are communicating with each other. In real life O' Donnell was a political consigli ere to the Kennedy brothers. He served as White House appointments secretary and political adviser after Kennedy became president in 1961. He tried to make sure that the president didn't seem like he was hiding something, thus making him go to Chicago as originally scheduled.

However he did not play that big of a role in real life as he did in "Thirteen Days". O'Donnell's character provides a useful dramatic vantage point from which to watch the crisis. But the film goes overboard in giving the character important tasks O'Donnell never had: conspiring with Navy pilots to hide from admirals the results of reconnaissance missions; checking CIA files on the background of the KGB's Washington station chief. What was needed in the film to be factually correct was the U.S. discovering the missiles in Cuba, how the orders of both Kennedy and Khrushchev were being undermined his their own side (military, generals, etc. ), Kenneth O' Donnell being Kennedy's Special Assistant because allows the movie to be seen primarily from his point of view, and Kennedy's brinkmanship mentality to the crisis.

However there were several historical elements not in the film. The film missed inconvenient facts about U.S. attacks on Cuba and the U.S. missile build-up. It didn't mention that the reason the Soviets supplied the Cubans with missiles is to protect the Soviets from the Americans because of the missiles located in Turkey and the numerous attacks on Castro's life. The film made the U.S. seem like the good guys and the Communist countries as bad, but in a historical context the U.S. seemed like the aggressors. The film was marketable when they got Kevin Costner to play a huge role in the movie but not real life of O' Donnell. In Thirteen Days, it's the Joint Chiefs who wear the black hats, not Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader whose perceived problems with his own hard-liners are regarded sympathetically, almost therapeutically, by the Kennedy's.

It isn't enough for the film's auteurs to make the accurate point that the Joint Chiefs wanted to attack Cuba to remove the missiles. Instead, the generals and admirals must also seem wild-eyed (and in the case of the Air Force chief of staff, Curtis LeMay, wild-eye browed), profane ("get the bastards"), bombastic ("shoot the red dog"), and conspiratorial. We " re supposed to applaud when O'Donnell tells the pilot to lie to his superiors if he's shot at. By the end of the movie, you half expect the generals to start talking, Dr. Strangelove style, about preserving the purity of our bodily fluids.

Stevenson was held in content because he considered a "dove" and an appeaser when he said that the U.S. should remove missiles in exchange for the Soviets removing the missiles from Cuba. He redeemed himself in the meeting with the UN where he made the Russians look bad. Stevenson did a great some in UN meeting. The reason for the black and white scenes was to show historical significance.

That was why during a conference and Kennedy's speech was in black and white.