Our Guests

• Frank Johnson—researcher for Chris White's Ancient Aliens Debunked documentary and writer for the Ancient Aliens Debunked website (https://www.ancientaliensdebunked.com/)
  

• Mark Campbell—creator of the Bowler or Fez Film Review channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSokpkLnhiQ65-AJK8Ru3kQ)

• Antony Rotunno—podcasts: "Glass Onion : On John Lennon" (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/glass-onion-on-john-lennon/id1473867166); "Film Gold"  (https://anchor.fm/filmgold); "Life and Life Only" (https://lifeandlifeonly.podbean.com/)

Note

I am aware that the personnel of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff changed between "Operation Northwoods" and the Cuban Missile Crisis (most notably the replacement of Lyman Lemnitzer by Maxwell Taylor as Chief of JCS on the 1st of October 1962), but I still think mention of Northwoods in the film would have been a good idea. But maybe it didn't make it past the CIA filter. After all, in their book, May and Zelikow ackowledge "financial support" from “Harvard University's Intelligence and Policy Project, which is sponsored by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence” (p. xiv).

Items mentioned in / relevant to the roundtable discussion

• Ernest R May & Philip D Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes : Inside the Cuban Missle Crisis, Belknap, Harvard University Press (1997)

• Ernest R May, "Thirteen Days in 145 Minutes", The American Prospect (7 November 2001)

• Robert F Kennedy, Thirteen Days : A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, WW Norton (1969)

• Barbara W Tuchman, The Guns of August, Macmillan (1962)

• James W Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable : Why He Died and Why it Matters, Orbis Books (2008)

• Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot : JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture, South End Press (1993)

• Detail on the Vasily Arkhipov story (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2022-10-03/soviet-submarines-nuclear-torpedoes-cuban-missile-crisis)

• TV docudrama: The Missiles of October (1974)

• Roger Ebert, "Thirteen Days", RogerEbert.com (12 January 2001)

• Michael Nelson, "Thirteen Days Doesn't Add Up", Chronicle of Higher Education (02 November 2001) [JC: This is quite a negative review of the movie, but still worth reading because it makes some good points. However, I can't agree with the author's defence of LeMay. In the transcript LeMay does use profanity in the JCS meeting (arguably worse than that noted by Nelson); it was said of him by McGeorge Bundy that his plans had called for "a massive, total, comprehensive, obliterating strategic attack... on everything Red", which I think justifies the film's depiction of LeMay as being capable of saying "shoot the Red dog", even if he didn't in actual fact; and I don't think it's unfair to portray the Joint Chiefs as at least somewhat "conspiratorial" given the background of the Bay of Pigs and Operation Northwoods (even if the latter wasn't mentioned in the film). I also think, had Kenny O'Donnell in real life asked the pilot "to lie to his superiors if he's shot at", that that request—under such circumstances of imminent nuclear war—would indeed have been worthy of applause. The fact that the author doesn't think so, I find somewhat telling.] [See: https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/when-the-pentagon-wanted-to-nuke-russia/]
  

• Audio of meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Crisis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MAmvx3lh4U) [Listen from about 22:10 for LeMay's "You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr President" and Kennedy's undramatic response.]

• Robert McNamara responds to questions on the movie, PBS Online NewsHour (March 2001) (https://web.archive.org/web/20010905114944/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/february01/thirteendays3.html)

• A nice little sample of JFK's sense of humour (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRcTCUTXr5M)

• James Corbett on JFK's so-called "Secret Societies Speech" (https://www.corbettreport.com/qfc-jfksecret/)

• Transcript of Adlai Stevenson addressing the N Security Council (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/adlaistevensonunitednationscuba.html)

• Transcript of JFK's "Peace Speech" of 10 June 1963 (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html)

• Curtis LeMay being bland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz__w3Hqy0E) [JC: I've no idea who the woman is who speaks first.]

• The "sparrows incident" : Air Commander William Ecker comments on the film's accuracy (https://vfp62.com/Ecker_Comments.html)

Acknowledgements

• Podcast theme music: Moment of Green by Antony Raijekov (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

• Podcast artwork: "Map created by American intelligence showing Surface-to-Air Missile Activity in Cuba, 5 September 1962"; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1962_Cuba_Missiles_(30848755396).jpg; Central Intelligence Agency from Washington, D.C., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped, slightly sharpened and colourised, and aspect ratio altered. See URL for original.

• TMR wishes to state that the fact that these creative materials appear in TMR productions should in no way be understood as implying that its creators endorse anything published by TMR.

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