Thirteen Days

             2 Allyn and others, Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 27-29, 1989 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 92. .
             3 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York:.
             Norton, 1997), 138.
             True facts show that they did not know, and their ignorance is what almost caused a third world war4. Smaller flaws can also be viewed in the film in comparison to the history books. As noted by Allyn and others (1989), "Cuban anti-aircraft gunners did not fire on low-level U.S. reconnaissance planes until October 27, when they almost brought one down-5. .
             Further only two or three people--not the bulk of the ExComm ""knew about Robert Kennedy's secret October 27 meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and, his offer to remove the Turkish missiles-6. But these artistic discretions do not depart substantially enough from what really happened to discredit the film. Far more significant is the film's one-sided presentation of the events in 1962.
             The film made it seem as though the Soviet's were planning to bomb the heck out of the United States with,.
             4 No Author, Thirteen Days, accessed 06, March 2003; available from http://www.jfkin61.com/photo_speech/peacecorps.html; Internet.
             5 Blight and others, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the.
             Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (New York:.
             Pantheon, 1993), 41.
             6 General Anatoli I. Gribkov and General William Y.Smith, Operation Anadyr: U.S. and Soviet Generals Reaccount the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chicago:1994),4. .
             an assortment of Soviet missiles. However, according to sources, in 1962, the Soviet had fewer than fifty bombers and missiles that could hit the United States. "We had more than five hundred. The missile gap Kennedy exploited in his 1960 campaign was real, except that it was in the U.S. favor, not the Soviets-7.
             Another inaccuracy that was off the beaten path of realism and instilled with Hollywood glitz occurred when the movie led the viewer to believe that the US was powerful enough to back down the Soviets in a type of dare game.