ABSTRACT
John F. Kennedy's response to Nikita Khrushchev's taunts was to flex his own missile muscle. During his presidential campaign he had criticized Republicans for tolerating a "missile gap" in Khrushchev's favor. Hearing the Republican alarms about missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev sent his ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to Robert Kennedy with assurances that the Soviets would do nothing provocative before the American election. American analysts concluded that the president's strong warnings made it highly unlikely that the Soviets would install a missile base in Cuba. "Capital's Crisis Air Hints at Development on Cuba," which, without mentioning missiles or a blockade, said the president would deliver news of a crisis. The moviemakers had bothered with the Soviet and Cuban sides of the crisis; they could have made a vastly better film, reasonably called Thirteen Weeks. And had they examined the calamitous miscalculations on all sides, it might have been titled Thirteen Months.
