Thirteen Days (film)

"I am the commander in chief of the United States, and I say when we go to war!"

"[The night prior to the beginning of the U.S. Navy's military "quarantine" of Cuba] You know, last summer, I read a book, The Guns of August. I wish every man on that blockade line had read that book. It's World War I, there's thirteen million killed; it was all because the militaries of both alliances believed they were so highly attuned to one another's movements and dispositions, they could predict one another's intentions, but all their theories were based on the last war. And the world and technology had changed, and those lessons were no longer valid, but it was all they knew, so the orders went out, and couldn't be rescinded. And your man in the field, his family at home; they couldn't even tell you the reasons why their lives were being destroyed. But why couldn't they stop it? What could they have done? Here we are, fifty years later. Think if one of their ships resists the inspection, and we shoot out its rudder, and board, they shoot down one of our planes in response, so we bomb their anti-aircraft sites, and in response to that, they attack Berlin...so we invade Cuba...and they fire their missiles...and we fire ours."

"This is not a blockade. This is language. A new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen! This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev!"

"Bruce Greenwood - President John F. Kennedy"

"Kevin Costner - Kenny O'Donnell"

"Stephanie Romanov - First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy"

"Dylan Baker - Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara"

"Steven Culp - Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy"

"Bill Smitrovich - General Max Taylor"

"Henry Strozier - Dean Rusk"

"Ed Lauter - General Marshall Carter"

"Michael Fairman - U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson"

"Len Cariou - Dean Acheson"

"Peter White - John McCone"

"Kevin Conway - General Curtis LeMay"

"Elya Baskin - Anotoly Dobrynin"

"Frank Wood - McGeorge Bundy"