That point was made more clearly in the three-hour 1973 TV drama "The Missiles of October" than it is in "Thirteen Days." With Kevin Costner co-producing and costarring as Kennedy advisor Kenneth P. O'Donnell, it's a thoroughly bland and mediocre movie about the Cuban missile crisis. Yet it's a cunning piece of Kennedy hagiography.

Of course, those who judge presidencies by tangible accomplishments have never adequately reckoned with the long-range influence of Kennedy's emphasis on public service and vigor. Still, when advance reviews of "Thirteen Days" declare that the movie offers a welcome contrast to today's putatively phony and disingenuous leaders, you have to ponder how we weigh our public characters. As a nation, we're being drawn into a knee-jerk lionization of Camelot and trivialization of our current president. Kennedy may have had his name on the cover of "Profiles of Courage," but that doesn't mean he always acted like one -- it doesn't even mean he wrote the book, which has been ascribed in part to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., James MacGregor Burns, Allan Nevins and Theodore Sorensen. (At least Al Gore was the author of his bestseller.)

All the talk we've been hearing about "The Greatest Generation," with its stress on wartime sacrifice, carries overtones of yearning for a time when "men were men." I fear that what makes JFK the perfect president to wax nostalgic over in the new millennium isn't his wit or eloquence, or the highest planes of his idealism, but his camera savvy and his readiness to look death in the eye. In "Thirteen Days," he and his inner circle judge Adlai Stevenson's berating of the Soviet Union at the United Nations as if they were rooting for their side on "Crossfire." And though "Thirteen Days" pits JFK against hawks who want to order airstrikes on Cuba immediately, the net result is to celebrate him as a strategist of the new frontier of nuclear brinkmanship. The war hero of "PT 109" becomes a warrior for peace.

How can one not be drawn into a story with torn-from-the-transcript dialogue like Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay telling Kennedy, "You're in a pretty bad fix," and Kennedy replying, "Well, maybe you haven't noticed you're in it with me"? (This exchange is the crux of the trailer.) At its best, "Thirteen Days" shows that a compromise between martial power and negotiation can be as dramatic as extremism. But the movie is too intent on sweeping us up in the spell of JFK's charisma. As a consequence, the selling of the crucial Kennedy-sponsored consensus -- the widespread acceptance of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's idea to blockade Cuba instead of bomb it -- lacks the requisite barreling momentum.

The smartest move of writer David Self ("The Haunting") and director Roger Donaldson ("No Way Out") is to dramatize how JFK and his attorney general brother, Robert, keep abreast of their dueling advisors and of their forces in the street, the water and the air. The president and/or his men pressure a newspaper editor to call off a story, insist that JFK alone has the right to trigger any kind of naval fire and even command American spy pilots to avoid being shot -- implying that they should lie to their superiors if they are fired at so the rabid American military won't retaliate. (That last bit is fiction.) In "Thirteen Days," these decisions are an integral part of JFK's plan to defuse impending catastrophe, as crucial as any high-level discussion of how to handle Nikita Khrushchev. Far better than the film's embarrassingly familiar stock footage of mushroom clouds or school kids practicing duck-and-cover routines, this dual focus allows Donaldson to cut away from talking heads and to suggest the earth-shattering military might that JFK struggles to hold in check.

Unlike earlier versions of the saga, "Thirteen Days" incorporates that dread concept of script committees, "the human side." Instead of "You'll never believe how close we came," the ad line could be "This time it's personal." The hinge to this part of the story is the character of O'Donnell, a college buddy of Robert Kennedy's, now a special assistant to the president with an expertise in gauging the political impact of policy. O'Donnell's function is to bring a warts-and-all perspective to the furrowed-brow spectacle of Bruce Greenwood's JFK and Steven Culp's RFK. But seeing the Kennedys through O'Donnell's eyes in effect elevates their stature; every show of self-doubt or vulnerability makes them more engaging. At the movie's most explicit and annoying, this ersatz humanizing results in scenes like Culp's competitive Bobby complaining about always being called the ruthless, brilliant one. Briefly, the Kennedy brothers come off as the Smothers Brothers.

The shrewdest aspect of the JFK-RFK-O'Donnell nexus is that O'Donnell's home life can serve as the Life magazine version of the Kennedy saga without raising questions of whitewashing. (There is one dewy shot of the president looking out the window, worriedly, at Jackie and their children.) An Irish Catholic with a pretty wife and a brood of kids, O'Donnell exudes the robust domesticity of the Kennedy mystique in a way that JFK no longer can, after four decades of exposés.

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