America Reflected: Language, Satire, Film, and the National Mind. Peter C. Rollins
These films were also distributed to commercial theatres—often after a White House premiere before the nation’s leading film buff. Understanding that the mass of American soldiers—most of them drafted from a society that was largely isolationist—or had been isolationists until the Japanese “sneak attack,” Capra set about the daunting task of justifying an aggressive internationalist agenda. In doing so, he tapped telluric cultural myths and revived their power. The seven hour-length documentaries of the Why We Fight series have been praised for their statement of America’s war aims, but the series is equally important for its reification of the American Dream—which had been grievously eroded by nearly ten years of economic depression. By the end of the war, 54 million Americans had been instructed by Capra that their nation stood as a “lighthouse of freedom” for a fallen world, an image which harkened back to the Puritans (and forward to the Reagan years). In the 1950s, the lessons about compilation documentary were applied in such television series as NBC’s Victory at Sea (26 episodes) and CBS’ Air Power (16 episodes) (Chapter 15). The Victory at Sea style of historical filmmaking was later applied to the Cold War threat of the Soviet Union, tracing the dangers back to the reprehensible vision of Vladimir Illyich Lenin, leader of the 1917 communist revolution (Chapter 16). Later, the genre was inverted to condemn the American military in such exposé feature-length documentaries as Hearts and Minds (1974) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).
Decades later, Richard Raack’s Storm of Fire: World War II and the Destruction of Dresden reconsidered the wisdom of wartime decisions—which may have been based on an excessive will to fight or even vindictiveness (Chapter 14). More recently, the anniversaries of the D-Day invasion have attracted the attention of political leaders, pundits, and filmmakers to the heroic invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe; certainly, since the success of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), the sacrifice and bravery of those who fought to drive fascism from the continent have received respectful annual memorials (Chapter 13).
Vietnam
As a returning Vietnam veteran, it was my distinct displeasure to observe how both print and television media egregiously misreported the conflict—both in regard to policy, and also when depicting our servicemen. From 1980-1983, in collaboration with David H. Culbert (Louisiana State U) and Townsend Ludington (U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), I researched and directed a 2.5-hour documentary entitled Television’s Vietnam: Impact of Visual Images.
Television’s Vietnam: Impact of Visual Images
This longish historical compilation made maximum use of Marine Corps combat footage, reconstructed newsreels, television commercials of the day, popular tunes, and the testimonials of those involved—from the battlefield to the diplomatic and White House echelons of the struggle (Chapter 18). This “epic” production was edited down to an hour-length program and “bootlegged” without my knowledge; one of the recipients of the truncated version was Reed Irvine (d. 2001), Director of Accuracy in Media (Washington, DC), who telephoned me at my office in Morrill Hall, Oklahoma State U, to suggest a reworking of the program using additional archival footage and interviews. Together, we designed a major conference on the subject in Washington, DC and, with the help of additional interviews with media analysts, journalists, and diplomats, produced two hour-length programs: the first, Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story (1985), was in rebuttal to the PBS series Vietnam: A Television History (1983) with Charlton Heston as the narrator/ host. Heston also hosted the second program, Television’s Vietnam: The Impact of Media (1986), a documentary focusing on specific stories from the Tet offensive 1968. The reporting of Tet served as a microcosm of the errors committed by the press throughout the years of direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict (1965-1973). These programs were distilled from a considerable research base—about the existing fiction and nonfiction on Vietnam—established long before production (Chapter 17). In addition, as a veteran, I was highly motivated to balance the public record, albeit in my second language, Spanish, which allowed me to be more forthright on the personal motivations animating the film projects (Chapter 24). Over the years, I have been asked by teachers to recommend Vietnam documentaries for the classroom (Chapters 23 and 25), but the prolific—though delayed—production of Hollywood versions of Vietnam demanded analysis (Chapter 17). Despite these animadversions, to my surprise, I was asked to step in for Oliver Stone on a college campus after he reneged on his contract with the student speakers’ forum. (He had been offered $30,000 to give an hour’s presentation; my PowerPoint lecture with clips turned out to be yet another of my charitable contributions to the principle of “free speech.”)
During production phase of these programs, some academic panels on which I appeared were picketed by protestors—most memorably by the Young Socialist League at a 1981 national Popular Culture Association meeting in Cincinnati. In the run up to broadcast of the programs on public television (PBS), the producer of the 23 episode WGBH series, Richard Ellison, warned the press about the—to his mind—egregious errors of our documentaries and predicted a “chilling effect” in the wake of their broadcasts by PBS. In the afterglow of an annual Phoenix, Arizona junket for television critics, most urban dailies in the US echoed Ellison’s dire predictions, although the New York Times distinguished itself as a defender of the programs and their right to be aired (Chapter 19). Ellison ceased his harangues only after the President of WGBH told him, in a public forum, that he was out of line.
General William C. Westmoreland (1914-2005)
General Westmoreland and his Trials
During the Vietnam conflict, General William C. Westmoreland went from the elevated status of Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” to its “Man on the Spot.” Westmoreland was a well-intentioned and honorable man who became a scapegoat for America’s Vietnam debacle. It was my pleasure to organize a conference in 1980 at which Westmoreland volunteered to share his views; the event was timely because his autobiography, A Soldier Reports, had just been published. He won over a full auditorium of initially unsympathetic students and faculty by his unpretentiousness sincerity and his passion to defend the legacy of Vietnam veterans. Throughout his retirement, he and wife “Kitsy” gave of their time and prestige for veterans events, seminars, television programs, hoping to lift the stigma borne by troops who came home to an indifferent—or, in some cases, hostile—nation.
In the same time frame as our Chapel Hill conference, Mike Wallace approached the General aboard a commercial airline—Wallace was seated in first class and came back to coach class to talk with the retired leader. The CBS television celebrity gave every impression that he was interested in pursuing the truth about the intelligence estimates of Vietcong and regular enemy units prior to the Tet offensive—and the contribution of those reports to the confusion and dismay resulting from the sudden Tet attacks at the end of January, 1968. Westmoreland agreed to fly to New York City for a filmed interview with Wallace and thus began work on a controversial documentary entitled The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception (1982). The “Westmoreland trial” (Westmoreland v. CBS) which followed the broadcast of the exposé received banner headlines week after week especially after sources inside CBS headquarters leaked details about unfair questioning by Wallace and fraudulent editing by director George Crile (Chapter 20). Sometime after the trial, a cherry wood box of research materials from the trial was prepared for scholarly use by the Clearwater Publishing Company; it contained microfiche copies of the pre-trial depositions and other documents from the courtroom drama. This treasure trove of information was borrowed via interlibrary loan and I remember two chilly months during the winter of 1996 vetting the lengthy testimony of the CIA’s George Carver deposed in preparation for the trial. Although a major player in the numbers debate, Carver was never interviewed by Director George Crile until the post-production phase of the project, most likely as a self-protective ploy. Carver’s deposed testimony revealed that a legitimate debate among intelligence agencies had been transmuted by CBS into a nefarious plot—an error of conspiratorial interpretation of the kind frequently embraced by journalists and other amateur historians (Chapter 21).
But Westmoreland was not the only Vietnam-era scapegoat. The subtitle of journalist Neil