America Reflected: Language, Satire, Film, and the National Mind. Peter C. Rollins
war in Southeast Asia, a government official whom Peter Arnett, David Halberstam, and Neil Sheehan—at least in the early days of the conflict—relied upon for colorful inside stories (Chapter 22). Sheehan’s epic “history” portrays a brilliant man fighting a bungled war; at a critical turn of his research, the investigative reporter even discovered a back story of perverted sex for his protagonist, a story introduced as a devastating ad hominem argument to discredit the war’s most convincing proponent. The New York Times correspondent describes himself as “a newsman who got diverted into history”—and it shows. A Bright Shining Lie is fascinating reading, but is guided by the same crusading journalistic perspective which led to much of the errant reporting of the era itself—rather than being a detached analysis written with the benefit of hindsight. In the Neil Sheehan version, the US military was blind to changing realities, especially in the Third World. General W.C. Westmoreland epitomized this myopia in his choice of a “big unit” strategy—rather than listening to the wisdom of Marine General Victor Krulak who advocated placing combined US and ARVN units in each threatened village. The book’s message is that national leadership should be wrested from the hands of aging governmental and military elites. A new generation—for some unexplained reason, 100% of whom are Harvard graduates—has the public interest at heart with David Halberstam representing the reportorial side and Daniel Ellsberg standing out as the model policy analyst. Within the book, Ellsberg is lauded for being both a Harvard Fellow and a company commander in the Marine Reserves, the perfect balance of thought and action. Sheehan concludes that the press and geniuses like Ellsberg turned against America because they were forced to do so—not because they espoused a competing ideology.
During the summer of 1998, HBO broadcast its film adaptation of A Bright Shining Lie, with Bill Paxton playing John Paul Vann. If it is true that the WGBH series on Vietnam would have been a better work of history had it followed more faithfully the narrative of Stanley Karnow’s companion history, it is equally true that the film version of Sheehan’s epic would have been more worthwhile if the screenwriter and director, Terry George, had read the book. Instead, the film recycles familiar clichés of the war era—many of them either disproven or seriously revised since the 1975 American debacle. The film’s treatment of the 1963 Buddhist immolations shows no historical perspective or interest in the many scholarly studies—to include Sheehan’s nuanced version. The famous photograph of Kim Phuc burned by napalm and running toward the camera is presented as an atrocity by careless Americans in 1967 when it was an accident of war committed by South Vietnamese in 1972. Tet, in 1968, is presented using the standard misleading microcosms of the day. In all, HBO spent $13 million to revive the anti-Establishment “spin” of the 1960s reporting. Even putative friends of the project were revulsed. After reading the script, Daniel Ellsberg, who is vital to the narrative of both book and film, threatened a law suit, demanding that his character’s name be changed. He concluded a stinging memo to director/writer Terry George with a coup de grace: “That [changing his name] would not solve all my troubling concerns about this script. What would go a long way in that direction would be to change two other real names in it, as well, to frankly fictional ones: ‘John Paul Vann’ and ‘Vietnam’” (quoted in Chapter 22).
Of lesser intellectual content, but of greater public exposure was another HBO production entitled Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987). Ostensibly based on an eponymous anthology, director Bill Couturie tapped the power of music and montage to convey a message quite different from that of Bernard Edelman’s anthology of letters from New York soldiers to their families. While the book emphasized themes of courage and suffering, the film evoked a Vietnam that was a brutal, demoralizing conflict of no redeeming value—one which demolished the country in which we fought while corrupting the young soldiers and marines sent to prosecute a misguided strategy (Chapter 23). For negativity, the program is exceeded only by Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds, an Academy-Award winning compilation film praised by the North Vietnam government in a telegram read by the film’s producer at the 1974 Academy Award ceremony (Chapter 17). There are both ideological and formal (i.e., film as an art form) elements which “determined” a special formula for portraying the war and the veterans who survived it; discerning viewers need to anticipate this pattern. Chapter 17 outlines this formula and contrasts the results in film with a 1980 Harris poll of veteran attitudes. Most readers will be surprised to learn that over 80% of our troops believed, some five years after the fall of South Vietnam, that they had done the right thing by defending the South Vietnamese from Communist conquest. No credibility gap could be larger than the abyss between the Hollywood version and the experience and memories of American service men and women who served. For twenty years, I tried to uphold their perspective and memory, an effort not without difficulty in Academe.
Other Figures and National Myths and the Film Record
Part 3 of America Reflected focuses on selected figures and films—in two cases, fascinating people from my home town of Brookline, Massachusetts. Founded in 1705, Brookline is an independent suburb just west of Boston and contiguous with it. The town has nurtured writers, scholars, and filmmakers—from Amy Lowell (poet) to Mike Wallace (adversarial journalist) to Richard Goodwin (presidential speech writer) to Ellen Goodman (pundit) to the Albert and David Maysles (pioneers of direct documentary). Two chapters of local history are here devoted to leading hometown figures. Frederick Henry Hedge (1805-1890) was the only New England Transcendentalist fluent in German. (Many of Immanuel Kant’s ideas were imported into New England by way of English translations or in French through the writings of Victor Cousin, a pen pal of Brownson.) Hedge, unlike other members of the “Hedge Club”—later called “the Transcendentalist Club”—remained within the Unitarian fold; his flirting with ideas about liberating the ego were counterpoised by a steadfast respect for tradition, a characteristic ambivalence for many nurtured in a protected and stable Boston suburb (Chapter 27). Also studied in detail is another denizen of Brookline, Amy Lowell (1874-1925), an iconoclastic member of a proud family whose childhood diaries disclose a youthful search for identity which flourished like the garden of “Patterns” in the poems of her maturity (Chapter 28). Her rootedness was such that her headstone (alas, in Cambridge) is satisfied to identify her simply as “Amy Lowell of Brookline.” Although of the product of Calvinism and Connecticut, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1811-1896) spiritual search connects with Lowell’s theme of identity. Chapter 26 explores this theme as it surfaced in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the regional novels in which she nostalgically evoked the weltanschauung of early New England. With passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the shame of slavery overwhelmed Stowe; her compulsion to write the anti-slavery tract stemmed from her conflicted sense of being a scion of Calvinism in an age of romantic optimism. She found self expression for her anguish by writing about the dilemma of slaves in the American South.
America’s attitudes toward nature are central to our national identity, an historical principle recognized long before it was formally codified by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous 1893 address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” It is a revealing reflection on our culture that John James Audubon (1785-1851) fervently shared the expansionist enthusiasms of his day; the “bird man” admired pioneer settlement, extractive industry, and the growth of cities—indeed, the full menu of Manifest Destiny—at the same time he recorded the disappearing aviary beauties of the wilderness (Chapter 29). The same kind of ambivalence about industrial development is reflected in the post-WWII motion picture, Tulsa (1949). Like Audubon, the makers of this crusading film were often more on the side of exploitation than their stated conservationist philosophy would seem to have justified (Chapter 31). Will Rogers understood these contrary feelings and, as a national spokesman for the 1920s and 1930s, repeatedly played to them in his daily and weekly articles. As part of his fascination with the Native American language and culture, Benjamin Whorf also shared in the dilemma; an offspring of his research as an anthropological linguist, he hoped, would be the lesson of cultural humility. His late articles call for an admission by Western civilization that technological advances need to be tempered by spiritual growth. Indeed, he saw himself as living proof that an MIT graduate could be a man of faith. In the film Tulsa, this search for balance is symbolized by the romantic choices for the protagonist, Cherokee Lansing (Susan Hayward). Initially, she is attracted to Bruce Tanner (Lloyd Gough), whose goal is to extract as much oil as possible in the most wasteful way; later in the film, she recognizes that the oil industry must respect the environment,