Three Movies
This weekend we took an afternoon and caught a movie. Politics are never far from our lives, so we watched the newest Rob Reiner film, Shock and Awe. Starring Woody Harrelson and James Marsden as well as Reiner, the movie follows two reporters of the Knight-Ridder News Agency, as they tried to unlock the secrets leading the United States to invade Iraq in 2002. Their dramatic discovery: the “official” reason for invading Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, was not only untrue, but a falsehood created by the leadership of the US government.
It is a story of investigative journalism, and of the Executive Branch manipulating the media to get what they wanted. While Knight-Ridder got the story right, the “big” media; the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC, ABC and CBS all fell for the story told by Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and President Bush. After the invasion when US troops were mired in Iraq and no weapons of mass destruction found, the New York Times apologized on their front page. They had been fooled.
The Bush Administration refused to respond to the Knight-Ridder stories, letting them “swing in the wind” while the rest of the media marched along to war. It is a story with consequences today. Not only does it tell us not to blindly trust the Executive Branch, but it also reminds us not to blindly trust the media as well. And finally, it tells us to listen to some of the “voices in the wilderness;” sometimes they’re right.
The second movie was a few weeks ago: Stephen Spielberg’s The Post. Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep star in the story of a powerful woman, Katherine Graham (Streep), taking charge of the Washington Post and making it a national force. The editor, Ben Bradlee (Hanks), published the Pentagon Papers, classified documents outlining the Pentagon foundation for America’s continued involvement in the Vietnam War. The Post, and the New York Times, risked legal catastrophe to tell Americans that their government was lying about Vietnam. It was the beginning of the end of the war, and of American’s trust in their leadership.
Leading us to last night’s movie, one of my favorites: All the President’s Men. It is the well-known story of two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) who lead the Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal of President Nixon. I remember first seeing this movie in the theatre while I was living in Washington, only three years after Nixon’s resignation. It made my nervous walking in parking garages.
While we all now know what Nixon did, how he conspired to commit crimes, break-ins and buggings, then spent two years of his Presidency personally orchestrating the cover-up: when Woodward and Bernstein began their work his actions were a close kept secret. Their dogged reporting, and the willingness of the honest among the “President’s men and women” to tell the truth, is the story of my generation’s biggest political crisis. The Nixon White House did everything they could to attack the Washington Post (and the New York Times, just as involved in the story) and drive them out of business.
The rhetoric of the Nixon Administration sounds eerily familiar today; attacking the media as biased, claiming some great “silent majority” of support, demanding that only their facts were the “real news.” The difference today: we may be so horribly divided, that even evidence as convincing as the Nixon tapes might not be enough to unify us in a conclusion. Or perhaps even worse, as Rudy Giuliani would have us believe: that crimes are really not crimes, just “regular business.”
All three movies have the common theme: that truth may ultimately overcome power. The Post and All the President’s Men present courageous government insiders, Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt, who believed the truth was so important that they were willing to risk their careers, and perhaps their lives, to make it public. They show reporters who ignore the risks to get their story in print.
But Shock and Awe gives us a warning: that sometimes the corruption of power can overcome the truth. We should be prepared for that as well, as the we deal with the ultimate political crisis we face today.
