Arts & Events
Truth: Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford and the Swift-boating of Dan Rather and CBS News
Opens October 23 at the Century 9 and Sundance Kabuki in SF
Opens October 30 at the Shattuck Landmark in Berkeley
As if Jeb Bush didn't have enough to worry about, Sony Pictures has started airing TV commercials reminding America that his brother, W, "may have gone AWOL from the military," "He never even showed up." The ads are promoting a new movie called Truth that examines how George W. evaded serving in Vietnam and how a CBS exposé wound up taking down the most respected journalist in America.Screenwriter and first-time director James Vanderbilt signals his intensions from the first scene: Get ready for some intense verbal clashes in a high-stakes clash between political power and the First Amendment. The film starts with a combative meeting between embattled 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and her attorney. Blanchett quickly gets ticked off and angrily pops a Xanax. It's a Blue Jasmine moment. Like her Oscar-winning performance in Woody Allen's 2014 film, this is Blanchett in another rip-roaring, pedal-to-the-metal, emotional road-race. Robert Redford (as iconic CBS anchor Dan Rather) is just along for the ride.
.The Discovery of the 'Bush-Guard" Memos
Vanderbilt's film is based on Mary Mapes' book, Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and The Privilege of Power, and is set in 2004. Mapes has just produced an award-winning exposé on US torture abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison when she gets word of a bundle of documents that apparently detail how presidential candidate George W. Bush used his political connections to avoid being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. Instead, Bush was assigned to serve in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG). But the documents from 1968 and onwards revealed that Bush not only shirked combat duty, he also apparently stopped showing up for stateside duty.
The documents confirmed that Bush initially performed well in the TANG, both at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia from May 1968 and at a fighter squadron in Houston. But in 1972, Bush was suspended for missing a physical. (This lead to the rumors that Bush may have had a "substance abuse" problem.) At one point, Bush was reassigned to Alabama so he could work on a Republican Senate campaign being run by a family friend. From May 1972 to May 1973, the records showed no evidence that Bush even bothered to show up for duty. Neither his supervisors nor fellow pilots reported ever seeing him. In September 1973, Bush requested and was granted an early discharge so he could enroll in the Harvard Business School.
If the Documents Were Hoaxes, It's a Scandal
Four different document analysts assured CBS that the copies presented appeared genuine. In a 60 Minutes interview, former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes confirmed that he used his clout to secure Bush a pilot's seat in the Texas Air National Guard. In a phone conversation with Mapes and others, Major General Robert Hodges confirmed that the contents of the documents reflected the critical assessment Bush's superiors had of a young pilot who missed assignments and enjoyed preferential treatment.
The story looked solid and air-tight but, within hours of the broadcast, the report was attacked by a legion of conservative bloggers who raised pointed questions about inconsistencies in the documents, suggesting they had been produced on a computer, not a '60's-era typewriter.
As Truth unfurls, Rather and Mapes and their team are subjected to an onslaught of accusations, insults and abuse. Eventually, even their superiors at CBS begin to turn their backs on their star producer and legendary anchor.
The story is no longer about the truth of Bush's service. It is the would-be truth-tellers who are being pilloried. CBS calls for an investigation. Hardly impartial, it impanels more than a dozen corporate lawyers (many with conservative allegiances). Everyone on the news team is sanctioned. Mapes, alone, is fired. Rather is subjected to public humiliation—forced to go on air with an apology—and he resigns soon after.
Vanderbilt and his crew execute the story with nail-biting pacing and emotional body blows. Blanchet's Mapes—despite her great reserves of authority and self-confidence—suffers tremendously as her corporate superiors abandon her and push her from her career-perch in the upper stories of Black Rock, CBS's fabled highrise on W. 52nd Street.
We learn that one of the personal ghosts Mapes has to deal with involves being raised by an abusive father. And just when someone most needs a father to come to her defense, Mapes hears her dad doing a press interview and berating her both as a professional and as a person. It's infuriating and Blanchet's reaction is heart-wrenching.
Redford as Rather? Who Would You Rather Have?
Redford is an interesting choice to play Rather. Redford is not a character actor (it would be easier to imagine Josh Brolin in the Rather role) but there are several reasons why this casting choice works. Redford and Rather are friends and both are cultural legends. Using the logic of "get a legend to play a legend," Redford merely approximates Rather's on-air posture and calm, baritone delivery. Vanderbelt even permits Redford's Rather to appear as a reddish-blond facsimile of the CBS Evening News' familiar dark-haired icon.
Redford effectively channels his personal knowledge of Rather's off-air nature and marvelously captures one of Rather's unseen signature moments when—after the broadcast ends and the cameras are cut—he rises from his chair behind the anchor's desk and shucks his coat, liberating his arms and revealing his trademark suspenders.
The Decline of News as a Public Service
At one point, as Rather and Mapes wryly commiserate over drinks on a glittery Manhattan night, Rather muses about the history of TV news. At first, he recalls, the three major networks were required to produce news programs as a "public service" in exchange for the government's granting of potentially lucrative broadcast licenses. "But then," Rather says, "they realized that the news was something that could make money."
Once the delivery of news was removed from the realm of "public service," it was only a matter of time before it became just another part of the corporate budgeting process. And eventually, in the name of efficiency and cost-cutting, CBS (and the other networks) began to close foreign news bureaus and reduce the number of field reporters. Rather ruefully notes that modern news programming now is often little more than one network reporting on what another network already has reported. Network news has lost its independence. The journalist's once-proud calling has become a product, without an edge, without risks, homogenized and subservient. CBS, NBC, ABC and the rest are now just addendums to the corporate media empire.
This is a truth that makes Truth an especially bitter pill.
If the Documents Were Hoaxes, It's Even Worse
There is another chapter to this story that still needs to be written. The fact remains that bulk of the charges in the 60 Minutes broadcast were true. The record was there to corroborate.
As Blanchett's Mapes tells a Star Chamber of corporate lawyers: "Our story was about whether the president fulfilled his service. Nobody wants to talk about that. They want to talk about fonts and forgeries and they hope to god that the truth gets lost in the scrum."
If we accept the critics' charges that the documents were in some way fraudulent, that raises a larger and more ominous prospect: If the Bush-Guard documents were forgeries, who created them and why?
The story of the origin of the documents is beyond cloak-and-dagger bizarre. Bill Burkett, the former Texas Army National Guard lieutenant who provided the documents initially lied to 60 Minutes. He subsequently claimed that the papers were handed to him by two mysterious strangers who told him to make copies "and burn the originals." (Why would these strangers leave it to Burkett to destroy the originals they had handed over?)
Another oddity: The attacks on the documents' legitimacy began within hours of the 60 Minutes broadcast when the conservative blogosphere swarmed CBS (and competing news organizations) with detailed criticisms citing arcane inconsistencies involving fonts, formatting, spacing, kerning and a rare superscript—the kind of minutia that even the 60 Minutes document analysts had missed.
In retrospect, it begins to resemble a set-up—a highly organized response that was prepared in advance to do as much damage as possible in the shortest amount of time.
The Swift-boating of Dan Rather
Remember, this was the same presidential campaign that saw Democratic presidential contender John Kerry vilified by the notorious "Swift-boating" campaign, which called into question his military service.
Although Kerry was the candidate who actually went to Vietnam and faced combat, it was Kerry's record and not George W. Bush's that became the subject of obsessive "in-depth" news coverage.
George W's history became a "non-issue." Once the authenticity of a single set of documents was questioned, no other reporter could (or would dare to) raise the matter of Bush's military service for fear of being discredited. Despite the damning nature of his existing military record, Bush was granted immunity.
If we are to believe that the 60 Minutes documents were forgeries, we need to ask who was behind them and why were they created?
One answer to the first question is: only a well-financed and skilled intelligence operation could have conceived and executed such a conspiracy to deceive. The answer to the second question is even more chilling.
If the Bush-Guard documents were forgeries, they may have been created to be used in a sophisticated disinformation campaign to not only draw attention away from the Republican candidate (whose father, after all, was head of the CIA before becoming our 41st president) but also to destroy the career of Dan Rather, thereby sending a clear message to the rest of the journalism community that there was only so much truth that the power structure was willing to tolerate.
For More on George W. Bush's military history, see:
George W. Bush’s Military Lies:
The real story about the undeniable service gaps he got away with
Paul Rosenberg / Salon (October 17, 2015)
