Max Holland

Much Worse Than Watergate

 

 

Trump’s appointee Matthew Whitaker and Nixon’s appointee L. Patrick Gray. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by U.S. Department of Justice and Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images.

 

 

It has happened before: the interim appointment of a man unknown and unqualified, except for his open loyalty to the president, to one of the top law enforcement jobs in the federal government.

It was May 1972 when President Richard Nixon abruptly elevated Patrick Gray III, a Justice Department official as colorless as his name, to the directorship of the FBI following the sudden death of J. Edgar Hoover. The announcement came as a shock. The conventional wisdom, both outside and inside the bureau, was that one of Hoover’s hand-picked executives would run the FBI when he no longer could. The naming of Gray, even on an acting basis, was widely criticized. The president “has chosen a highly political and professionally unqualified crony to direct this powerful and semisecret police agency,” the New York Times editorialized.

There is a parallel between Donald Trump’s selection of Matthew Whitaker to be the acting attorney general, replacing Jeff Sessions, and Nixon’s appointment of Gray. Both appear to be efforts to personalize law enforcement if not justice itself. Yet there are also marked differences between the two situations that make Trump’s brazen selection of Whitaker more disturbing in its implications than Gray’s appointment—and nearly every other maneuver, legal or political, that Nixon tried in his desperate effort to survive the Watergate scandal.

  

To read the entire article as published in Slate, click here.

The Post and the Past

 

2 March 2018

 

Here’s What Was Really at Stake in the Pentagon Papers Case

In the sure hands of filmmaker Steven Spielberg, history is often a morality play. Take Schindler’s List (1993), the story of a Czech citizen, Oskar Schindler, celebrated for saving Jews from concentration camps or worse.

An ethnic German who joined the Nazi Party months after Hitler’s partial annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Schindler had already been acting as a spy for German military intelligence for three years before Czechoslovakia was dismembered. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Schindler moved to Krakow to profit from the “Aryanization” of Jewish-owned businesses in the former Polish state. In late 1944, once the war, from Berlin’s perspective, had taken a decisive turn for the worse, Schindler obtained permission to move his factory west and had an assistant draw up “several versions” of a list of essential slave laborers supposedly needed to operate the relocated plant. In this manner, and at considerable risk to himself, Schindler facilitated the survival of up to 800 Jewish men and 300 to 400 Jewish women who otherwise faced extermination.

Spielberg’s depiction was a misleading beatification for, while Schindler was no Nazi ideologue, men and women were put on or taken off his list depending on what wartime valuables they had to offer. Missing from the movie was that he was an opportunistic businessman through and through (though never a particularly good one).

The liberties taken by director Spielberg and writers Liz Hannah and Josh Singer last year in making The Post—about defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the so-called Pentagon Papers (formally titled “History of U. S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy, 1945-1967”)—are of a similar order. The demarcation line between the bad guys and the good guys (plus one woman) is simple and clear-cut, with complications burnished into nonexistence.

Accordingly, some legal and political history may be in order.

Read the rest of the article here.

 

Much Ado About Nothing

 

 

 

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A majority of Americans believe there was a wider conspiracy to kill Jack Kennedy. They're wrong.

12:22 PM, Dec 11, 2017 | By Max Holland

 

From film shot by Abraham Zapruder, November 22, 1963.

 

 

On October 26, the National Archives was supposed to release the last of its remaining records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The date was chiseled in a 1992 statute. Around 88 percent of the records had already been made public, but there were still 3,200 documents that had never been available and nearly 35,000 more that had only been released in redacted form.

As the date neared, Representative Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) declared, “It’s time to let people know the truth.” Jones believes (like a majority of Americans, according to polls) that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had confederates and that important facts about that “awful afternoon” are still hidden away. Martha Wagner Murphy, chief of the special access and Freedom of Information Act staff at the National Archives, repeatedly cautioned that the documents would add only incremental information to what was already evident. But few in the general public and fewer still in the “research community,” as Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorists prefer to be known, were willing to believe her. After five decades, occasions for challenging the official verdict are few and far between. The community knew the disclosures could gin up interest, and the excitement reached all the way to the White House.

Donald Trump created much of the drama by tweeting his inclination to align with those calling for full disclosure: No more postponements, no more deletions, damn the Deep State, he seemed to be saying on October 21. At the eleventh hour he deferred to the U.S. intelligence agencies and gave them an extra six months to make their cases for continuing to redact or withhold a tiny portion of the record. But documents were to be released as fast as they could be processed.

 

Murphy has been proven right; the pages released in five document dumps so far this year (there was a release on July 24 that attracted no fanfare) haven’t told us anything of moment we didn’t already know. The pseudo-drama surrounding the October date has only served to illustrate what H.L. Mencken once called “the virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.”

Read the entire article here.

The "White Rat"

Mark Felt (left) in 1976 and Liam Neeson portraying him in a publicity still for the 2017 movie Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House. Courtesy CBS/Getty and Sony Pictures Classics

I used to have this annual argument at Christmas with my brother-in-law, a well-regarded film editor in Hollywood. I would arrive brimming with complaints about a movie like Argo, said to be “based on actual events” but with an entirely fictitious Keystone Kops-like airport chase scene. I would rail about the disservice to history and the misleading effects as an increasing number of Americans learn their history from Hollywood features. He would defend dramatic license. I’d respond by saying a driver’s license doesn’t give one the right to do anything one wants on the road. Round and round we’d go, until we reached his final redoubt: “It’s only a movie.”

Eventually I conceded that films “based on actual events” have the right to composite characters, to elide real-life figures, rearrange chronologies, invent fictitious subplots, and the like for the sake of entertainment. As the Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan once noted, historical films “are constitutionally incapable of being completely accurate.” The mere fact of turning a camera lens on a real event means its distortion. But I insisted a line is crossed whenever a film violates the historical essence of an event. History may be a never-ending argument, but one is not entitled to one’s own facts, and not all facts are equal.

I invented a matrix in which the upper left quadrant is reserved for films that simultaneously respect the gist of historical events and manage to be highly entertaining. It goes all the way back to Call Northside 777, the 1948 docudrama featuring Jimmy Stewart as a crusading reporter whose investigation frees a man wrongly convicted of murder. More recent examples include Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, about the ill-fated moon mission; Edward Zwick’s Glory, about a regiment of black soldiers in the Civil War; and Michael Mann’s portrait of the tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, The Insider. In the lower left quadrant, you’ll find films that while respectful of the past are disappointing as drama. I’m thinking here of movies like 42, the syrupy Jackie Robinson biopic, and Valkyrie, which recounts the July Plot to assassinate Hitler.

 

The quadrants on the right side of the matrix are reserved for the pernicious films, distinct because they promote a big resounding lie. The bottom quadrant includes deservedly panned films like 1965’s The Battle of the Bulge—which Dwight Eisenhower felt compelled to condemn for its historical inaccuracies—and Brian De Palma’s account of Eliot Ness, The Untouchables. The top quadrant is dedicated to riveting features, ones made by filmmakers who are unfortunately at the top of their game. Selma would be an example for the way it falsely depicts Lyndon Johnson as an obstacle in the way of civil rights legislation. Oliver Stone’s entertaining and noxious JFK occupies its own special pedestal here.

The matrix is subjective, of course. And many films sit on the line dividing the wooden but accurate film from the wooden but inaccurate one. Thirteen Days, a depiction of the Cuban missile crisis, faithfully renders John F. Kennedy’s determination to avoid nuclear war while simultaneously perpetuating a big lie about Robert Kennedy being a dove from the start. All the President’s Men is another problematic case. This 1976 paean to investigative journalism has many fabulist elements. It demonizes or skirts the government’s role in uncovering Watergate (nobody is doing their job except the reporters at the Washington Post), and it greatly distorts what went on inside the Post. It is, nonetheless, a diverting drama: eminently watchable after 40 years. And it will be on the minds of everyone who goes to see Hollywood’s latest stab at portraying Watergate: Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, written and directed by Peter Landesman. 

To read the entire article in The Weekly Standard, click here.