An Immediate Response to…. Path to War (Dir. John Frankenheimer, 2002, HBO) I watched the HBO production entitled Path to War last night and found it to be intriguing and painful. The film really captures the anguish of LBJ, a great President who was impaled on a war he did not wish to fight. What worried me was the lack of true in-depth historical understanding reflected in an otherwise admirable production. The press release indicates that the writer for the film was Daniel Giat, a "professional writer" who went back to the recordings of White House phone calls-fascinating items available on the Internet from the LBJ Library. Now Mr. Giat is not an historian and is thus in the position of so-many Hollywood people-ie, they know nothing about the literature on their topic and go plunge blindly into original source materials. The Christian Science Monitor review indicates that Giat also consulted articles by Clark Clifford, items published in the New Yorker. Now Clifford was not a disinterested party in these events; not surpisingly, the film presents him as a paragon of placidity and judgment in a stormy sea of historical conflict. (Interesting casting…The Mr. X of Oliver Stone's LBJ [Donald Sutherland] is tapped to play Clifford-get the connection?) What is missing? 1. Any recognition of the misunderstanding of Tet. The positions of Peter Braestrup in BIG STORY or Don Oberdorfer in TET are passed off as Establishment fantasies. If the Viet Cong attacked in such numbers, it must have been triumphant with lots of back up; actually, we have known for decades that the Tet offensive destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force. This show tells us, again, that the Viet Cong were in the Embassy building in Saigon. We even see someone firing into what looks like the embassy-but is not. No, the Viet Cong did NOT get into the Saigon Embassy building and historians have known this fact since the day after the attack on the Embassy. Peter Braestrup and Don Oberdorfer have corrected this misperception in book-length works as early as 1972. Unfortunately, the AP reports of Peter Arnett win out in this "historical film." (See Don Oberdorfer, Tet [1972] and Peter Braestrup, Big Story [1977].) 2. Understanding of the numbers calculations. The thesis of the CBS documentary which provoked suit from General Westmoreland, a CBS White Paper entitled "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" is upheld and this argument is put into the mouth of Clifford, himself. There have been at least four books on the CBS program and most come to the conclusion that the numbers debates were part of a legitimate conflict between experts and not a conspiracy. (See Don Kowet, _A Matter of Honor [1984] and also my article for War, Literature, and the Arts on the documentary and the numbers debate.) 3. The call up of 206,000 men after Tet. This story was leaked to the New York Times and caused quite a commotion in the public marketplace, but scholars on the subject are in agreement that this request was NOT for Vietnam, but for world-wide force strength needs-to include Europe. The initial misunderstanding by the New York Times and others has long-since been dispelled. (See Herbert Schandler, The Unmaking of a President, 1977) 4. Compassion for LBJ. As quoted by the Christian Science Monitor, Giat claims to have discovered for the first time that LBJ was in anguish about the war: "I think it will come as a revelation to the public." The ignorance revealed by this statement-it seems to have been a revelation for Giat as well-can only be matched by the remark by another Presidential filmmaker, David Grubin, during a talk at Dartmouth College last year when he admitted that he had not realized that FDR was an "interesting man" until he stated working on a major film project. These kinds of remarks are very, very frightening since these people in media pretend to be our "historians" and, indeed-because we are lazy and untrained-are the nation's historians. (See Television Histories [2001], Eds. Edgerton and Rollins.) Those of us who study history and culture for a living need to critique these productions as they come out or we will live with the consequences-in this case, a perpetuation of misunderstanding rather than provision of historical insight. Listening to presidential phone calls may lead to good drama, but it is not the basis for accurate and insightful history writing. Indeed, the person who listens TO those tapes needs a framework of interpretation and a background in methodology of historical studies or he will be led to repeat the tired historical models accepted by other well-read people of his age, class, and -in this case-the Hollywood film colony. (Remember Oliver Stone as "historian?") The Path to War is poignant drama with surface verisimilitude but it does not reflect a true historical approach to its materials. The acting is superb and there are many subtle portrayals, but the substance of historical studies is lacking in this historical docudrama. I urge all historians to watch it and for some to use it within a critical context for their classes. It is yet again a case of history being written at the level of a Time-Life Books summary-and, as a result, a tragic misuse of resources for the teaching of history through television. Peter C. Rollins [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu