"The Crown" and "The Post"

Noonan: "The Crown" and "The Post"

Peggy Noonan wrote a piece about "The Crown" and "The Post." She has a patrician air and a schoolmarm pedantry but in this case she might be right.

She objects to several factual errors in both productions. Anthony Eden comes off much more nasty than naïve and there is a part where JFK has animosity towards his wife over her political success; neither are true. They do provide some drama, excusable in historical fiction, but the problem is  that such artificial and insincere drama is almost always an effort to provide motive where, in real life, there is none. And guilt where there is none.

Her take on "The Post" is probably more important and it is more than a simple slanting of personal character, "The Post" creates a story about the Pentagon Papers--which revealed the mendacity underlying the Viet Nam War that was created entirely by the U.S. Government--and the Washington Post' efforts to expose it. This was and is a very important story; the whole Viet Nam period scarred the younger generation and most will not recover. The story's opponent is President Richard Nixon. The problem is that The Pentagon Papers were published one year before Nixon was president and that his efforts to suppress them--which were real--did not benefit him.

Here is her comment:

"President Nixon is portrayed as the villain of the story. And that is the opposite of the truth. Nixon did not start the Vietnam War, he ended it. His administration was not even mentioned in the Pentagon Papers, which were finished before he took office.

When that dark, sad man tried to halt publication of the document, he was protecting not his own reputation but in effect those of others. Those others were his political adversaries—Lyndon Johnson and Ben Bradlee’s friend JFK—who the papers revealed had misled the public. If Nixon had been merely self-interested, he would have faked umbrage and done nothing to stop their publication. Even cleverer, he could have decried the leaking of government secrets while declaring and bowing to the public’s right to know. Instead, he did what he thought was the right thing—went to court to prevent the publication of secrets that might harm America’s diplomatic standing while it attempted to extricate itself from a war….His attempt to stop publication was wrong—the public did have a right to know. But he did what he thought was the responsible thing, and of course pays for it to this day.

Were the makers of “The Post” ignorant of all this? You might think so if it weren’t for the little coda they tag on to the end. Suddenly a movie about the Pentagon Papers is depicting the Watergate break-in, which would take place a year later. As if to say: OK, Nixon isn’t really the villain of our story, but he became a villain soon enough. It struck me not as a failed attempt at resolving a drama but an admission of a perpetrated injustice."

O.K., maybe historical fiction. But there seems to be a lot of that going around.

Those who control the past control the future, George Orwell said.