The Weirdness of 20th Century History

...As Told By Hollywood
I really like the following films:

The Good Shepherd
13 Days
JFK
The Fog of War
Nixon

However when you watch them back to back, you begin to get a feel for what US politics in the 1960s was like, and it starts to creep you out. Add in the Watergate incident covered in All The Presidents' Men, which gave us the character 'Deepthroat', and suddenly you get a miasmic sense that "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and that we are foolish to believe any line of rhetoric that comes out of the US government to do with World Peace. As far as we can tell, War is the business of State (as Donald Sutherland's Mr. X tells us excitedly in 'JFK'), and Peace, most certainly is the enemy of the USA.

Maybe I'm simply allowing myself to be jaundiced and paranoid and cynical about political will but I've always been a great admirer of Machiavelli's works. I have a great deal of tolerance for the kinds of cynical things States do to preserve order or the status quo. Despite this I feel a little queasy about the nakedness of the drive for power that we witnessed in the mid parts of the Twentieth Century. But surely Art, it's all fictionalised movies, you say.
Even allowing for the substantial *characterisation* and *editorialising* that goes on in the creation of these films, it's also true that the writers go to great lengths to research their facts; and if the facts do speak for themselves, these films corroborate a picture that goes like this:

The CIA grows out of a weird varsity secret society which goes on to gets its expertise from the British. They cut their teeth in WWII after which, they move on to secure American/WASP interests against the communists around the globe. The fear of communism is all-pervasive, and so all means become acceptable. Cuba then falls to Communism, which creates a major policy crisis for the USA.

The CIA keep working the issue with Cuba and they team up with the Mafia, as well as the anti-communist Cubans - who they equip with lots of guns and weapons. Meanwhile, the Kennedy family who are Irish Catholic glom onto power through crooked elections and their own mob connections only to find themselves in the hot seat for the Bay of Pigs operation. The CIA wants it done, but the Kennedys are appalled. They pull the plug, sack some generals and Allen Dulles, head of the CIA.

When the Cuban Missile comes up (mostly as a reactionary result of the Bay of Pigs Incident), the Kennedys do their best to put out the deliberate attempts to go to war by the CIA and the Pentagon. The CIA and Military Industry Complex carry 2 major grudges from the Bay of Pigs AND the Cuban Missile Crisis, as they hurtle into Vietnam. they don't want the White House to know just exactly what is going on there, so they deliberately misinform McNamara, and by extension, JFK.

In 1963, JFK commits to pulling troops out of Vietnam on the advise of McNamara which prompts the CIA to assassinate JFK. McNamara stays on in the hope that there is a rational exit to Vietnam, but then he is overwhelmed by those who really want it to be an excuse to spend money. Deals are made, people are brought in, 'Lee Harvey Oswald' is set up as an elaborate cover story. Then the fateful day in Dallas happens.

LBJ, then becomes the President and greatly facilitates the War in Vietnam because his constituency is Texas - but also he believes the Domino Theory. By 1968, the USA is spending up to 100billion dollars on the Vietnam War for marginal gains and massive destruction of equipment. The war industries such as Bell helicopters are making a fortune. RFK runs for the White House saying he'll end the war and surprise surprise, he gets killed too. So Nixon slides into th Oval Office, mostly as a puppet of the Military Industry Complex and he too tries to face down the CIA and the Pentagon, but he ends up so paranoid and thus gives rise to the Watergate thing.

That's the grand narrative in a nutshell if you believe Hollywood's version. Of course it could all be codswollop as much as say 'Pearl Harbor' was; and we should all take it with a truckload of salt. After all, if it weren't fanciful it wouldn't be Hollywood. What kind of episteme could we have out of movies anyway?

If you think that's bad enough a bet, consider this: The CIA and the Pentagon all have 'plausible deniability' over all of this stuff from start to finish. There's a mass of stuff to deny, but it can't all be plausible to be denied away. Now that would be downright creepy, kind of like being caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

I don't know where all of this leaves us. I don't believe in decoding ciphers as a way of reading history (even though I do like 'The Name of the Rose'). History is not a palimpsest. Nonetheless, the grand narrative is out there if you could bother watching a bunch of dour movies.