Wag the Dog Read online

  The sense of empowerment was so potent that the minute Teddy handed the propaganda paper in the idea for his screenplay entered his mind. He knew exactly where he was going to steal the plot, the structure, and the characters and exactly how he was going to reinvent them to make his version fresh and original.78The minute he got home he sat down to write a treatment. The first draft was done in a matter of hours. By morning he had revised it, run it through spell check, reread it, retyped the corrections, and printed it out. He brought it with him to work.

  Beagle had had the single page—pithy and enigmatic as strategy by Sun Tzu or prophecy by I Ching—overnight. Teddy Brody waited, impatiently, for Beagle’s arrival in the morning, for his blessing or his curse. And when—if—Beagle praised it, that would be the moment. The moment to say, “I have a treatment—would you read it?”

  Beagle had sat bolt upright at 5:00 A.M. It was dark outside, not even a predawn gray, but still crisp black, and stars too. He was wide awake. He thought it was inspiration when that happened, but it was his liver. That’s not to say he didn’t have insights and fresh concepts in the early hours, but it was the sluggishness in his liver that woke him.

  The new woman—Beagle told himself he’d have to make a point of remembering her name—had made another stupid mistake. The sort of mistake Kitty would never make. In an excess of zeal she’d gone out and bought a present for John Lincoln to give to Dylan, even though she didn’t know what she was doing. She’d bought a little football and a little helmet. Beagle thought it was cute. Kitty would have known better. Jackie climbed the walls when she saw it. She nailed John’s hide to the door. All the sins of the male race apparently had something to do with football. It brought on war, killing, wife beating, beer guzzling, belching, and the national overindulgence in junk food.

  What he understood, at last, when he awoke in the dark, was that football was his model, not baseball, not movies. In one sense that should have been obvious because one of the standard adages in the drivel of popular wisdom is that football is the sport most like war. If you had asked Beagle, before this particular morning when an insufficiency of bile aroused him, he would have said: “Football is the sport most like roller derby. It can also be compared to professional wrestling with more clothes. Golf is the sport most like war.” But part of Beagle’s genius was the ability to overcome his intelligence and arrogance and cater, shamelessly, to a lower common denominator. The lowest, if possible.79

  If football was what America thought war was, then a Beagle-directed war was going to be the goddamn Super Bowl. Unlike baseball, which used anticipation instead of action in the game, football no longer even needed the game. The players didn’t have to do anything. The fans did it all by themselves. Super Bowl was the most hyperbolic version of this effect: two weeks of hype, hysteria, wagering, turmoil, media blitz, and ado—without a single block, tackle, or penalty, without one ball thrown or kicked or carried.

  The game itself—that final, end-of-the-season, ultimate, championship confrontation—was normally a dud. A blowout, decided early, barely worth watching for those few weirdos who watched for the sake of seeing what happened in the actual game segment of the event. Yet it was never a disappointment. No game was bad enough to diminish the hysteria of the subsequent Super Bowl.

  That, Beagle now knew, was the pace and the shape of a war that America was going to love.

  Heroes and villains. The hero was a given: George Herbert Walker Bush. He would have his costars. They would be . . . hold that for later.

  The first thing Beagle did when he got to CinéMutt was run villain footage. Hitler, Joe Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Kaiser Wilhelm, Jack Palance, Erich Von Stroheim. There was just one word, one definition of “villain”—Hitler. Change the face, change the language, change the rant, but call the character Hitler.

  But the really interesting thing was that in the end the importance placed on the character of the villain was illusory. Bush had done a Hitler bit with Noriega and it didn’t play. Maggie Thatcher had done the Falklands without a bad guy and her splendid little war did splendidly.

  What did she have? She had Pearl Harbor!

  It wasn’t the villain, it was the villainous act, which found its most perfect expression in the sneak attack. Which was also the centerpiece of America’s mythology of itself: Mr. Nice Guy gets sucker-punched. Mr. Nice Guy gets up off the floor, squares up man to man with Mr. Sneak Attack. Mr. Nice Guy turns out to have been John Wayne, Clark Kent, a Superpower—Mr. Sneak Attack wishes he’d never been born.

  What America needed—or Bush needed—or Beagle needed—was someone to invade America.

  That was a problem. Big-time. Who was going to invade the U.S.? Mexico? Canada? Laughable. The remnants of the USSR? They’d use nukes, we’d use nukes, that would be the end of Hollywood as we know it. Japan? Would Japan be willing to invade us again? Could the economic thing be made to look like an invasion? No. The job didn’t call for economic war. Too sophisticated for TV and, frankly, the images were nonexistent.

  He went back to the Vietnam scenario. He did not yet understand why he felt The Return was wrong and he needed to do so before he could find his way to a war whose aesthetic would succeed. He started running Nam clips. It was clear in less than a minute: jungle. That was a big one. Americans don’t like jungle wars. Too wet. Too hot. Hot and wet was disease and sex. Americans liked fighting the Nazis. Americans liked Germanic warfare. Mechanized. Civilized. Clean and dry.

  Yet, America had fought the Japs in the jungle. And that had been good. A lot of good films had come out of it. John Wayne had been mostly in the Pacific. There he was again, on Screen 8, in the only pro-Vietnam War movie ever made, The Green Berets, an old, fat John Wayne strutting around like it was still WWII.

  And that was the final insight.

  The real fundamental problem, the structural problem, was that Vietnam wasn’t Vietnam. It was never intended to be its own thing. To go back to Vietnam was to miss the point. The point was to be what Vietnam was supposed to be in the first place—a remake—not for theaters, for television—of 1942-45: World War II Two—The Video.

  He heard the words underlined in his head. That was it. That was the essence.

  He remembered an anthology film—Going Hollywood: The War Years. It said something pertinent. He searched it out and punched it up: “A war where there was no doubt about who started it or what we were fighting for or who were the good guys or who were the bad guys. In other words, it was a war that could’ve been written by Hollywood.” That was good, right on target, but still not the statement that he was looking for—there: “Gone were the movies of the thirties with their screwball rich people, their fast-talking heroines, their wisecracks about banks, government, unemployment. The war canceled all criticism. A new and total wholesomeness pervaded Hollywood’s America. It was decided that the true character of the nation was just—nice. There were no demonstrations, no complaints, in nice America.” That’s what it was really about. That’s what the client wanted. The war was just a means to an end. World War II was the war that delivered the proper end. That was the America Bush wanted—where rich people were respected, banks were good guys, nobody criticized, even the darkies turned out to be nice, and women kept their goddamn mouths shut.

  John Lincoln Beagle had chosen the film that America would make next: WWII-2-V.

  77 Earlier versions—all but the final one, actually—do contain footnotes or other forms of reference. The first line is attributed to Professor Campbell Stuart in Sidney Rogerson, Propaganda in the Next War (Garland Library, 1938). This is a fascinating series, edited by Captain Liddell Hart, of predictions about World War II. Titles in the series included Sea Power in the Next War, Air Power in . . ., Tanks in . . ., Gas in. . . . The information in the chart, slightly altered, and the three statements following, came from Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, The Psychology of Enmity (Harper & Row, 1986), a book about war, war images, and war pr
opaganda, which seemed to Teddy to describe the way his family related, especially his relationship to his father and his father’s to his mother. The next line, the quote from Mr. Lodge, and the last two lines, all come from Bruce Winton Knight, How to Run a War (Knopf, 1936; reprint, Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972). The underlined passage is a paraphrase of Terence H. Quaker, Opinion Control in Democracies (St. Martin’s Press, 1985).

  78 Jeanine Basinger, in The World War II Combat Film, points out that “Hollywood was, contrary to popular opinion, a frugal place. Plots and characters and events were saved like old pieces of string, and taken out of the drawer and re-used. . . . Useful things were—tough sergeants, raw recruits, old veterans, diary-keeping writers, colorful immigrant types; mail calls, Christmas celebrations, barroom brawls; wounded men crying out to be brought in, and, when rescued, dying anyway; brave men going up in planes to sacrifice themselves. . . .”

  This was exactly what Beagle did. He took bits and pieces “saved like old pieces of string,” and we can notice their appearance in the final production. Teddy’s brainstorm was to take the classic combat film—the same twelve or fourteen people: Pop, the guy from Brooklyn, the kid with a puppy, the guy who was gonna write novels someday, etc.—and make all the characters gay. In the Pacific War, a homophobic colonel takes all the gays—men and women—in his battalion and puts them on a tiny atoll. He knows that it will be attacked by an overwhelming force of Japanese. He tells them they must hold out at all costs. And so on.

  79 He was fond of a quote from H. L. Mencken, changing they/their to we/ our: “We have built our business on a foundation of morons,” and said as much in a interview in Cinema magazine. “Who do you think buys movie tickets? Who goes to see the same movie fourteen times—morons and aspiring film directors. Who watches TV? If it’s not dumb enough that the morons love it, it will lose money and I haven’t done my job. Catering to the morons is Job One! Somebody said that: Lee Iaccoca? Ford? Reagan? Before you go to make a film, spend a couple of days watching a lot of television. Get down with the morons. If you can make a movie that does that and is brilliant too, then you’re a genius. You’re John Huston, you’re John Ford, you’re Alfred Hitchcock.”

  This is actually the last real interview Beagle ever gave. David Hartman saw to it that Beagle never again spoke for publication without a handler present and without previewing the questions.

  Chapter

  THIRTY-TWO

  IN 1967 THE CIA instituted a program in Vietnam called Phoenix. The name is a rough translation of Phunng Hoang, also a mythological bird. The program was run by William Colby, who later became head of the CIA.

  One of the phrases that Teddy Brody pulled out of Sam Keen’s Faces of the Enemy for his one page of adages on propaganda, but which did not make the final cut, was, “Notice, the undertone beneath the self-justification in all propaganda is the whining voice of the child: ‘He did it to me first—I only hit him back.’ ” They did it first is the foundation of Phoenix. It happens to be true. They did do it first. The Viet Cong had an extensive and very effective terrorist program. It targeted everybody and anybody whose work supported the routine functions of government—mayors, tax collectors, police, postmen, teachers. Guerrilla warfare isn’t nice, and opposing the power of the state is always difficult. Yet, however politically correct the VC may have been, it’s fair to say that only motive separates what they did from the most ruthless forms of gangsterism. They established their underground rule in much the same way as the Mafia in Sicily or the drug gangs in Colombia.80There are lots of good atrocity stories—good in the sense of “As a popular passion producer, experience indicates that there is nothing quite like the atrocity story”81—about VC terror. These include young boys and elders impaled on stakes where the rest of the village is sure to see them and pregnant women disemboweled, the fetus cut out and left on the ground as a public display.

  The South Vietnamese government, the CIA, and the other American organizations had all made attempts to imitate these tactics before Phoenix. The CIA had various CT—counterterrorist—teams that consisted of Vietnamese, and sometimes Chinese, who are frequently referred to as mercenaries because they were not regular Army and they were paid. Some of these teams consisted of convicted murderers, rapists, and other criminals, recruited from Vietnamese prisons, real-life versions of The Dirty Dozen. The Special Operations Group (SOG), which ran Project Delta and Project 24, Navy Seals, hunter-killer teams, and most especially the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU),82all engaged in counterterror operations.

  What Phoenix did was centralize all the South Vietnamese intelligence services under American supervision and target what was called the VCI—Viet Cong Infrastructure—in a systematic way. The Americans and the South Vietnamese actually had a lot of information about who the VC and their sympathizers were. Phoenix put it all together. They put up wanted posters, they offered rewards. They set up interrogation centers. They sent in teams to arrest and to assassinate.

  To the degree that Phoenix was known, it was instantly controversial.83And it remains so. Vietnamese named to Phoenix as VC or VC sympathizers were not innocent until proven guilty. Assassinations did not wait upon due process. Suspects were detained without trial, on the basis of anonymous accusations. In prison they were often beaten and tortured. South Vietnamese district intelligence officers got rich through extortion—threatening to put people on the list unless they paid—and by letting real VC buy their way off the list.

  For some people Phoenix was a lot of fun. This was tropical Lawrence of Arabia stuff. Dressing up in native garb, eating indigenous foods, setting up ambushes, sneaking into villages at night to kill silently, committing bizarre yet colorful acts like hammering custom-made calling cards into the third eye of their victims and cutting out their livers because you can’t get into Buddhist heaven without one. Actually, it was better than the Lawrence scenario, especially for heterosexuals—instead of veiled females covered in layers of robes, there were the accommodating girls of Indochina in their bao dais; instead of eating goat bits and rice with their fingers, these western warriors in mufti had steak and ice cream from the States or Vietnamese cuisine which, combining the traditions of France and Southeast Asia, is among the most enticing in the world; there was no prohibition of alcohol; the drugs were of superb quality; and to be an American was to be very rich.84

  With all this—the cowboys, the profiteering, the moral corruption of participating in torture and assassination—the truly strange thing was that Phoenix worked. It hurt the Viet Cong very badly. Combined with their losses in the Tet offensive, it crippled them to a degree from which they never recovered.85

  Taylor brought in two men to intercept Kitty. They were waiting outside her house. They knew what time she was supposed to meet Joe Broz and how long the drive took, so they knew approximately when she was expected to leave. They had photos of her for identification purposes. She was very attractive in the photos, smiling, bright-eyed, voluptuous. Both of the watchers were graduates of Phoenix. Their names were Charles “Chaz” Otis and Christian “Bo” Perkins. There are a lot of ways to describe both of them, but bottom-line and the simplest is to say that Bo was a sadist and Chaz was a rapist.

  80 Of course, the VC can say “He did it to me first—I only hit him back.” And that’s true too. State terror—a concept discussed at length in The Terrorism Industry by Herman and Sullivan and in the works of Noam Chomsky—can be, and frequently is, more murderous and less discriminating than any guerrilla group. Certainly, Diem and the imperialist French before him ruled by force, not consent, which is to say through terror.

  81 Oddly enough, the U.S. failed to make very good use of enemy atrocity stories in the Vietnam war. This was partly deliberate. Johnson did not want to whip the American people into a war frenzy. Later the Nixon administration did push the atrocity line, at least a little, but only about the treatment of our own POWs.

  82 . . . one form of psychological pressu
re on the guerrillas which the Americans do not advertise is the PRU. The PRU work on the theory of giving back what the Viet Cong deals out—assassination and butchery. Accordingly, a Viet Cong unit on occasion will find the disemboweled remains of its fellows among a well trod canal bank path, an effective message to guerrillas and to non-committed Vietnamese that two can play the same bloody game.” (Chalmers Roberts, Washington Post, 2/18/67)

  83 “By analogy,” said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, “if the Union had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the Mayor of Macon, Georgia.” (The Phoenix Program)

  “The Phoenix operation aroused an outcry from American antiwar activists, who labeled it ‘mass murder.’ But several Americans involved described it instead as a program riddled with inefficiency, corruption and abuse.” (Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History [Viking, 1983])

  84 “The CIA people were the worst. I was appalled at the kind of people the CIA had out in the provinces . . . these guys loved to ride through the streets and down the country roads in their Jeeps with all manner of weapons strapped to them, gun belts and helmets and all of it. They had lots of booze, lots of women, the best furniture, and the nicest places to live. They had their own private airline, Air America, to take them anywhere they wanted to go on a moment’s notice. They played the Terry and the Pirates game, swashbuckling, lots of bravado. Some killing, too. They were after the VCI, the Viet Cong infrastructure. This is where you get your assassination squad.” (Robert Boettcher quoted in Harry Maurer, Strange Ground: Americans in Vietnam 1945-1975: An Oral History [Henry Holt, 1990]).