IN 1976, STILL fairly early in his epic career, Robert Redford played Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, a tense and ultimately triumphant retelling of the Washington Post Watergate investigation that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Now, near the end of that same career, in the movie Truth Redford plays CBS News anchor Dan Rather, in the story of how Rather stumbled, fell, and was pushed out of big-time journalism in the course of pursuing the truth about George W. Bush’s mysterious Vietnam-era “service” in the Texas Air National Guard.
The great moral test for many men of the baby boom generation was “what did you do about the draft?” Questions about how he had eluded the draft dogged our first baby boomer president, Bill Clinton. Then the campaigns of 2000 and 2004 brought the historic test of the baby boom soul front and center, pitting Bush, a baby boomer born to privilege and pro-war politics, against two Democrats, also born to privilege, who volunteered for the military and actually served in Vietnam. Al Gore had a noncombat role and was only in Vietnam for five months, but still, he was there, in a uniform, sometimes carrying a gun. As a Navy lieutenant, John Kerry was honored for courage in battle.
Bush, on the other hand, joined a platoon of other fortunate sons in the Texas Air National Guard. He trained as a pilot, then stopped flying and didn’t show up for his mandatory pilot physicals. He got permission to transfer to a Guard unit in Alabama so he could work on a Republican senatorial campaign, but only one Alabama Guard member claims to have seen him. Finally, he disappeared to Harvard Business School and may have never completed his required days of service.
There were stories about Bush’s wartime shirking in 2000. In 2004, the irony and outrage were intensified when W.’s opponent, Kerry, a bona fide war hero, was subjected to slander from the notorious “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” PAC.
It was in this environment that Mary Mapes, a CBS producer working with Rather, went digging for the truth about Bush’s military service, or lack thereof. Mapes was given letters purportedly written by one of W.’s commanders complaining about the young pilot’s disappearing acts. Two of the four document experts Mapes’ team consulted warned that the letters could be bogus. But CBS went ahead and put the story on the air, only to be blindsided by an internet fury over “forgeries” that ended up killing the Texas National Guard story for the rest of the campaign season.
In All the President’s Men, the movie’s dramatic low point comes when Woodward and Bernstein are caught in a terrible mistake. They have put a story on the front page saying that a grand jury witness had named Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, as a key figure in the Watergate cover-up, when in fact Haldeman’s name had never come up. The Post was widely derided for the error. Woodward and Bernstein feared they might have to resign. But their editor, Ben Bradlee, trusted that they had the substance of the story right and stood by them through the furor.
When Rather and Mapes found themselves in a similar position after the National Guard story, CBS News appointed a Republican former attorney general, Richard Thornburgh, to investigate their mistake and threw the journalists under the bus.
For a while, back in 1986, Dan Rather infamously signed off his daily broadcasts with the odd exhortation: “Courage.” As Truth reminds us, courage was sometimes in short supply among the mainstream media in those early years of this century, when the Bush regime of war, torture, and surveillance seemed so all-powerful and untouchable.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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