Let the Great Illusion Drown

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read. - David McCullough.

I suppose that applies to viewing as well and I agree. But what McCullough is talking about is taking history and making it engaging without changing or distorting it. That's something the movies have never been good at. As a result, I don't go to the movies for history lessons and as a history buff I don't expect them. I'll get my history from McCullough and others and get my dramatizations from the movies. But sometimes, a movie can distort history to a point where it becomes problematic. That point is usually reached when the movie itself becomes popular enough that the majority of people start believing that the history in the movie is the real history.

I've written several reviews on these pages about narrative dramas and documentaries concerning the Manhattan Project of World War II. It's a subject I have had a deep fascination with for decades. I've read everything there is to read on the subject and seen most, but not all, of the relevant films (I've still not seen The Beginning or the End made in 1946 with Hume Cronyn as J. Robert Oppenheimer but I'd love to, if only it were available). The movie Fat Man and Little Boy is a classic example of a film so loose with the historical record that anyone familiar with the record (like me for instance) starts to wonder, "Was it an actual goal of this film to ignore every possible fact?" Hilariously, the director, Roland Joffe, famously stated that his was the most historically accurate account of the Manhattan Project ever made. "Why," he said, "we even have 'Dance of the Fairies' playing on the radio before the Trinity Test, just like it actually happened." Wow. It's true, they do have that (it occurred due to a reception problem with the P.A. system that picked up a local radio station) and lots of other tiny and utterly meaningless little "details" that add up to nothing. The big stuff, who Oppie and General Leslie Groves were, how they acted, what they said and did, is pure fantasy.

But who cares? Like I said, I don't get my history from the movies and since the movie was a flop I don't have to worry about people actually believing that Robert Oppenheimer squeezed an orange and came up with the idea of implosion (hahahahaha - that scene took the movie straight into the comedy genre for me. And by the way, implosion as an alternate way to achieve a runaway chain reaction was already being researched before they even set up camp at Los Alamos). And if I do want history from a movie I'll watch Day One yet again. You want history? That movie's got history. I'd have to say from all that I've read, including the excellent account by Peter Wyden upon which it was based, that a good 98 percent of what is in that movie is on the historical record. It's probably the most accurate historical film I've ever seen.

Then sometimes a movie mixes up its facts and time lines but still gets the right idea across. In fact, I'd say this is the most common of all the possibilities of the historical film. If you know or have read anything about General George Patton, you know that the movie Patton mixed up dates, deleted characters and generally played fairly loose with the facts about the General. And yet, they still did a good job of accurately portraying him. Filling the role with an astonishingly dynamic presence, George C. Scott gets to the heart of Patton so even if the movie isn't quite accurate, it is, if you know what I mean.

Or take The Right Stuff. Much of the information about the actual flight missions were authentic to a fault. If you've read Thomas Wolfe's account or seen any number of documentaries on the Mercury program, you know that Chuck Yeager did indeed break his ribs the night before his historic test flight and had to use a sawed off broom to close the door to his plane so that he could become the first pilot to break the sound barrier. Just like it is in the movie. But you also know that the Mutt and Jeff characters of Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum as well as the hilariously overplayed moments of frustration with LBJ (Donald Moffet) are probably more or less fictionalized. And so what? Again, they get the feel right. They capture the proper spirit, displaying the astronauts' courage and honor as well as their fears, egos, tantrums and generally childish behavior. The Right Stuff gets it right, even if the facts aren't all there.

But now I'd like to get back to how I started this post. That is, the movie that distorts the history and becomes popular enough to sell it as the real deal.

This time of year as the baseball season is heading into its final stretch I often think of Ken Burns' documentary Baseball, which I have on DVD. It's a thorough accounting of the history of the game, if not a thorough accounting of every player (they left out Rogers Hornsby?). Whenever I watch the third installment, The Faith of Fifty Million People, which covers the Chicago White Sox World Series scandal where eight players threw the game for a few thousand bucks, I start thinking about the movie Field of Dreams.

Now I'm not here to critique Field of Dreams, I'm here to talk about it's story concerning Shoeless Joe Jackson. (however if you want to read an entertaining story about the movie and its title I recommend checking out this post from Sheila) If you don't know the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and have only Field of Dreams as your guide (and many people do) you'll come away with quite a different picture of what happened during that ill-fated World Series in 1919.

First there's the casting which is, to borrow a term from the game, straight out of left field. You need to cast an actor as a down home country ball player born and raised in rural poverty in Greenville, South Carolina and you cast ... Ray Liotta!?!???! Liotta, without saying a word, screams urban, tough and streetwise. When he says that line about Ty Cobb not being invited because everyone thinks he's an asshole followed by that Liotta Jersey cackle I cringe every time. And it's not even because Jackson and Cobb were friends and respected each other, although that's obviously a problem with the line as well, but because again, Liotta just doesn't convince me he's a rural poor boy. Kind of like casting Woody Allen as the Terminator. No matter how hard he tried, Woody just wouldn't convince me.

But the real problem for me is the way Jackson is presented. Similar problems occur in Fat Man and Little Boy too, but like I said, that movie flopped. Field of Dreams was a smash. And to this day I've heard people make arguments about Shoeless Joe lifted straight from the conversations of Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) and Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) in the movie. That bothers me. Not because I hate Jackson (on the contrary, I find him a sad figure and sympathize with what he went through) but because I don't like it when the whole story, in favor of just part of it, is swept under the rug because of a person's personality or popularity. And that's the tactic of Field of Dreams with Jackson. We don't get the whole story, just enough to turn him into a victim, instead of a man in control of his own destiny.

Kinsella and Mann talk about Jackson as a sainted figure. He was just a dumb bumpkin who didn't know what he was doing. And besides, if he was in on the fix, how come he played so great during the series? How come his series stats were so amazing? Good questions but not quite thorough enough. His stats were fantastic - offensively. Guess what? So were the offensive stats of the other players on the team. So are Kinsella and Mann saying no one threw the Series? What Kinsella and Mann don't mention, but baseball history books do and these characters appear on the surface to know their baseball history, is that the defensive stats were less than stellar. Why? For me it's simple - ego.

Defensive stats are important to a player but not like those offensive ones. The offensive stats (home runs, rbi's, bases stolen, etc) are the glamour stats and, thrown World Series or not, no one on that team was about to screw with their glamour stats. But when it came time to catch an easy pop fly Jackson stumbled. When he picked up balls in play he took an extra step or two before throwing them to the proper base and when he threw them they didn't have the same power they normally had. To be sure, he made some amazing plays defensively during the series too, enough to keep his stats in line there as well. But he stumbled when he needed to, he slowed down when it counted. And that was the difference. All of this was noticed by sportswriters, fans and one Christy Mathewson during the series. The shadiness of what was going on was somewhat of an open secret. *(see below)

Christy Mathewson was one of the games greatest pitchers before an accidental inhalation of mustard gas during training exercises for combat in World War I ended his career. During the 1919 World Series he was asked by a sportswriter to watch the series with him and let him know what looked fishy. Mathewson noticed things immediately, and they were all on the defense. You know, the part nobody talks about in Field of Dreams.

In the end, none of this matters much. It's innocuous really. But that's how it takes hold. If someone distorts the facts about a world changing event in history there's an immediate outcry and the public takes notice. If someone distorts the facts about a baseball game, well...

Still it bothers me and I think it bothers me more in a dramatic sense than in a historic sense. Imagine if the movie had gone with the Jackson as a man in control of his own destiny. Imagine if Jackson was shown to have helped to throw the series and thus lose the opportunity to ever again play the game he loved. And as a result, it cut a wound so deep in his soul that he had to come back from the dead to heal it, to make amends. Now that's compelling. Innocent victim? Not so much.

And all of this leads me to this scene, this favorite moment from the Ken Burns documentary. It is the Grand Jury testimony of Joe Jackson, the testimony in which he confesses to what he did and explains how it all went down. The testimonial record was conveniently lost and not recovered until after the players had been acquitted in trial. Hmmm.... wonder how that happened. The moment from the documentary has the viewer listen to Jackson (voiced by Keith Carradine) tell the Prosecutor about his payoff. The Prosecutor asks him if his wife knew and if so, what was her reaction. When Jackson tells it the full tragedy of his character is on display. You can hear a wife, in just a few simple words, trying desperately to steer her husband in the right direction, and a husband not hearing any of it. And when Jackson repeats the words on the stand you can imagine the deep regret he has that it didn't end that day. He should have listened to the better angels of his nature, but he didn't. And at that moment his field of dreams died forever.

*If you read the Wikipedia entry on Jackson you will inevitably find the section about his alleged innocence during the series. It is still an open question and I am not trying to outright condemn him in this piece. The Wikipedia entry however, unlike more thorough baseball history books, ignores the defensive stutters of Jackson throughout the Series as Jackson supporters often do. They also mention nefarious tactics by the Prosecutor and end with a statement by Lefty Williams that Jackson's name was only mentioned to give the plot more credibility. However, this does not tell the whole story either. What Williams meant by most accounts when he said Jackson's name was mentioned to give the plot credibility was that he knew Jackson had to be in on it because he was such a great player that if he wasn't in on it the fix might not work - They might not lose. Jackson was that good a player. Take all of this how you will, my main argument here is against the half-truths in Field of Dreams resulting in a less compelling presentation of Joe Jackson's motivations. My main points here are to the dramatic differences in the story if the full Joe Jackson history is used. If history proves Jackson to be completely innocent I will be extremely happy. In the end, Joe Jackson was kind man with immense talent who made one tragically big mistake.

Unseen Images: Day One

"Eureka" moments are myriad in literature and film but rare in actual history. Inventions and concepts are often the result of hard work, building upon the research of others and trial and error. But "eureka" moments do occur. One of the most extraordinary occurred on September 12, 1933. As documented in Peter Wyden's excellent volume, Day One, and later dramatized in the film of the same name, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard was walking in downtown London. He came to an intersection and stopped. He had recently read H.G. Wells The World Set Free (1914) in which Wells envisioned the use of what he called "atomic bombs," bombs that exploded like ordinary bombs but because of their core material, Americanium, continued burning for years after their initial explosion, effectively producing a residual heat so intense that the entire area would melt. He had also read Ernest Rutherford writing on the possibilities of achieving a nuclear chain reaction that could possibly, in the future, become a source of energy. Szilard stared at the traffic lights and began putting the pieces together in his head. Within seconds his brain conceived of something no other human brain had ever conceived: If one could produce a run-away chain reaction in fissionable material using conventional explosives as a trigger one could produce an explosion of extraordinary immensity. The thought so immediately terrified him that he bolted straight forward to develop his nightmarish idea only to be stopped by a fellow pedestrian before he was hit by a bus.

The following year, after he had worked out the details, he filed a patent and gifted it to the British Admiralty. After studying and living in Berlin since 1922, he fled in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. Even though the scientific world was still six years away from a successful test of fission (when everyone else finally got the idea) he was afraid that someone in Nazi Germany would have the same epiphany he had. He wanted the British to have the patent. They didn't take him seriously. No one understood what exactly it was he had patented. Later he would take a teaching position in the United States and contact his old friend from Berlin, Albert Einstein. He explained his idea to Einstein and urged Einstein to alert the United States government. Since Einstein, and most other physicists at the time, was unsure of what Szilard had envisioned, Szilard penned the letter to President Roosevelt himself and Einstein signed it as if he had written it. You can read the full text of the letter here.

But there was another physicist that understood all of it. Unknown to Szilard, on January 29, 1939 Robert Oppenheimer heard about the first successful attempt of fission in a lab. Within minutes he surmised that with the bombardment of excess neutrons upon a fissionable core, an explosive chain reaction would occur, and a bomb with almost unimaginable destructive force would be possible.

Robert Oppenheimer was a man of unique intellectual ability. He was fluent in both the writing and speaking of English, Greek, French, German, Portuguese and Sanskrit. He was proficient in several others. He could learn the basics of a language and its alphabet within six weeks. But he was no isolated intellectual savant. He was also well-versed in politics, poetry, classical literature, art, music, history and more. As General Leslie Groves later said, "He's a genius. A real genius...Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up." While he is best known in scientific circles for formulating the Born-Oppenheimer approximation (which is so far above my head I cannot even summarize it for you but I do know it does not involve Matt Damon) he is most highly regarded in science today for his work on gravitational collapse, work he did in the thirties. Work that would not be done or continued by any other physicists until the sixties when people like Stephen Hawking would use it as a jumping point to build a theoretical model for black holes. Oppenheimer understood things decades before everyone else. It is important to understand these things about Oppenheimer, to understand fully that this was no government scientist lackey put in charge of a weapons program. There were a few of those later to come. This was a thoughtful and astoundingly intelligent human being who served science and his country, and unlike so many others in his field, found himself devastated by guilt.

These are the two central figures of Day One, the book written by Peter Wyden and later made into a film for television in 1989. There is a third figure of course, one that looms large over the whole affair, that of General Leslie Groves. But it is the moral and ethical battle between Szilard and Oppenheimer that provided the book, the film and history with one of the most extraordinary crises of conscience ever recorded. 1989 saw the release of another "Atomic Bomb" movie, Fat Man and Little Boy but to say that film got everything wrong, everything, would be an understatement. The facts are wrong, the motivations of the characters wrong, the personalities wrong. All wrong. But Day One, directed by Joseph Sargent and starring David Straithern as Oppenheimer, Michael Tucker as Szilard (an absolute dead ringer!) and Brian Dennehy as Gen. Leslie Groves gets it all right. And it was a made-for-television movie at that. The difference was in deciding early on to follow the source material to a word. If you've read Wyden's well researched Day One, you have essentially read the screenplay for the movie. And what the filmmakers understood was that telling everything precisely as it occurred required no further dramatic padding. Fat Man and Little Boy gives us plenty of padding (and many a fictionalized character) and none of it is as nearly as dramatic as what really happened. I'm not sure why they felt this story needed anything added to it at all.

The film covers much of the historical material that everyone is familiar with but also deals with the minutia of life at Los Alamos and the clockwork political machinations that culminated in the most devastating decision made by a politician in the twentieth century: The engagement of nuclear warfare on a civilian population. Twice. It's been said that Hiroshima showed our capacity to do what we had to do to win and Nagasaki showed our capacity for cruelty. Some would argue they both showed determination and/or cruelty.

As the physicists readied their creation the politicians argued the finer points. Harry Truman (Richard Dysart) was now President of the United States after the untimely death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he made James "Jimmy" Byrnes (Hume Cronyn) his right hand man. Byrnes had been the Assistant to the President under Roosevelt, a position no longer used. It was only used because of Byrnes, one of the most accomplished statesmen of the twentieth century. Hailing from South Carolina he was at one time or another House Representative, Senator, Governor, Secretary of State, Assistant to the President and Supreme Court Justice. Just try and find another resume like that. Truman put his trust and decision making in Jimmy's hands. Hume Cronyn, who played Oppenheimer in 1947's The Beginning or the End, plays Byrnes brilliantly, displaying just enough homespun charm mixed with the right amount of "my way or the highway" arrogance to make Byrnes alternately amusing and terrifying.

The film juggles the politicians and physicists stories deftly but it is the Szilard - Oppenheimer story that keeps everything afloat. Oppenheimer loved being in charge of so many great minds working together but was uneasy about what that work was. Szilard also worked on the project, doing theoretical work in Chicago. The turning point for all was when Germany surrendered. Most physicists working on the project, including Szilard and Oppenheimer, had naively assumed they were working towards creating an atomic bomb because Adolph Hitler was trying to do the same. Once Germany surrendered and it was revealed that their nuclear program was scuttled, Los Alamos physicists thought their work was done. It was not. They were told to keep working. Szilard was shocked and immediately circulated a petition to be signed and sent to Truman morally opposing any use of the bomb in war. He met with Oppenheimer who assured him that the bomb would be developed but not used. "It's shit," Oppenheimer told him. "this is a weapon with no military significance. It will make a big bang - a very big bang - but it is not a weapon which is useful in war." It may be hard to believe that kind of naivete today, that the physicists at Los Alamos honestly never thought the bomb would be used beyond a demonstration, but the memos, the correspondences and the diaries all back it up. Almost all of them were borderline pacifists and socialists who believed America was the right country to develop the bomb because it was the one country that would never use it.

Szilard finally got an audience with Byrnes and tried desperately to plead the case of demonstration, possibly over the Sea of Japan or at Los Alamos with Japanese representatives present. Byrnes would have none of it. Then there was a meeting of the so-called Interim Committee, the committee set up to decide how and when to use the bomb, with Byrnes, Groves, Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, General George Marshall and others where final arguments were made. Oppenheimer, Fermi and Under-Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard made arguments for demonstrations and Byrnes shot each one down. Someone suggested giving the Japanese a 48 hour warning to evacuate the city. Byrnes countered the Japanese would simply move all American POWs into the target city. As it turns out, there were American POWs in Hiroshima anyway. And before anyone thinks it was a different time and the decision makers did not understand what they would be unleashing it should be noted that on July 1, 1945 Ralph Bard resigned his position. He said in his letter to Truman that the United States would lose its standing as a humanitarian country and one that ensures fair play if any such weapon was used. Since by July 1st its use seemed inevitable, he resigned. He wanted no historical role in its use. In the film this scene is done with great subtle effect. After his resignation to Truman, the President appears not only unmoved but slightly bewildered.

As it turns out there were more people opposed to the use of the atomic bomb than one might suspect. Among those opposing it were General Douglas MacArthur, General Dwight Eisenhower, Gen. H.H. (Hap) Arnold, John J. McCloy (Undersecretary of War) and even Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's very own Chief of Staff. Leahy wrote, "I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." Secretary of Defense Henry Stimson did not oppose it but did oppose using it in culturally historical spots. When General Groves presented him with the military's final report on the first target, Kyoto, Stimson flatly refused. "No," he said "It's a sacred city to the Japanese and I will not see it destroyed,". Groves told him it was the perfect location. Stimson said, "I don't care how perfect it is. It's an ancient city and a beautiful one. Pick another target." There are still some who blame Stimson more than any other for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I've read their articles and read Stimson's diary through the process. It has been suggested Stimson had Truman under his control. Yet when you read Wyden or Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) or Gregg Herken (Brotherhood of the Bomb) or any of the relevant letters and correspondences from the period it is clear that there were only four men absolutely hellbent on using nuclear weapons in war. They were Harry Truman, James Byrnes, General Leslie Groves and physicist Edward Teller.

Both the book and the film make this point abundantly clear. When the Trinity test (nicknamed by Oppenheimer) was successfully conducted, exploding the first nuclear bomb in human history, Truman, Byrnes, Groves and Teller were ecstatic. Szilard was not informed of the test. By this point, July 16, 1945, he was considered a risk due to his moral objections of its use. Oppenheimer's reaction was all Oppenheimer. Having watched the test from five miles distant, feeling the intense heat on his face and the rush of wind from the distant shockwave he first said to his brother Frank, a physicist at Los Alamos as well, simply, "It worked." Then he turned to Kenneth Bainbridge and asked if he was familiar with the quote from the Bhagavad-Gita, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Bainbridge replied, "Yeah Oppie, now we're all sons of bitches."

The film concludes after the surrender of Japan. At Los Alamos the physicists watch the first post war footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are in shock. Some cry, some run out holding their mouths, some close their eyes. Oppenheimer says to his wife, Kitty, "And so finally begins the reaction" to which Kitty angrily and brilliantly replies, "Well what in the hell did they think was going to happen?"

The movie is finished but the book Day One is only halfway done at this point. The second half of the book documents the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it is stomach churning to say the least. Peter Wyden interviewed survivors for his book and the descriptions are devastating. In the hospital where victims were being treated the floors were covered with vomit, bile and excrement from the uncontrollable nausea and diarrhea that emerged within a couple of hours as a result of radiation poisoning. Other survivors on the outskirts of the city could not make it into the city for well over a day to search for relatives, loved ones or just to help because the fires and residual heat were so intense that entry was impossible. The Ota river in Hiroshima was filled with the bloated corpses of thousands who had lept into it to escape the firestorm only to die from the excess heat and radiation. One survivor told Wyden that you could have walked across the river on the bloated corpses that filled it from end to end.

Wyden ends his book with a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and a moving tribute to what he considered in the end, a grave wrong. The debates over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki usually center around the massive loss of American and Japanese military and civilian lives that would have occurred during a land invasion of Japan. Thus it is argued, by dropping the bombs millions were saved. It's an argument that has no resolution since half of the argument takes place in the hypothetical "what if" of an invasion. But as Day One, the other books mentioned and even now, finally, the history books point out there is a missing factor from this argument that is a deal breaker. A debate ender. Period. In June and July of 1945 the Japanese made entreaties for peace to the Soviet Union, whom it hoped would act as a mediator between Japan and the United States. They were willing to stop the war with only one condition: The Emperor retain his status. Thus Japan would restructure its own government and even eliminate its own military. The United States and its Allies would occupy Japan and oversee the restructuring and approve or disapprove at each step. Just like it actually happened after the war. As early as May 31, 1945 the Japanese had communicated through their embassy in Portugal that only the term "unconditional surrender" stood in the way of peace. They simply wanted the Emporer to be recognized as such. Joseph Stalin presented the mediation request to Truman at Potsdam on July 18. "Unconditional Surrender" remained. The tragic irony being that after Japan's unconditional surrender, the United States decided to let the Emperor retain his status after all to ease the occupational transition. In other words, by mid-July the war would, could and should have been over. Any arguments for or against the use of the atomic bombs versus a land invasion with conventional weapons is rendered moot by July 18, 1945, the day Truman himself got the offer of peace. After that day, the war should have ended and the United States begun its occupation of Japan. But Byrnes and Truman wanted the bomb dropped. Byrnes especially wanted to send a message to the Soviet Union: We have nuclear capabilities and we're willing to use them. On August 8th, two days after Hiroshima, the U.S.S.R. declared war on Japan and starting sending troops towards the homeland. They were hoping for a piece of Japan after the war. Fortunately for Japan, they surrendered before the U.S.S.R. could get in and create a postwar North Japan that would probably be a problem to this day.

The film and book, Day One, have something in common besides the obvious historical details. They are both done straightforwardly in unsentimental journalistic fashion. Joseph Sargent does not employ any special camera tricks or style but simply lets the story tell itself. Peter Wyden does the same. And for both it was a wise decision. It is a story that needs telling and one that requires no fiction to detract from it. It is a complicated and complex story, simply told. July 16, 1945 marked Day One. Everything after has taken place in a different world from the one before it. A world we can never return to again.

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Websites for Further Reading:

NuclearFiles.org The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Atomic Bomb Decision