Fresh Air - Remembering Philip Caputo, who wrote an unflinching Vietnam War memoir

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Philip Caputo wrote the 1977 acclaimed and unflinching memoir ‘A Rumor of War,’ about leading a Marine platoon during the Vietnam War. It taught him a painful truth. “I had discovered that I had a capacity to be violent and dark in my actions in a way that totally shocked me,” he told Terry Gross in 2005. He went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Caputo died May 7 at 84. Also, celebrated naturalist and nature documentarian Sir David Attenborough turned 100 this month. We listen back to his 1995 interview with Terry Gross about working in the field. John Powers reviews the new film ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin.’See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. in Cooley. One of the most unflinching and acclaimed memoirs of the Vietnam War was about a young lieutenant, one of the first Americans to fight in the war, leading a marine platoon through the jungle. A rumor of war was written by Philip Caputo, who died last week at the age of 84. In reviewing the book in 1977, John Gregory Dunn described it as, quote, Heartbreaking, terrifying, and enraging. It belongs to the literature of men at war, unquote. The book became a bestseller and was adapted into a TV miniseries.

After the war, Caputo became a journalist and was part of the Chicago Tribune Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered violations of voting procedures in a March 1972 primary. While a foreign correspondent in Lebanon, during their civil war, he was captured by Palestinian militants and held for a week. Later, in another incident, he was shot multiple times by a different group of militants in Beirut. He returned to the States, and during convalescence for his injuries, he wrote a rumor of war. Caputo went on to write two other memoirs, ten novels, two short story collections, and four works of nonfiction.

His love of adventure is detailed in an obituary on his website, which reads, quote, Caputo caught a leviathan-sized marlin off Cuba's shores, hunted big game in Africa, roughed it in Australia's outback, cast fly lines in the world's oceans and streams from Alaska to New England, and read books as voraciously as he wrote them. We're going to listen to Terry's 2005 interview with Philip Caputo. At the time, he had written the novel Acts of Faith, set in war-torn Sudan, about aid workers and missionaries there. You've been in war zones as a Marine and as a journalist. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between being there as a fighter and being there as somebody just covering the fighting?

Well, probably the major difference is that the war correspondent can get out of there almost whenever he chooses or she chooses. The soldier is stuck there, is under orders, and there's no. there's no return ticket. There's no going back to the hotel in another day or two or three. The soldier has to confront that situation, constantly under orders, often against his or her own will. And also, the journalist generally has some kind of picture of what's going on, a big picture, what's happening.

quite often if you're an enlisted soldier or even a junior officer, say, on the level of a lieutenant or a captain, all you know about what's going on is what's going on directly in front of you. And this can often give you a certain sense or feeling of powerlessness, no control over your fate or your destiny that, say, somebody like the war correspondent, can maintain that sense, although it may be. be an illusion, even on the war correspondence part. Did you respect war correspondents when you were fighting in Vietnam, or did you see them as like guys with pens and cameras who were onlookers? I think I was agnostic about them. I didn't particularly dislike them. I always remember feeling that I think there were probably in four operations I was on that

there were journalists along, either TV or print journalists. I could never figure out why they were there. It seemed just peculiar to me. It seemed very odd, and sometimes I got a little annoyed with them because I would be, especially if they were with the unit that I was with or that I was in command of, which this case was a rifle platoon, I would feel somewhat responsible for them and for their safety. And that would be a distraction to me.

But in general, you might say I could have taken them or left them. You know, as we were saying, your new novel, Acts of Faith, which is about aid workers and missionaries in Sudan, is in part about how idealistic motives can become really changed once you're in a foreign war where you don't really understand the culture. And you wrote in your memoir about fighting in Vietnam, a rumor of war. War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it. But we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy's challenge to ask what you can do for your country. And by the missionary idealism, he had awakened in us. I guess I'm wondering if fighting in Vietnam made you skeptical of idealism. Oh, yes, it did. I'll just freely admit that, and like a lot of people my age, I was indelibly marked by that experience and by that era.

Yes, I'm profoundly skeptical of idealism, profoundly skeptical about government pronouncements, profoundly skeptical, skeptical about the honesty and integrity of our elected officials, profoundly skeptical about what, generals and military leaders tell us is happening as opposed to what may really be happening. And I would not want to speak for the entire baby boom generation. I forgot how many millions of people that is. But I think a significant number of people in that age group think that way. And as a result of what happened in Vietnam and in the 60s. And I can't. There's no sense in my trying to pretend somehow that that didn't happen to me because it did. It's interesting. You managed to, as you've pointed out in your writing, you managed to get through your tour of duty in Vietnam without any wounds. But then as a journalist covering Beirut, you were shot several times in one episode.

What happened to you? Well, it's one of those proverbial long stories that I will endeavor to make short. I was covering the Lebanese Civil War. I was the Chicago Tribune's Middle East correspondent based in Beirut. I was filing a story to the paper when the building was in came under heavy machine gun fire. I then exited the building, ran in. into some Muslim militiamen from some strange street militia that was active in Beirut at that time. They tried to take my press card away from me.

The press card was very precious to us, is that without it you could get killed fairly easily. And I remember I grabbed it from one of these guys that was trying to take it from me. And I put it back in my wallet and they says, all right, you know, get out of here, go. And as I was walking away, they started to open fire at me, open fire on me and hit me in the ankle, my left ankle, hit me in the left leg. I got hit superficially in the head, the back, the shoulders, but just by, I'll say, superficial shrapnel wounds. And fortunately, these were Muslim militiamen, and I was, these were Muslim militiamen, and I, I was right near a street controlled by Christians because that was a sectarian war, or at least in part, a sectarian war.

And although I was down, because of the wounds in my legs, I couldn't walk. I was able to crawl, and I crawled onto this Christian-controlled street, and probably I just owe my life to that because I think had they not been afraid to pursue me, they would have. And that would have been the end of me. You're a writer. You use your imagination all the time, and I'm sure during the war in Vietnam, you must have imagined what would have been like to be shot or injured there. How did actually getting shot compared to what you'd always imagined it would feel like? Well, I suppose, I used to wonder like anybody who's been in there, will it hurt? even if it is an instantly fatal wound, like, say, one to the brain.

I remember I used to think sometimes in Vietnam, especially if I'd seen comrades who were killed. If they felt somehow in that last flashing instant of their life, some enormous amount of pain was compressed. Well, as I discovered, is that you actually don't feel a thing. the impact is so stunning from a high caliber high I mean a high velocity bullet that something happens to your system and I didn't feel any pain in fact for probably two or three hours after I was shot by then were you in a medical setting yeah I was I was in a hospital by that you did some of your recovery back at your parents house the house you grew up in and you've seen said that you wrote you wrote some of a rumor of war, your Vietnam memoir, in the bedroom that you grew up in. And when I read that, I thought, wow, that's so weird because, I mean,

a lot of people I know feel or used to feel that if they went, that when they went back to the bedroom that they grew up in after they were an adult, they'd feel like a child again. You know, that you see that same furniture, stuff that's still on the wall. Your parents are there. And somehow, you know, you're kind of a kid. again. But what was it like for you to be in that kind of setting at writing this, I mean, this really complicated memoir of war? Well, I think considering that I was then confined either to a wheelchair or to crutches, that I was almost naturally in a childlike situation. I mean, I had my wife and two kids with me, so we were all living in the same house.

It was almost like one of those old immigrant families. And it was so intensely boring, you know, to be confined to a wheelchair in a rather ordinary suburb of Chicago that, as a matter of fact, oddly enough, writing that book gave me some focus, a purpose in life and was also partly an antidote. to this intense boredom. I think I would have either been perhaps reading some of the time, but probably most of the time would have been sitting in that wheelchair or in a chair with my legs up and cast watching TV.

Some of your new novel Acts of Faith is about extremism. And, you know, again, it's set in the Civil War in Sudan and the government in Khartoum is an extremist, Islamist, government. You've had firsthand experience. with extremists, when you were covering Lebanon, you were captured for a week. Who captured you, and what did they do to you? I was captured by a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization that was called the PDFLP.

They captured me because they thought that I was a CIA agent, which is rather frequent accusation made against journalists' particularly American journalists in the Middle East and elsewhere, but particularly in the Middle East. So what did they do to you in the week that you were held hostage? Well, I wasn't held hostage. They weren't holding me for a ransom or anything. Captive, captive, yeah.

They interrogated me over and over and over again, often with questions that were ludicrous. they I was subjected to mild physical and at times severe psychological torture you know things like having my hands tied behind my back and then my ankles or my legs bent back so my ankles were then tied to my hands you know as you bent like a bow and then a guy sticks an AK-47 in your temple and says you must now answer these questions truthfully you know no kidding

and and then or or they stuffed me in a in a hole in the ground that was where rats were crawling around

and things like that for 24 hours with no food, no water, no light, hardly any air that sort of thing, all of which they were trying to break me down

convinced that I was a CIA agent. At any moment, I would suddenly, you know, like a person in the courtroom melodrama, leap up and scream, I did it. I did it. But of course, I didn't since I wasn't one. So what were some of the things that went through your mind about what you should tell them? I mean, you told them the truth that you weren't a CIA agent. But you did risk getting killed during this week? I'm sure that that was a real possibility. So did you think of like lying and making stuff up together? them? Yeah, yeah, I sure did. I'm there a couple of times I actually thought about telling them what I figured they wanted to hear because you get the feeling that they're going to hold you there forever and that you're going to go through 10, 12, 14 hours of grilling every single day

for in the indefinite future and that you'll be driven crazy. to which was added the extra stress as the Palestinian camp they were keeping me in was under fire from the Lebanese Air Force and the Lebanese army. It was being bombed and shelled at the same time. So while I'm answering these questions, every now and then the interrogation would be interrupted

by a 250-pound bomb going off in the next block or something like that. So, yeah, I was tempted at times to just lie to them And in fact, after I was released, a CIA agent from the American embassy called me in to his office and wanted to know if I had done just that. And if I might have, you know, started to throw out names of people I knew in the embassy just to give my captors names and say, yeah, these guys are CIA agents too. So that was, you know, one of the things I did think of, but I decided that it would be a bad idea. You know, people talk about war as a crucible that will test you and shape you. Probably being in a hole in the ground held captive is a crucible too.

Do you feel like you were tested and learned things about yourself and even about your threshold of pain when you were. held captive for that week in Lebanon? Oh, certainly. When you've had experiences like that, and then you encounter the more or less ordinary stresses of life, even what one could consider, say, extreme stresses, I don't know, like say you're broke, or you can't make the mortgage payment or whatever that,

you know, that's nothing to sneeze at, nothing to laugh at. But when you've been through something like that, you, in the midst of a more ordinary crisis, you will stop and you'll say, oh my God, you know, I got through that. This is absolutely nothing compared to that, and I'll get through this easy enough. So what are, if this isn't too personal, what are some of the things you feel you learned about yourself in the extreme and dangerous situations you were in, you know, as a journalist, as a Marine,

as a captive? Well, I think, you know, let's say on the flattering side. Yeah. On the flattering side, I certainly learned that I was tougher than I thought. Not in the sense of a, you know, chest thumping macho, tough guy, but I meant that I could endure and keep my head under extreme stress better than I would have thought. On the unflattering side, I know in Vietnam, and it's described fully in a rumor of war, and it would take me way too long to go into a full description of it. But when I was in Vietnam, I had discovered that I had a capacity to be violent and dark in my actions in a way that totally shocking.

me. And I didn't think that that sort of thing was in me. And, you know, I've got this main character here in the novel, in Acts of Faith, Douglas Braithwaite, about, who never, who does have a dark force within him, but he denies that it exists. And his partner, Fitzhue Martin, later says of him that those who deny the dark angel, in their natures will become prey to it. And they won't recognize that dark force when it summons you, when it knocks at the door and summons you to do something that is really reprehensible. And I think that arises out of a discovery that I made about myself when I was in Vietnam.

Since your Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, was such an important book about the war, I'm just wondering what you made of the whole debate about John Kerry's service in Vietnam during the election and how divided the country still seemed to be about the meaning of that war and the justness of that war. The Vietnam War and the 1960s will not be over until, oh, I'll predict, let's say, 2040. that is roughly when the last baby boomer will die. And I just think that the divisions that were aroused during that era and by that war will continue to be fought by that particular generation, again, until they no longer have any effect on the daily and political life of the country.

Philip Caputo, thank you very much for talking about that. Well, thank you, Terry. Thanks. Good to be here. Kudo spoke to Terry Gross in 2005. He wrote the Vietnam War Memoir, A Rumor of War, which became part of the canon of wartime literature. He died last week at the age of 84. Coming up, we mark the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough and listened to a portion of our 1985 interview with him. I'm David B. and Cooley, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. Incouly.

Sir David Attenborough, the globally famous host, narrator and creator of nature films marked his 100th birthday last week. His celebrated and popular natural history programs, since he began hosting and producing them for the BBC in the 1950s, have included Planet Earth and the Blue Planet series, The Life of Birds, and Life on Earth, which traveled the globe to trace the history of evolution. London's Natural History Museum noted the occasion of Attenborough's 100th birthday by naming a new genus and species of parasitic wasp after him. PBS did it by presenting a new special with Attenborough's host, allowing him to look back on

what he considered one of his finest achievements, the series Life on Earth. Today, we're noting the occasion by listening back to his 1985 interview with Terry Gross, where she asked him about making his Life on Earth and other nature documentary series. When you're a cameraman looking for animals to display, the birds of the display, birds have displayed its feathers or whatever are you sitting there with the camera waiting and waiting having it poised ready to be turned on? Well of course it's the

sort of the classic thing for the natural history of cameraman to say modestly well I'm afraid we waited nine months and 27 or whatever you know to get that shot in point of fact if the truth is to be told the better cameraman you are and the better

naturalist you are the less time you have to wait if you really know enough you know well, I mean, it's like turning up in England and hoping to get cuckoos in December. I mean, you know, they don't occur. Let's have cuckoos go cuckoo in spring. And so you turn up in spring.

And if you really know, you know which week to turn up. And similarly, if you decide that you really want to have, what you would say, a monkey, the alpha male of a troop displaying at a certain time, you find out the man who knows about that. particular species and perhaps has been working with them for a year. And he'll say, oh, what if that's what you want? I can take you, you want to meet Fred, who is the alpha male of group three, and Fred always turns up in the morning, about half past five with the troop on that log there

just by the river. And he always sees Willie from the other side of the river who is frightened, very fed up, and they're great rivals, and he always displays. And you go down there, and you get there half an hour before Fred's due. You set up the camera, Fred turns up, and he does it. And so you go away and you said, fine, I've got the shot I wanted and I did it in a day. But that is a measure of, not in that instance, your success, it's the measure of the skill of the scientific observer who has spent his life studying that troop.

And that's the fact of the matter. So that actually boasting how patient you were and how long it took you to get the shot is a kind of confession of inadequacy. Have any of your camera people ever? gotten hurt or attacked by one of the animals who they'd come to shoot? No. None of my friends, thank goodness, have ever

had, I mean, we've all had sort of mild occasions to climb a tree rather faster than one would think. Are you good at that? I've no idea what I'm good. All I know is that when the rhinoceros charges, you find yourself 12 foot up a tree that has no brown

beneath you and you can't imagine how you got there. But actually, again, that again is a sort of the wrong kind of boast. If you're a good enough naturalist, you should know how close you can get to an elephant before it charges. You should be able to read the way it moves its ears and the way it shakes its head and which way the wind is going and so on to know that that is as close as you want to get. And it's not my job or any of us are job in all. order to demonstrate to be brave. Our job is to get the pictures. And you don't actually get

pictures by siding an elephant to charge you and pound your camera to little bits of cogwheels into the dust. Just curious, how close can you get to an elephant before he charges? You can get, it depends on the wind. On the wind? Yeah, I don't mean the elephant's wind. I mean. What does the wind have to do with it? Well, because of your smell. Oh. I mean, if the wind suddenly, what you do, if you want to get close to elephants, which isn't a particular ambition of mine. I've spent a certain amount of time closer than me. You get one of

your silk stockings or nylon stockings and you put talcum powder in it, face powder. And you hold it in a little bag and you continually bob it up and down so that you can see from the way this very fine talcum palber is drifting, which way this is less than the wind.

This is just the faintest breath of air. As long as the talcum powder keeps coming towards you, which is how you should have been approaching the element in the first place, then it's okay. You're smelling the elephant he's not smelling you. But if that talcum powder starts to move away from you, then you can bet your bottom dollar

that the elephant's going to smell you quite soon, and this is the time you ought to retreat. So the elephant's not really paying attention to seeing you smelling you? It doesn't like the smell of human beings. Its eyesight's not all that good. It has very small eyes. And, of course, one on the other side of its head, as it were, so it's viewing from the side all the time.

And you're pretty, you know. So it's, it is smell. and sound, which particularly get it upset. You've been making naturalist movies for over 30 years. Film technology has changed a lot during that time. Is what you're able to show us different because of how the technology has changed? It's changed beyond recognition.

The first films I made back in 1952 in Africa, where you had a clockwork camera. I mean, you had to wind it up. And it only ran for about, I think, 40 seconds or something. That was the longest shot you could take. There was no way in which you could actually record sound at the same time synchronously. The lenses were small focal lengths so that you could really never get any decent close-ups, without that is, getting much closer than you would wish to be.

The film stocks were extremely slow, so that you couldn't actually film unless the light was very bright. You couldn't film in the jungle, for example. Well, at least you couldn't film colour, certainly. It was just not enough light. Now, of course, you have cameras with marvellous lenses, very sensitive stocks, very fast lenses, very long-focused lenses, so that you can do with the cameras, all kinds of things that you couldn't do before. You can get resolution, definition of your picture much better than it was. But also, there are many other sort of things you can do recently.

I mean, in the last, well, for life on Earth, for example, we wanted to show a mole running down its tunnel. Nobody had ever shown a mole running down this tunnel. Perhaps nobody had ever wanted to show a mole running down this tunnel. But we decided we did. And so we went to the local hospital and borrowed their fiber optics, which they use to put down people's throats and look inside their stomachs or entire their lungs. And we used that fiber optic device to put it in a moles tunnel. Sex and violence is such a big issue.

In television programming, how much of sex, mating or violence parentheses, one animal killing another for its food, do you think it's proper to show for a documentary series on television? Well, the curious thing, the curious thing is that if you show one sequence of copulation, it may last, I mean, in terms of actual technical, of when it starts and when it finishes, no more than about, say, perhaps, let us say, for the sake of argument, a minute and a half, people will be convinced afterwards that the programme showed nothing else

I mean they'll say that programme I mean why you went on and on and on and on about that sequence we can't possibly understand it was really awful of you and that of course is because the images these images are so powerful that hit us subliminally and psychologically

so powerfully that we are knocked right off balance by them as you say I used to be a film director I used to be a director of programmes and I remember very well, we have a fairly liberal view about those sort of scenes that you can do. But on the other hand, we had a financial program, which was devoted to doing an item about bloodstock and horses and the value in terms of economics of what thoroughbred stock was and so on.

And they had an interview in which a man was talking to a breeder about this. And over the breeder's shoulder in the background, there was a stallion servicing a mayor. Now, I don't know how familiar you are with stallions servicing mayors, but I can tell you it's a fairly spectacular proceeding. And I was as mad as anything as the network director that the irresponsibility of doing that, because actually it was totally irrelevant.

I mean, of course, he thought it was quite, the producer thought it was quite entertaining because it was marginally peripherally appropriate. But it was not centrally appropriate. And it was not about the economy. and the result, but the image was so powerful that nobody could possibly listen to about the economics while this extraordinary drama was going on behind. Now, that seems to me irresponsible and totally indefensible. But if you're doing a program about the nature of display or the techniques that the scorpion had it being a very antique organism and how, in fact, the evolution of sexual behaviours developed amongst that group of invertebrate animals,

then it seems to be totally proper that you should do it. Of course you can be lascivious about it, just as you can be lascivious and obscene about violence, and you can use shots of lions tearing the entrails from some poor wildebeest. I mean, it happens, you didn't organise it, and there it is, but is it what the programme's about? Is it necessary for to be an accurate tooth? If you actually sanitise it so that you never put any of that in,

that's just as bad, because that gives a totally misleading idea to what the world of nature is like. David Attenborough, speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. More after a break, this is fresh air. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's 1985 interview with David Attenborough. Last week, he celebrated his 100th birthday.

Did you well grow up in the city? I'm in a town, yeah. Well, it was a city, yes. But one that I could get to the country fairly easily on a bicycle. Yeah, because I was kind of wondering how you became as comfortable with different physical environments because I think a lot of people who grew up in the city adapt less easily to exotic locations and climates. I'm not sure that's true, actually. I think a lot of us who grew up in cities developed great hunger for these kind of places

and a sufficient hunger to kind of quell the... uncomfortableness of involved in going there. I grew up, I certainly spent a long time in the countryside looking for fossils or hedgehogs or whatever, but I was certain a city boy. When did you decide that you weren't going to live the academic life and write textbooks, but instead you were going to write popular books and make movies that a popular audience could appreciate?

Well, when I was an undergraduate studying zoology, it sounds amazing now to say this, but it is true, and this was in Cambridge in 1944, 45. The kind of zoology that we learnt was a zoology which was laboratory-based. Most of the animals you dealt with were dead. You were cutting them up to learn about their anatomy. Or if you were studying live animals, behaving, as it were,

then there were rats running through mazes or frogs jumping in front of a checkered board or something. What you didn't do was to go out and look at exciting animals like elephants or lions. In Africa, that was not zoology. That was either big game hunting or natural history or something, but it certainly wasn't science because you couldn't... It was kind of thought that science involved manipulating

in an experimental way the animals you were studying. But unbeknownst to me at that time, the great pioneers of animal behavioral studies, Conrad Lawrence, for example, were actually working on this behavioral science that we now call ethology. But I was then called up and I went to the Navy. And when I came out of the Navy,

it's still seen that they were still cutting up dogfish and watching mice in mazes. And I thought, well, this is not for me. And I went into publishing and then got into the BBC and persuaded them to let me make animal films. Did they reach an audience right away? Yes.

Yes, animal films have always had a huge audience in Britain at any rate, and I suspect here. I really think that people, and I'm with them, think that there are few things more beautiful than a butterfly or a hummingbird, and that there's a few things more dramatic than a party of warrior ants invading termites. There are two things more extraordinary than some of the breeding techniques of amphibin and so on. and it's always had a huge audience. Do you think it's the beauty of it? No, I think it's all those things, the beauty, the drama, the fascination, the unexpectedness, the uninhibitedness, the truth in a curious way. I mean, animals don't lie to suit the camera, as it were.

What they do is what they do. They may lie to one another, in fact, they do. But they don't lie to the camera. Do you ever find yourself, though, doing the equivalent of only looking to fold? photograph pretty people, you know, like looking to photograph animals who are especially photogenic or landscapes that are especially dramatic or beautiful. That, in fact, is one of the reasons why I determined to do those two series, life and earth and living planet.

Because there's a great temptation, as you say, to do the pretty ones all the time. I know perfectly well how you can get an enormously popular program. If you want an enormously popular animal program, it's not difficult. You might just put a chimpanzee in it. That's the equivalent of having an infant. That's right. If you want to make an unpopular program, you put a snake in it. But if you're on the other hand, you say, I wish to survey the animal kingdom,

you have to do programs about snakes and chimpanzees. And so you have to do programs entirely about insects, which are not all that pleasant. I remember starting life on Earth, because I said we've got to start at the very beginning and go from the beginning of life all the way through, the first program was going to be almost entirely about algae and single-celled organisms, you see. And I was trying to sell this to a television executive,

make sure that they get some money, a decent budget for this. And he said, the first program is of great importance, that's what the audience is going to judge it on. So what's your first program going to be? And I told him it was going to be about this. And he said, how the hell? He said, are you going to get 10,000 people grabbed by,

the throat by green slime, he said, which indeed is a question. Making programs about green slime is not as easy as making it about chimpanzees, but if you're going to be comprehensive and responsible, you should try and do so. Did you keep that as the first show? Oh, yes. And did it work? Did you get the honest?

Yes, it did, fortunately. Is there a desired response you'd like viewers to have to your programs? Well, I'm, if I'm totally honest, I have to say that the reason I make these kind of programs is because I find the subject matter fascinating. and therefore find very enjoyable. There's nothing I enjoy more than watching animals doing things. And I would hope that other people would enjoy them.

That's the primary thing. Now, of course, if you think that the wildlife and animals and plants are enjoyable and important and somebody that says they are in danger, then you have a sort of obligation. to make sure that you can do what you can to help them and protect them. And so I am delighted if a subsidiary purpose or subsidiary effect of these films is that people also say not only is this wonderful and marvellous to look at, but it is valuable, it is threatened, and therefore you must do something

to make sure that it's not destroyed. Then I'm delighted. Sir David Attenborough speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. Last week, he celebrated his 100th birthday. His new TV special, Life on Earth, Attenborough's Greatest Adventure, is available to stream at pbs.org and the PBS app. Coming up, critic at large John Powers reviews the new film, The Wizard of the Kremlin.

This is fresh air. This is fresh air. The new movie The Wizard of the Kremlin is set in Russia in the years from the fall of communism in the early 1990s to the period just before the invasion of Ukraine. It stars Paul Dano as a one-time artist who becomes the media consultant to Vladimir Putin. He's played by Jude Law.

Our critic at large, John Powers, says that even though the movie doesn't always work dramatically, you'll leave knowing a lot more about how Putin came to be a dictator. Back in olden times, the movies usually waited until political leaders were safely buried before putting them on screen. We're less deferential now. From Oliver Stone's W, which hit theaters when George W. Bush was still in office,

to Ali Abassi's The Apprentice, which came out when Donald Trump was seeking his second term. Filmmakers now calmly fictionalized stories about those still in power. The latest to take a bow is Vladimir Putin. Played by Jude Law, surely Vladimir would be flattered. he's the dark star at the center of the Wizard of the Kremlin, an exceedingly interesting, if sometimes frustrating, new film. Based on a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, it's been adapted for the screen by two top drawer talents,

director Olivier Asiyas and co-writer Emmanuel Carrere. Blending made-up characters and real-life big shots, they offer a bouncy history of how Russia went from a Soviet dictatorship to a new kind of czarism. The wizard of the title isn't actually Putin, but his media advisor Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano with plump cheeks that look as hermetically polished as Teflon.

During an interview with a Yale professor, that's Jeffrey Wright, the now-retired Beranov looks back on his career. It begins during the fall of communism in the Gorbachev era and continues into the lawless 90s, when mafia-style capitalism impoverished millions, but turned some schemers into billionaire oligarchs. In that time, Baranov goes from selling electronics

to becoming an avant-garde theater director who falls in love with a cynical actress. That's Alicia Vakandr. When she dumps him for an oil oligarch, Baranov realizes that the arts don't matter in the new Anything Goes Russia. He decides that he wants to be at the heart of his time. So he goes into TV, creating trashy reality shows, and becoming a protege of Boris Barasovsky, a real-life oligarch who owns the country's biggest channel.

Berizovsky is looking for a sturdy, malleably corrupt successor to the Russian Federation's fading president, drunken Boris Yeltsin. He settles on a balding, taciturn, slightly nondescript KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. Although Putin's at first reluctant, Baranov persuades him to run for office by arguing that Russians have always needed, indeed, craved, authority from the top. Now there's an idea that Putin can get behind. He quickly turns on the clever Beresovsky, who thought he could control his creation. Always a mistake.

And Baranov becomes Putin's media guru until 2014, dreaming up things like Russia's use of the Internet to destabilize the West by flooding social media with extremist ideas. Early on, Baranov, who always speaks in an eerie hush, tries to convince the smirking Putin that pursuing war in Chechnya is a losing political strategy. I'm sorry, but I would think twice before getting involved in that mess. These past few years, Chechnya has killed more political careers here in Moscow

than enemies on the battlefield. None of them have put enough energy into the issue. those politicians on a war that dare not speak its name. A humane war like the Americans do. I'm talking about something else. I'm not interested in winning the Nobel Peace Prize. What interests me is restoring integrity to the Russian Federation. I want comment on geopolitics.

It's not my field of expertise. What I will say, however, Is that it's political suicide? I think you're mistaken. I think you've let Westerners persuade you that an electoral campaign has to be two teams of economists discussing PowerPoint presentations. In Russia, power,

something else entirely. The Wizard of the Kremlin contains so much sharp dialogue that I wish its story was more dramatic. While individual scenes brim with life, Aseas really knows how to evoke a series. society on the move. The action as a whole feels rushed, episodic, and a tad abstract. For instance, Fekondri's character is less a full-fledged woman than an alluring symbol of Russia's divided soul. Yet despite all its flaws, the movie's worth seeing just for law's portrayal of Putin,

which isn't merely juicy but revelatory. In his composed posture, ironic smile, and flashes of anger, we sense what makes this man tick. His canniness, brutality, rough humor, paranoia, and resentment of the West, which he believes, tries to make him feel small. Watching Los Putin in action, I got a clearer sense of why this man, whom Baranov calls the Tsar, jails or murders anyone he finds threatening, and why he feels righteous about invading Ukraine. In contrast, the wizard himself remained.

elusive. Based on a real-life figure named Vladislav Serkhov, Baranov is opaque, perhaps even to himself. Some viewers are annoyed by this and by Dano's stylized deadpan. What is he thinking? But the wizard's inner life isn't what matters. It's his deeds. He's one of those brainy, morally vacant political strategists you find all over the world. As he sits in his country house talking, you wonder whether Baranov ever believed in the dictatorship he was helping to create, or whether he just enjoyed seeing his ideas triumph in the real world, like staging a successful play. In the end, the Wizard of the Kremlin is less about exposing Putin's authoritarian nature than about capturing an emblematic figure of our age. Baranov is a man who's excited by serving malevolent power, even knowing it will

probably destroy him. John Powers reviewed The Wizard of the Kremlin, now in theaters. On Monday's show, growing up underground, the son of two American revolutionaries, Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayers were leaders of the Weather Underground, the radical group that planted bombs and collaborated with the Black Panthers to protest racism and the war in Vietnam. Their son, Zaid Ayers-Dorn, has a new memoir. Hope you can join us.

You can subscribe to our YouTube. channel at YouTube.com slash This is Fresh Air. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind the scene shorts, and iconic interviews from the archive. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorak.

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