Unclear and Present Danger - JFK (feat. Alexis Coe)

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

It’s episode 14 of Unclear and Present Danger and we’re talking Oliver Stone’s ridiculous yet incredibly-compelling conspiracy thriller, JFK. Jamelle and John are joined by the historian Alexis Coe to discuss the film, as well as the real John F. Kennedy, his life and legacy. This is a long and fruitful conversation, that covers everything from the Boomer wish-fulfillment which animates the movie to the political consequences of conspiracy-thinking.Once again, our new logo is courtesy of the great Rachel Eck! You can find her on Instagram.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieAlexis CoeLinks from the episode!New York Times front-page for December 20, 1991Oliver Stone’s New York Times op-ed defending the film.Miller Center of Public Affairs page on the Kennedy presidency.Politico Magazine on John F. Kennedy and Margaret CoitOnce Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath by Mimi Alford

Question everything. Now we're through the looking glass here, people. White is black and black is white. You don't believe me? I don't know. All this time, you never believe me. I just want to raise our children and live a normal life. I won't learn life back!

Hey, look, this thing's bigger than all of us. Now, how many corpses it gonna take for you lawyers to figure out what you want? People got to know, people got to know why he was killed. He was killed. Do you know what you've done to me? I'm a dead man! Well, if they can kill the president, they can certainly get me. Your mouse fighting a gorilla.

You're close. You're closer than you think. There's going to be an attempt to kill you somewhere between here and your arms. I say let justice be done, though, the heavens fall. Welcome to Episode 14 of Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrill of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I write a newsletter called Unpopular Front, and I'm working on a book about

American politics in the early 1990s. Today, we are talking about Oliver Stone's JFK. And we have a guest. We are joined by the historian Alexis Coe. Her most recent book is You Never Forget Your First, a biography of George Washington. And if I have a this correctly, she is working on a book about the young John F. Kennedy. Welcome, Alexis, to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Before we get into talking about the movie proper, I'm just going to give some quick JFK facts. If you do not already know, not this is going to happen a lot. JFK, the movie facts, I'm sure we will get into JFK, the person facts, which are sort of tangentially related to the movie.

Okay, so JFK is a 1991 American political thriller starring Kevin Costner and virtually every male actor of note at the time. That includes Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, and Michael Rooker

with appearances from Joe Pesci, Jack Lemon, Walter Mathau, Ed Asner, Donald Sutherland, and many, many others. There are really only two big rules for women in the cast, and they are performed by the great Lori Metcalf and Sissy Spacic. A quick plot synopsis.

Excuse me. A quick plot synopsis. JFK presents the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, led by the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. When Garrison begins to doubt conventional thinking on the murder, he faces government resistance, and after the killing of suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, he closes the case. Later, however, Garrison reopens the investigation,

finding evidence of an extensive conspiracy behind Kennedy's death. I think that's a good way to segue into, I feel like the big point I'm going to make about this movie, which is that it is insane. It's an insane movie. It's absolutely wild. Alexis, what is your experience with this movie? Have you seen it before? Was this a rewatch? Was it a first watch? I think I haven't watched this since high school, or yeah, I think high school. I think it was like an AP US history free day sort of thing. And I remember it took a few days, but I assume that was because we were doing other work, but we weren't. It is just so long.

And so you should know, though, I love any period drama. I will watch anything. I have seen Turn too many times. And a part of it is, so history. by Hollywood is never accurate but a part of the fun is sort of seeing what is an accurate and um I had so much more fun with it this time last time I was like oh this is just boomer paradise but this time I really I got it John go ahead yeah you know my relationship with this movie uh look I'm not going to say it's not entertaining it absolutely is um but uh I have a lot of problems with it for it's it's

It's kind of encapsulating the boomer paranoid mentality that it has. It's the myth creation that it does. And they actually kind of like, I mean, this might be taking it a bit far, but in retrospect maybe, I mean, this is a real cultural phenomenon when it was released in 1991. It was mostly hailed as being like a good movie. There was a few dissenting critical voices. But I think it actually had some pernicious effects on the American psyche, not the least of which being that people believe that this is the actual, what actually happened with the Kennedy assassination. Like, they just, like this story that the movie gives is like, oh, yeah, that's what happened. So that annoys me as a historian.

And also, I think, you know, we're governed so much by. Paranoid conspiracy thinking in the present is such a big part of our cultural, political climate. And I blame it a little bit on this movie and the sort of mainstreaming of JFK conspiracy theories as being like, oh, kind of both fun, but also maybe true. So I don't know, the movie, the movie on a political and cultural level kind of bugs me. You know, there are, it's a, it's a fairly well-made movie, I'll give it that. But, and a lot of these actors are terrific. I mean, they're all, I mean, not Kevin Costner, in my opinion, but, like, you know, Joe Pesci is always a scream. He doesn't always keep his southern accent in this movie when he starts to get really mad.

He kind of lapses back into his New York accent. I'm probably going to make a lot of comments about the accents in this movie, which are wild, beginning to end. And yeah, Tommy, yeah, go ahead. Tommy Lee Jones's characters will scream. Like, yeah, the movie's a scream. Like, that's the thing with a lot, I think a lot of, like, Oliver Stone's political dramas, which is just like, there is something, like, generally enjoyable and outrageous about it. But, yeah, like, I was watching it. First of all, a few times I was just, like, cracked up how bad Kevin Costner's line delivery was.

I was just like, geez. But then, uh, I was just thinking to myself, man. like this movie really fucked up a lot of people's minds. Yeah. But yeah, like I'm not going to say that this is not like a fun movie to watch to throw on and like be like, oh yeah, JFK, pretty pretty entertaining movie. Yeah, no, I'm in the sort of the same boat as you both. This is my second watch. I only have watched this for the first time a couple years ago. I was like on a long train ride and I was like I need to occupy myself with the movie and JFK's three hours and I've never seen it so let's do it and I was sort of riveted the entire time

and I said this on Twitter during this last rewatch but the experience of watching it especially when you're just sort of really locked into it and the movie is it's so dynamic it's so dynamically edited you might even say that it has a lot of editing it's dynamically edited Oliverstone really is a kind of first-rate visual stylist um and it it hooks you really quickly and so you get locked in to the movie and you're kind of you're with it you're on its wavelength and then if you uh you know if you have your wits about you as a person you finish the movie and for a second you're like oh yeah this is this is all true and then you remember that it's all bullshit um and it's it's like coming down from a high

It's like a very, it's a very weird feeling to finish that movie. And for a second, a friend of mine on Twitter said that he once took 80 milligrams of THC and watched this on a plane, which, which sounds night. Yeah, I was going to say, that does not sound like a good time necessarily. And then he said he finished the movie and he believed everything. And that's, I feel like that is sort of, that's the, that's the vibe. I think the movie can, it's the spell it can cast on you. And that's what happened to me the first time I watched it.

And then I was like, no, this is all very silly. But in the second time, I should have made way through it was like, you know, when you get to the Donald Sutherland monologue, you're like, you're like, yeah, man, this is it. He's got it. 17 minutes long, I timed it. Really? That model is 17 minutes long? Yeah, so 17 minutes because I just, you know, I was halfway through it and thought, this is really long. Did this take an entire class period, senior year?

17 minutes. Wow. I didn't realize it was that long. That is crazy. I mean, if you're going to have anyone deliver just straight exposition for 17 minutes, you could do much, much worse than Donald Southern. Sure. I could watch a whole movie with just that.

I mean, and that was the thing that was sort of straight. And we keep talking about this, like alluding to consensus history and how this is Oliver Stone's idea. of the JFK assassination. This is not that he made mainstream. It's not what happened. It's a great example also of boomers sort of tending their garden of generational trauma, which I feel like we're all victims of. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

These two things are what I really hope we talk about in this episode, in this podcast. But before we get to them, we have to, look at what was on the New York Times front page the day this was released, which was December 20th, 1991. This was a Christmas release. Imagine going to see this after Christmas, opening the packages with the kids, and then settling in for this fever dream, this three-hour fever dream, very incredible.

So I have it up. John, do you want to take it? Sure. So, I mean, the most relevant piece here for our purposes is Yelts and Sweeps up crucial remnants of withering Union, foreign ministry taken. Basically, this is shortly after, I believe, shortly after the coup attempt in Russia, Yeltsin is sort of taking over as president of Russia. The Soviet Union is really on the verge of collapse.

It ends, I think, at Christmas. So that's very interesting. It says President Boris Yeltsin said about swallowing up the remnants of the Soviet state today, taking control of the foreign ministry, the KGB in Parliament, and even Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential office down to his dollars and his phones. Yeah, so this is really very much the end of that. Then there's some other interesting little pieces of 90s history. There's something about bank fraud.

There's a big banking and housing. in loan, I'm saving and loan skinned. All that was going on, there was a banking crisis. Taxpayers had to bail out a lot of banks. Job losses in the New York region erode 80s growth. There was a very

severe recession, especially in New York, and also in the West Coast. You know, a large job losses, you know, not quite as bad as the 2008 financial crisis, but much closer than people are

remember. It was a very, uh, it was a very severe recession. Um, then everything else, federal auditors report rise in abuses and medical billing. I mean, that could have been published anytime and ever really, charming big banks out of billions. Um, this is about Robert Maxwell, uh, who is the father of Gilead Maxwell and his fraudulent, uh, act. activities. So, yeah, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of 90s memes here. And I think, you know, one context to put, which we've discussed a little bit, when you look at this front page, to put JFK in is the populist moment of the early 90s. There was a big growth in a lot of resentment and paranoia about, um, the establishment, uh, feelings of abandonment, uh, betrayal. Um, and you can see the reasons, uh, here. You have banking scandals. You have fraud by elites. You have massive unemployment. I think, you know, JFK really, the movie really resonated in the, in the kind of populist, um, foment of,

of the early 90s, which is, you know, not necessarily what, what people remember. about the 90s, but was definitely a big, a big theme. No, sort of on that note, you can very easily, you know, the overwhelming message of the movie that there is a, you know, deep state conspiracy out to continue endless war. Lans, I mean, for land, I think lands hard will appeal to a lot of people in a moment where There's, like, paranoia about the New World Order, a phrase that's about to kind of emerge from George H.W. Bush's lips, if it hasn't already, George H.E.T.B. Bush, a former CIA director at that. So I think you're right, John, that the populist moment of this, of the early 90s, the extent to which there is a real suspicion of elites were not far out. I mean, the Democratic nomination is already ongoing at this point. The fight for the Democratic Democratic

presidential nomination, but, you know, people don't think of him in this way necessarily now, but Clinton presented himself as a kind of populist figure, a kind of, you know, not just folksie, but someone who understood the common man and the common woman, but stand out for them. So all that is sort of swirling in the atmosphere, like you said, John. Alexis, do you have any thoughts before we move on to the movie proper? I think, no, can I just point out to errors that happen immediately. Just to get them off my chest

and then I promise I won't do this the whole time. But there are two like real tells. So there are, you know, thousands of books on Kennedy, 10,000. And the vast majority are on the assassination. So I just want to

I want to get in there. In the first hour of the movie, Guy Bannister says, Camelot is Smytherines. Camelot doesn't exist yet. Jackie, it will be published by In Life magazine by Theodore White

at the end of the way. It's not, it doesn't exist yet. She's still coming up with it. And she's shown in the emergency room just like with so much blood and there was less blood. That was the only thing. Those are the two things that really bother me

in the beginning. And then there were too many. I mean this, I think this is a good way to jump into what i think we all agree about this movie which is that it is it is Oliverstone was born in 1947 um so my exactly my 1986 oh 1946 so a little a little younger than that and so he would he was a teenager an older teenager and jfk was assassinated he was sort of a prime age right for someone to have invested hopes in jfk and then seen them you know

completely dashed in this movie uh is really it's sort of like it is a boomer kind of primal scream almost about the sort of like lost hope and it it it feels like the entire thing an attempt to impose order on the event to make it make sense for the for for that generation of people no matter what it takes in terms of abusing the historical record and, you know, abusing common sense and logic to make it make sense. Yeah, that's, you know, I just want to know one last thing about the newspapers. I flip to the op-ed section, and there's an op-ed by Oliver Stone responding to some the criticisms of the movie, and the poll quote is behind the immediate establishment's

anger over JFK. And he's basically arguing in the people. piece that, you know, oh, the establishment is upset about this movie because I'm, I pointed out, I'm, I'm on to something, essentially. And, you know, Kennedy would have stopped the militarization of, you know, the United States, which, which I think Alexis will confirm is, is absurd. It's absurd. It's totally absurd because he had increased troops from like 800 to something, 15, 16,000. Right. So, so like the, the conceit of the movie, the central conceit of the movie is, which connects

to this, the, the boomer wish fulfillment of it is, had JFK not been killed, there would have been no war in Vietnam. And he was, he was trying to get us out of it, you know, and all of the skullduggery of the CIA and so, so forth was happening behind his back, and he wanted to end the, I mean, if you know the first thing about Kennedy, it's just not true. He was in love with covert action. He was very taken with the romanticism of it. He was a ferocious cold warrior. In fact, part of his campaign against Nixon was going to the right of him in certain ways on the Cold War. It's true that he was not happy about the Bay of Pigs, but I think that really had more to do with how it made him look politically. it's annoying when you know a little bit about the Kennedy's administration's actual foreign policy you know to see the movie kind of set him up as this mythical figure a proto hippie in a way

and who had he lived all of the problems of the 60s all of its strife and conflicts would not have would not have happened and you know they refer in the movie to all of these they refer they make these references to actual things that were going on. Like they talk about Operation Mongoose, which was sort of all of the CIA planning about undermining Castro and Cuba and all the kinds of crazy plots they came up with. What doesn't movie fails to point out is that that was done under Canada. Kennedy's supervision. I mean, all the documents of Operation Mongoose came across the president's desk, and not all of them were implemented, but a lot of very insane things, like a plan

cooked up by the CIA and the Pentagon to possibly do false flag operations in the U.S. to justify an invasion of Cuba. Okay, they didn't go through with it, but this was the kind of mentality of the time. And I think a mentality that Kennedy shared to a great degree. a really fevered Cold War imaginations. So, yeah, the mythologizing of Kennedy as a figure who I don't want to totally demonize and I think it's a complicated person. But also, you know, he was involved. I mean, he sort of half said yes to the coup and murder of Diem and Vietnam,

which was an accelerating feature of U.S. there. So, you know, I think that the, that if you know even a little bit about the history of time, that the building up of JFK as a person who wanted to end the Cold War, which they literally said in the movie, just silly and annoying to me. And I just want, I just wanted to shout at the scream sometimes. It would be like, no, Kennedy would have loved all of this stuff. Kennedy, the kind of person Kennedy was would have been the kind of person who conspired to assassinate Kennedy in the movie. I don't know that sounds kind of weird, but that's sort of how I felt. Absolutely. He compartmentalized everything, but this idea that he was like a liberal,

a progressive, and it was just too much that he was a beatnik, and he was going to change everything about civil rights in the country, and, you know, the Cold War was going to be over, and he was going to take on the military industrial complex, which, by the way, he was decorated in. He was a Navy hero. And he, you know, he had, that was a big part of his, his charm, his allure. He was really, you know, sold as that. But no, he, there, I think it has to do with our conception of the presidency, which he did really change, which is that, you know, he, obviously, you know, Camelot came about later. But they wore what you see. They were good looking. they were well dressed and it was an entire set whole family but we still understood what he was doing

in real time so i think the thing is you can suspend everything past that point of the assassination so you can say there would be no vietnam but not only would there be no vietnam there'll be no watergate and you know that's and and so that our bright future this sort of arcadian age can be realized um And it's this, this just false sense of self that we always have of superiority. And it really rocked us. Yeah. Yeah, it was deeply traumatic for the generation that experienced it. And I think that the almost sainted image of JFK was created by the assassination in a way.

I mean, he was popular and he was charismatic. But, yeah, the assassination turned him into a, you know, a kind of messianic figure almost, which this movie definitely plays into. So he becomes a symbol of Oliver Stone and, you know, this, this, this, uh, um, belief in their generation that, you know, a wrong turn happened. And this can be blamed on shadowy forces within the national security state. Um, you know, what's interesting is like the establishment is the enemy of this movie and the enemy of Stone's whole conception

of things. But JFK I mean, oh slightly, it was okay, he was an Irish Catholic, so he was not. The WASP establishment loved JFK. They felt he was the they needed new energy, they needed this young Irish guy

who was going to breathe life back into them. And they literally had an almost erotic fascination with him. they they they they really gravitated to him and they thought okay this guy's an intellectual he listens to us um so he was a person who aspired to join the establishment successfully joined the establishment was enamored of its glamour and its power the idea that jfk more than johnson in a way i mean johnson for all's faults was a was a texan of modest background was as

being the opponent of the establishment is also just another absurdity in the movie. I mean, like, the kind of, again, JFK was the creature of all of the things that this movie decries. And, you know, you can't really dissociate him from the defense establishment and the whole world of waspy elites behind that and so on and so forth. So, yeah, I mean, you could go on forever, really, being like, but I think it's just like, why, I guess it's just a very easy way of dealing with history just to say, well, had this one traumatic event not happened, and we could undo this in our minds, every other tension and crisis of the past 30, you know, years. This, you know, in 1992, in 1991, when, when this came out, the JFK assassination was, was, was, was not that long ago. I mean, it was the same time as what we're talking about, you know, it's the same time difference, essentially, you know, the, the, the, the, the early 60s are to what, I mean, it's strange to say this now, but to what the early 90s are, are to us. So this hadn't, this wasn't in far historical memory. I mean, so the fact that there was so much. lack of clarity about it already, and so much myth-making already when it was in living memory, I think is really remarkable. And that was the, I mean, oh, sorry, I was just going to say that that's something that

we can credit Oliver Stone with. You know, it's sort of, this is the challenging thing about artistic interpretations of history. A year later, because of the pressure the movie put on, you know, Congress passed the John F. Kennedy the assassination records collection act. And surely the stuff is not, we don't have as much as we should, and we haven't gotten in time. But he did actually make a difference. And you're absolutely right.

There just wasn't, the cultural memory was not completely formed at that point. And this had a huge impact on it. Alexis, let me ask you, what do you think happened with JFK's assassination? So I've heard from, this is two, two things I like. I did a talk for the LBJ Library, and we were making a small talk, and I brought up two sensitive subjects, just back to back. I asked them who they thought assassinated before the talk, JFK. And then I also asked them if they get along with Caro now, with Robert Carrow.

They didn't use to talk to him, even if he was there. They would hand out invitations to things to everyone else but him. They would, like, go around, you get it researcher, you get it researcher. And nope, sorry, Kara. And just a bunch of pettiness, they said, you know, a bunch of different things. But what people who work at presidential libraries and associations seem to think is that Castro was behind it, which I'm going to take Oswald. I'm going to take him. Okay.

So you don't think there was a conspiracy as such. It was that you're a lone gunman person. I don't know. but I know what didn't happen. And so all of these things, even the, even the like going to the site ahead of time that he's like, well, you know, during the 17-minute monologue, he talks about how that he, if he had not been sent to what, the South Pole, I believe, he would have been in Dallas looking at all the different windows and roads and all of that. That's not true. That's not the CIA's job. that's that secret service and also the bubble top all of that that was Kennedy insisting that they don't use that like there was so much that just didn't yeah it didn't make sense me so I don't know what happened but I know it didn't happen right and the movie is just full of these pseudo facts about well why do they do this well they didn't at an point of fact and it creates the impression through this kind of dizzying array of fake facts I mean a lot of it is just

completely fabricated that like oh it sounds like well if all of these things are facts it does suggest well some of them just flat out aren't it's kind of dazzling in the amount of information it bombards you with where it's just like it seems like it has like I think we all you know we're all historically minded people when you read history and you do historical research the sheer amount of factual information has a certain truth, you know, it has a certain grain where you're like, yeah, this has a lot of little facts and it's starting to add up into a picture. And I think the movie sort of approximates historical record in its detail. But a lot of that detail is fabricated. Right, right. I mean,

the thing, and I sort of said this a little earlier, but the thing, I mean, I think the thing the the thing the movie does. And I think this is unintentional, right? Like, I think Oliver Stone believed he was making, like, this is going to blow the lid off of the JFK assassination. That's what Oliver Stone thought he was doing. But what he actually did was make a movie that might be the single best cinematic depiction of what is so seductive about conspiracy theories, right?

Of what exactly is so compelling about conspiracy thinking? And that is this idea that you can essentially take this, you can take this melange of real facts and fake facts and suppositions and observations, and you can kind of turn it into a unified and coherent narrative that gets to the bottom of some secret or some mystery, that imparts onto you a kind of hidden truth, takes a veil from your eyes. It's like the first line of carry on my wayward's son, right? Like it kind of, that's what it can do. And I mean, the character of Jim Garrison based off of a real person, this movie is based

off of a book by Jim Garrison, who was a New Orleans district attorney, and he did actually, you know, try a guy as a conspirator in the JFK assassination. but Kevin Costner's character of Jim Garrison I mean his character developed over the course of the film is exactly this but in the film it's portrayed is the scales falling from his eyes and him seeing the truth but we know what's happening basically is he's becoming like cue-pilled right like he's becoming a conspiracy mania

and I think the movie does and again unintentionally does a tremendous job of showing just how seductive that is, right? Like, just how much, just how attractive that is. Um, and how it's actually legitimately difficult to escape. Like, as you go deeper, it's hard to break yourself from it. I mean, the, the final courtroom scene, which is, again, like a half hour in my mind, that was like a, that was like 10 minutes of courtroom. But watching it, there's like, this is like a, this is like a, you know, a, a. A, you know, a. A. fifth of the movie is this is this sequence the courtroom sequence but the court from the from the movie's perspective this is jim karrison making his heroic last stand for the truth but if you just

like kind of like tweak your perspective a little bit this is the rate these are the ravings of a maniac and and the jury the jury acquitted him immediately they can't escape that historic yeah that historical fact which is like well the case was garbage And I don't know that much about this Clay Bertrand or Clay Shaw, but there was a, in the movie, it's a deeply homophobic thing going on in the film. And in, I think in reality, which was that there was some connection of this conspiracy to a gay underworld in New Orleans, which, you know, I think in retrospect, that part of the movie has adds to its purient fascination

but perhaps is not aged particularly well. I think isn't they're sort of different so when people present these characters they have to be one dimensional right when you when you translate to the screen and

Garrison therefore you know so it sort of has to be like either Icarus or the Phoenix and Garrison we sort of we do see him though as like a very good person and he's he in reality was homophobic was not his his reputation was not as pristine um i think i i think maybe half his staff quit we only saw one person quit so he was um so i feel like we got both sides which was really exciting which is the allure of of this cabal and and figuring it out and thinking like okay this does make sense and it's denied us something

we feel entitled to, which is a better, you know, current life. And, um, and then at the same time, it, yeah, it, I don't know. It's just, it's complicated in this way that, so, so we have this perfect person and then we have Shaw who's like supposed to be a terrible guy, right? CIA, um, you know, has these like weird orgies where everyone's gold and, it's it's very strange this is like gold body paint that there's all sorts of everything that you would imagine it's just they're all just cliches um but shaw was actually a really good um guy and he was part of the community and he was a great fundraiser um so so i think that's what's interesting to me is is really how these two that everything sort of switched around in this way and and

And one of the things that's so compelling to me is that we're seeing both at once on this screen, which you don't often see in this way because they're just starting to figure out that it's crazy. You know, they're just like there's the initial pushback, but they don't have information yet. So I just, I really like that real time. It's not, yeah, you have to sort of weigh both at once. And obviously it was very effective. I think, yeah, basically I'm really, I'm really.

reading Stone's op-ed, and it's just so, the method of argumentation is sort of the method of argumentation of the movie, which is this sort of dishonest, just asking questions thing. If Kennedy was killed by a political conspiracy of his opponents, and if Kennedy was killed by a political conspiracy of his opponents and has been covered up, then our so-called democratic system has betrayed us. Okay, well, that's a big supposition. The real issue is trusting the people with the real issue, with their real history. The real issue is opening up all the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and Bargown until 2029 today.

The real issue is opening up all the CIA and FBI military intelligence files held for eternity on Oswald, Ruby, Kennedy, and Dallas 63. All of them without crucial parts blacked out. Only then can we start to have a real democracy. JFK strikes a blow for that open debate. I find this argument to be pretty spurious because the movie takes a clear. stand on what happened. It's not like, oh, well, there's a lot of, there's a mystery here. It has a, it offers a clear story and, and offers it convincing you to the point that people believe this is what happened. It's not just there was a conspiracy, or we don't know all the

facts, but this is, this is what happened. LBJ killed him with the help of the military industrial complex, so on and so forth. So I find that this, this kind of stepping back into just asking questionsness again a huge part of like the dance that conspiracy-minded people do which is like well there is some other story out there don't you aren't you curious about it it's like well you that that's a that's kind of a dishonest move um so i think like yeah there's a there's a mixture of like these these things these sorts of this thinking always combines intellectual curiosity or some kind of legitimate historical or legal process of investigation um and kind of like retreats behind that rhetoric when it people press people well you actually

don't know those specifics this is all crazy there's a well i'm just asking questions i'm just looking at something that doesn't make sense so all of the features here exist of the general consciousness of conspiracy thinking why is oliver stone like this i don't know that much about him but he he sort of attracted that in his other movies and um it's just striking to me that when this movie came out you know there is a little bit of pushback but it just he struck a blow i'm this is maybe a little stronger than i than i want to say But I think, like, this idea that we have a real democracy in JFK, the movie, is opening the debate and helping democratic culture somehow in the United States is exactly the opposite. I think it actually really hurt the way people consume information and synthesize information.

And QAnon, as you hinted at Jamel, is an offshoot of this thinking. and it's an acceleration of it. I mean, that is, there's a huge part of Q&on that's fixated on the JFK assassination. Thinks JFK is like an occulted, maudi type figure who's going to come back to life at a Rolling Stones concert. Like this whole boomer Fantasia, like it's coming up with it. But I would say, you know, my book is predicated on the notion that, and I never really thought about the movie JFK. Now I realize I have to write a whole fucking chapter about this. But like, this was the beginning.

of something here, where this sort of thought had been always, we know, present in American political culture, but this is when it was mainstreamed and turned into just the way one approaches questions of politics through this, this method of thinking. And I know so many people and I get so mad who when I bring up when we started talking about Kennedy they just repeat the JFK plot the movie JFK plot as what happened I was like no that's not what happened like you don't know what you're talking about um so yeah I think like I mean this may be a killjoy opinion but I think actually I would go so far as to say this movie had a even pernicious effect on American mentality.

This gets to something I wanted to go back to. So, Alexis, at the start of our conversation, you mentioned that part of what JFK did as a figure, it's changed the nature of the American presidency and sort of how it related to the public. And that this movie also sort of like rest on the public's notion of what the president is, the public's post-JFK notion, post-the-act-actual. president's notion of what a president is. As I've been thinking about that observation, what occurs to me is that the movie and kind of conspiracy theorizing in general, it takes politics out of the realm of the material, right? It's not that, so first of all,

there's the attempt to impose order on disorder, right? So it couldn't have possibly just been some wacky guy who killed JFK because JFK is too important. He's too important of a figure for him to have just been killed by some weird drifter. But beyond that, you know, this idea that his death sort of sets off this chain reaction of misery essentially sort of ties politics to sort of like the machinations of all these discrete individuals doing their discrete things and moving people like pawns on a chessboard. idea, right, that the civil rights eruptions of the mid-60s come out of actual, you know, social and historical forces that are driving things, that are producing individuals and

circumstances that causes eruptions, the idea that, you know, the Vietnam War was the product of discrete decisions by people in the United States, but it also comes to this like larger, these larger forces at work that produce the war and produce American involvement and produce this particular course, you know, kind of going on to the present that, you know, the disorder of the current world isn't the result of, you know, forces of capital and, and, and various social forces, but sort of like a cabal of evil elites trying to harvest adrenachrome from children. I think, I think sort of what the movie hooks into, and to your point, John, what it sort of encourages, is this view of human events as essentially being sort of like, like people have individual people in the, in the associations they create and the forces they help generate are irrelevant, right, to the course of history. It is all just sort of these elite figures working behind the shadows.

And so I think your point, John, this movie in this way of thinking is like intensely anti-democratic. It's sort of like it is anti-politics, right? Sort of it kind of it it neuters the ability to think and act politically because ultimately what's the point? Yeah. I think that that fascism is sort of, you know, the threat of fascism is found everywhere in the movie and the future of America and socialism and Castro. And I think that it introduced this idea to Americans that you think you are a part of this great project. And in fact, there's a coup happening in your country. and Lyndon Johnson is waiting in the wings and, you know, it's all based on like $100 billion

industry and all of that. Yeah, it's an easier thing to understand than sort of what we see. It's easier to buy this. It just makes more sense because the answers, the descriptions, the reasons we get are too simple or they don't make sense. And so this lone gunman thing, but we're also thinking about it, of course, with our own understanding of modern technology and ability to find evidence and such. But yes, I think it makes us feel okay about not being able to do anything.

absolutely yeah absolutely that's the thing about this whole Oliver stone mentality is that it's basically yeah it paralyzes actual politics because it assumes well someone's manipulating it anyway and nothing that you could actually do would um you know would uh would actually change anything or do anything and the only thing that's generated by it is more and more paranoia and conspiracy theories which are actually paralyzing um and you know anytime someone in a position of authority says hey that doesn't sound right it's a confirming piece of information um and yeah so i think we see the the anti-political the technocratic thing behind this which is like look, this is the mentality, I think, okay, don't get mad at me if I'm, I'm saying this to the audience.

If I get this wrong, I think that the story that Stone essentially tells about the JFK assassination is pretty damn close to the one the KGB cooked up. It's like, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, like, sort of, it's a, it's a, it's a chef's kiss, like, success of Soviet disinformation. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's like this is the KGB version of the story, which, you know, it makes sense from two ways of looking at the world, informed it. First, Marxism, Leninism, which is, you know, not completely wrong, but just that, you know, like the capitalist states are controlled by monopolies that are carrying out imperialistic plans. across the world and that's what governs the democratic republics or sham and that's what's really governing their politics so you have that and then you have the mentality of spies which is things that happen in politics we we make them happen you see this very much in Putin's

conception of democracy now which is everything is a charade and a fake because I know what that's like because I'm the person who created them, which I think is these secret services flattering themselves about their actual power and ability. So the mentality of this is that of a spy's outlook, which is politics are fake. There is always the opposite side spies behind them. So it's a professional defamation of the way spies, national security bureaucrats, look at politics. And it's just that flipped on its head. And it's, of course, it's super seductive because who wouldn't want to be that? Who wouldn't want to have that level of insight and secret knowledge? But the secret knowledge is all fake. Like, this is the thing. It's all these narratives that they create in order to

try to manipulate the political arena. But they end up convincing, as we've seen, convincing themselves of the validity of these stories. So it's strange to me, like, these, this is almost like a nuclear, a Chernobyl, a nuclear spill or a toxic dump from the security state of the Cold War of both the other side and this side, where these sorts of paranoid, spy-centric, conspiratorial way of practicing politics kind of spilled out of the state into the general population. And we see, like, it's like, I think this is one way we can look at a lot of the movies we're watching, a lot of the preoccupations that come from, and a lot of the issues we're

dealing with is kind of a toxic spill from the Cold War, like a nuclear submarine's reactor leaking or something like that. And part of it is this mentality, which, you know, is only within the secret councils of state are anything of consequence decided. And everything else is a charade. Yeah. And I think that that's done real harm to the public and to democracy in this country. So, so again, I'm just getting madder and matter at Oliver Stone's pretentious, oh, this is for, democracy's sake

posturing, because I'm like, no, you actually hurt this country, Oliver Stone. So yeah, my conspiracy theory, my counter conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories themselves are sort of a byproduct of

conspiracy thinking, like the way spies think, the way bureaucrats think, and then it's not the way the world necessarily works, it's the way they view the world, and then because they are perceived to have all this power, people think their way of viewing things is the correct way.

And it's just like, no, man, you don't want to think like them. You don't want to become a counter spy. Their spies are, there's something intrinsically insane about the spy's view of the world, I guess is what I'm saying. Just to kind of add to that and kind of actually call back to a thing, you know, the talking earlier about JFK and sort of his fascination with black ops and the extent of the establishment embraced him. I mean, so we, whatever early episodes was on the Russia House. And what are the things that struck me about the Russia House was, you know, how, how the characters in the

intelligence, the American intelligence services were also waspy. And I think a thing we talked about that episode was how the CIA, the intelligence services, weren't really often the place for the best to the best. They were the place for sort of like, you know, the WASS son who did find at Harvard and wasn't smart enough to go into business goes into the CIA, right? Sort of like the elites who, you know, they're going to go into public service and the intelligence agencies are like a sinecure for a certain set of East Coast elites. And that's all to say that the movie's view, and I think it's still kind of prevalent view of intelligence services as being all powerful and all seeing, is people accepting their own propaganda and the reality we know is that they were like kind of mostly incompetent, right? like the CIA

famously fucked up all the time well the Bay of Figs was a fiasco and that's what made Kennedy angry was that it didn't work yes he did not like to be embarrassed and he did feel he did feel like he didn't trust everyone and to be honest

like the people he had surrounded himself with and there is a point in I think a year or two after the assassination Arthur Schlesinger the, I guess, imperial historian, went to Jacqueline Kennedy's house. And I think she was still in Georgetown, actually. So it must have been fairly soon after.

And they're talking about all of this. And about, you know, and I'm thinking, Jamel, to your earlier point, as aside, Jackie is absolute perfection for wasps. She was literally the debutante of the year and just the ideal. And Joe Kennedy, you know, the paper. the man who made all the money and all many bad decisions um sometimes good when he came to money um handpicked her she was perfect she had all the connection she went to the right schools um everything that they wanted this was upward mobility they were they were leaping um but but jacky's conception of

all these guys is sort of like this i have to say like she she becomes really good friends with macnamara very strange um he sort of like visits her there's there there's some people think they had an affair which is a weird weird idea uh but it is it is really it is i can't think of robert macnamara is a sexual creature yeah yeah we're a quick listeners just sort of like look up a picture of robert macnabre like their bodies coming together i don't want it oh god no but that's fascinating keep going so so it's so she talked, it goes on for a while and she's clearly, you know, she has PTSD and people don't, they have, it's anachronistic to say that because it doesn't exist yet. So everyone's sort of misreading her. But she is going, she's saying certain things that she definitely shouldn't and probably wouldn't a year from there, which is like LBJ. You know, he wasn't quite waiting in the wings, but she thinks he's terrible. She definitely thinks he's terrible. And she, all, also brings up a lot of this intelligence and what is true and what is not. And allegedly,

she claims that Kennedy told her that he was going to fire J. Edgar Hoover shortly before the assassination, which is huge of course, you know, Hoover straddled many presidents. In fact, Hoover had stuff on Kennedy from when Kennedy was in his 20s and had no fare with someone. Like, but also they got things wrong. They, you know, then there are other things that were manufactured things she brings up about Martin Luther King. She talks, so she both trusts them and don't and doesn't. And I think that is, that's a healthy way to look at the government versus, you know, all in conspiracy, all in democracy. She seems to sort of understand that there are good people and there are bad people.

and they, you know, they're just, it's, it's, it's, it's, they're just pulling, you know, it's just a tug of war. It's a constant tug of war. Right. There's an internal, they're not really all together. They're all kind of internal conflicts. What was her, so she sort of had a low opinion of the people surrounding Kennedy, I suppose. And, but did she ever engage in any of the, it sounds like maybe, from what you were saying she did and any kind of speculation about conspiratorial things about

the assassination? No, I think she wanted, she found everything distasteful, every interest we have in her then and now she thought it was ridiculous and spoke, you know, very low of us. And so I think she would have, wouldn't have wanted to even, if there was a conspiracy, she wouldn't want us to know it. She would just, you know, sort of get my name out of your mouth situation. But the, every Kennedy, yeah, any Kennedy biographer I talk to, everyone thinks it's Castro. And I, and no one really can give me that much more. And I sort of don't, like that's the blanket statement that said. So I think she might have just accepted it was Castro and moved on with her life.

in some ways because her life post assassination was pretty crazy. Yes. I think the Castro thing makes a certain amount of sense because the United States had tried to kill Castro on a number of occasions. He probably felt justified, trying to do it in response.

He probably felt like Kennedy was a personal threat to him and his regime. I mean, there's reasons why you would, but again, you get back into the same thing where you're creating a story based on what makes sense. That's the thing. You can't do history that way.

You can't come up with an a priori idea of what makes sense and then find facts to fit it because you'll always come up with something. But yeah, the casual thing, I guess, again, it makes more sense to me than this internal American conspiracy theory. Is it bad to say, oh, sorry. Is it bad to say that I sort of don't care? Like, as a Kennedy biographer, I sort of, I mean, I care if something comes out. But right now, as it stands, I just think we should be looking at other things.

There are still thousands of documents from the presidency and from his pre-presidential years that we haven't gone through. I'm writing a book on his early life because there are about five of them and they're all paltry and sort of insubstantial in some way. so and and I you both are you know you write about history or historians you know how frustrating that is it's so frustrating to feel like something's getting so much space that other things aren't and so that's yeah I sort of I do I don't want to I get really impatient with it sort of like I sort of shut down with these yeah that and so so I don't I haven't really asked a lot of follow up questions but also they don't have answers they don't know why the Kennedy family thinks that it was Castro. And we have no way of knowing if they really do. And I do feel like once people stop having a public life in certain ways, they shouldn't have to, like, continue to answer questions about it. So, you know, Bobby Kennedy's widow is still alive,

but I don't think she's giving any interviews on this. Let me ask you this then. And so if the assassination you feel is a distraction, which I think is an interesting perspective, what do you think is the most important thing for people to come away from, to think about JFK, the man and his presidency? I think it would be more interesting to talk about how he wasn't really a progressive, how he wasn't really a liberal, and the sorts of reactions from both sides to hit. people love to say that presidents have evolutions you know that Washington George

Washington had an evolution on slavery didn't happen so many of these evolutions don't happen but with Kennedy it kind of did that's the thing he was improving people usually say oh it's so sad for their marriage because they were getting along so well the year before which is conjecture we don't know that but we can look at his life and look at the things that he's done and see a very, a very nice pattern that I would like to explore, particularly in a country that favors political dynasties, rich political dynasties. Yeah. So you think he was evolving to a more progressive politics and outlook? I think so in some ways. And I think he also, you know, he had an interesting perspective on

what we owe other countries that wasn't that popular. I think he was. I think he was evolving as a person. I think he was, I don't think he was that liberal or progressive. And I certainly don't think that he would have done for civil rights what LBJ did. I think that's absolutely true. Yeah, I think you're right there. The other thing about JFK that is sort of interesting in this is that he was genuinely in the way that it was possible for an American politician to be.

I mean, there was a kind of anti-colonial or anti-imperialist. He was friendly to Algerian aspirations for independence, didn't immediately slot that into Cold War politics. I think that was sort of a feeling like maybe it was sort of self-interested about American power versus European power, but there was a feeling among young political class, like, okay, we really need to turn the book on the era of imperialism. And he did genuinely, I will give it to him. He did, I mean, perhaps in Cuba, not so much, but did, did, uh, share some, some sentiments in that regard. I mean, I think he was very, I think he had direct, direct connection or tried to mediate some, um, something to do with the, with Algerian independence and had some, some

positive things to say about, um, you know, Algerians who wanted to end the French occupation. So, yeah, I mean, I, I think I'm, I'm. may have come down a little too strong on JFK, the Cold Warrior, but I think part of my interest was just to kind of upset the mythology of the perfect JFK that this movie, I think in recent years as people have kind of come to a maybe more sophisticated picture, starting to come to a more sophisticated picture of JFK. That's not just like, oh, he was Jesus Christ.

But for me, for me, many years, I think that wasn't the case, and I think that's sort of what I was trying to poke at. I don't think he was America's worst president by any stretch of the imagination. But do you think... His approval ratings had dropped right before his assassination, and then after, I haven't looked at this in years, but I think the Miller Center, one of these places, has done a graph of his approval ratings after his death. And it is just an up, you know, he suddenly is right at the top, top ten presidents. He was not in the beginning. And so it is really, it says more about us,

and it is more of a cultural memory. It is this consensus. Do you think that he deserves any of that? I don't think, I don't like to rate them. No one's, no one's a perfect 10. No one's a perfect person. I think he had strengths and weaknesses. I honestly, my concern for Kennedy is that he moved too fast. And he wasn't an intellectual, but he was very smart. And he relied on intellectuals sometimes who, and he trusted people. So I have some like theories on different things, different stories in his, like the, for example, profiles encourage his Pulitzer Prize winning book.

I have a totally different theory because I think he was sort of misled, by someone. And I think that was happening in the presidency. So I think that's the wild card. I really don't know what would have happened. Do you think he was being led by the kind of

intellectuals, like Schlesinger? Yes. Schlesinger and then I think he had war hawks around him. I think Goodwin and Schlesinger were really trying to get just more time with him. And I think that, you know, Sorensen,

was actually more liberal than anyone Theodore Sorensen, who was his aid for a long time and his speechwriter, and people think, wrote profiles and courage, but didn't. And yeah, I don't know, but there aren't, these shakeups don't happen in that way, right? It's not, if he had been elected to a second term, I think he would have just surrounded himself with people who were more extreme, because that's usually what happens from the first. president from Washington, his first cabinet, different, you know, partisanship sort of is blame the rise of it on that. Up until, you know, in the second term, everyone agreed with him. And that has happened sort of consistently. So I don't know. And if he was listening to people

in the way that he did, he didn't, he like just wanted information. He would ask questions and he would come to a decision and that would be it. It's sort of a Silicon Valley thing. It's like a move fast and break thing. So I really, I don't, I don't buy this whole thing that he would have been one of the greatest presidents. I don't think when you compare him to like FDR. But, but I think this is a part of it, right? People think that he was some, there's some sort of continuity between FDR and JFK. And he was going to sort of help the new, any, you know, keep any part of the new deal going. Right. Right. And I think Albie, I'll be, I'll be. Jay deserves a little bit more credit in that regard.

Yeah. No, I mean, this, Alexis, you're talking, you talking about sort of the things about JFK that are out of the public view that we don't think about and focus about because of the obsession with the assassination, it makes you think it's sort of part of what of the challenges is, is actually to, like, ground the guy back in his actual context, right? It's sort of like he, his presidency and him has become this symbol for sort of post-60s America for that generation of Americans, a symbol of what was lost, the symbol of what we could have had. And there's, to your point, there's comparatively little interest amongst the public in, you know, what, you know, this was a guy who was born in the first decade of the 20th century and grew up in the first decade to the 20th century and participated in the second world. war and it's very much a product of that era of the United States sort of like what how did those

things shape him like what what is his actual context and his actual context isn't as this symbol it isn't that this sort of like would-be liberal savior it's as you know kind of like a machine ethnic politician and so like what what can we what can be learned about him from thinking about him in those terms rather than kind of like the Oliver Stone imagined version of what he is. We would certainly have fewer Kennedy books, I think, because people would be less interested. They want to just keep reading about it. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think the first time is tragedy, the second is farce.

I mean, that's sort of all I can say. I would love to see people be interested in particularly the changing of the guard. So you mentioned that he had lived through these wars. Before World War II, you didn't see all these young congressmen. That wasn't happening. Kennedy entered the House of Representatives with a really interesting class. His neighbor across the hall, Richard Nixon. his father gave him an $800 check to bring over to him.

They were friends. Their first debate, Kennedy definitely, you know, was Cold War, actually, and it was, I think, 46, 47. So I think this is an interesting look at, yes, how people were changing, how families were changing, how men were changing, how the workplace was changing, and definitely how the presidency was changing. Absolutely. There is this moment in time where everything changes. There's a generational shift. There's a shift when it comes to civil liberties. A lot of things are happening, of course, and then we have reactions to it. Yeah. I think, you know, Kennedy's, Kennedy's figure, Kennedy's role as a sex symbol and figure of sexual fascination in his famous affairs also kind of adds to his, like, cachet as a historical figure and people's interested in him. And I think that's beginning to be looked at in a less favorable light, whereas once it was sort of roguish and charming and even sexy about him now, you know, he was at the nicest way of putting it a womanizer and possibly worse. so but I think that that also his he he kind of was the president of the era of playboy and sexual mores were changing it was pre-sexual revolution but his he is a figure of the

you know of that era's sexual imagination in a certain way and I wonder had he been less attractive and had he been less notorious for his affairs, whether the historical fascination with him would exist? Would he be as rich in that scenario? Yes. I don't know. Well, then, yes. They would still be obsessed with him.

He was featured in this series who wants to marry a millionaire. People were always talking about him and he was considered such an eligible. Bachelor. The thing with the sex, with just, oh, Kennedy sex. that frustrates me is Robert Dalek who wrote a what's considered sort of the definitive biography on Kennedy because he illuminated all these things about his health, which isn't true. Claire Blair did it years earlier in the search for JFK. He just did it in this really unattractive way, a lot of block quotes, a lot of like,

and then I found, and so people didn't like it. But he found a lot of those things like 15 years earlier. So, Dalek says, he goes into all that stuff, right? He pays a lot of attention to the things you should, but he does something I really dislike, which he says basically, Kennedy is with a lot of women. We know that it didn't affect his presidency,

so we should just move on. There's absolutely no way it didn't affect his presidency. And I think that we are starting to look at it differently, but it has taken a part of this, and I know this is sort of my soapbox, but people who have written books, about Kennedy have mostly been men. And they think this is great. And it particularly speaks to a sort of madmen era of men. And then other people who have done books, and Doris Cairns Goodwin,

I love her. We text all the time, but like her husband was a speechwriter for Kennedy. And then she wrote the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds. And it's just everyone is somehow involved. So I think that, you know, we need to get a generation away. Women of this generation, like myself, and others need to look at this through sort of a post-me-to lens. And I also think that it shows a lot about him as a person in a way that we now understand. So there's a book by Mimi Alford. And it was a woman that he had an affair with when he was in the White House, one of the money. She was a 19-year-old intern.

By the way, so is Nora Ephron. And she has a great old op-ed in which he's like, I don't think he liked Jews, which I am not debating. I can't find a Jew or a black woman or, yeah, in his past, which is unusual. He really was sort of an equal opportunity. Well, Schlesinger was Jewish, but he was really kind of a wasp in a way. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, so there's this moment in which Mimi Alford, it's like a shocking part of the memoir, all of it's shocking.

They had an affair for two years. He never kissed her on the lips. They never kissed on the lips. She lost her virginity to him. They spent the night together often. And this is what you sort of see across the board. And so I think there's sort of like a chip missing from him in some way that I think would be. Yeah, there's just so much more to learn about him.

And whatever is going to come out will come out because clearly people have been looking for it for a long time. It's going to come out pretty soon too. I'd love to talk about other things. things in a different way. I think that is a good place to wrap up. That is our show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, and Google Podcast, and wherever else podcasts are found.

If you subscribe, please leave a rating and review. You guys have left a lot of them. You folks have left a lot of them, but it does help people find the show. um uh our numbers look pretty decent these days so thank you and and please continue leaving those ratings and reviews you can reach out to all three of us on twitter i am at j booey uh john you are i'm at lionel underscore trolling and alexis you are nice hard to follow up on that one at alexis co um you can also reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at bass mail com. For this week and feedback, we have a letter from Tim in Indianapolis. Subject line, I'm loving

this podcast. Thank you. I don't know if he said it like that, but I'm saying it like that. Thank you, Tim. So here's the email. As a person who graduated college in 1991 and in the late 80s turned from Reaganism to liberalism, these podcasts are scratching an itch I didn't even know I had. Still, I have a quibble with the very first episode. Clear and present danger. the book and the film are disgusting. I'm sorry, a little misspelling here, are disgusting, but they are transparent allegories to Oliver North,

a personal friend and hero of Clancy. These vehicles are Clancy's argument that Ryan, North were the good guys, doing what we liberal do-gooders were too feckless to do for America. Thus, North slash Ryan break the law, mislead Congress, and are ultimately stopped in their holy mission by the same do-gooders who lost us Vietnam and abandoned the lovely Contras.

You guys didn't seem to notice this in your review of the politics of the film. There are a few academic papers on this and several contemporary reviews noted it. As I recall, Clancy wasn't shy about comparing Ryan and North, which proves what a consummate grifter North was. Still, minor quibble, since I've loved these episodes, especially on the movies I remember seeing in the theater. my quick defense of us here I mean I'm going to say this is kind of bullshit defense but however much that might be the case in the in the books

I don't actually think that's quite true in the movie because of the casting of Harrison Ford I think they try to they tried to lib I think this is what bugs clancy about the movies is that they tried to make Ryan a little bit more of a liberal and the movies a little bit more liberal so I would say I think yeah absolutely in the books he's very sympathetic to the I mean but there is a there's a section of the movie where it talks about the hypocrisy of

the you know we should let the military do what they want and the bureaucrats I mean and the politicians are hypocrites and so and so forth there is that but I think the movie tries to sanitize it oh sanitize um um um uh clangely This is like hard right sympathies a little bit for a general public. What I will say, though, is that a upcoming movie, not anytime soon, but soon enough, Air Force One, I think has a much more Clancy-esque Jack Ryan, even though it's in a Jack Ryan movie, Harrison Ford is playing that character as if he is Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. So I will probably get to that whenever we get the Air Force One in the future. So that was email feedback. Again, you can reach us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com.

We read the emails and we're reading them on air. So please continue sending them. Our next episode, which gets coming in two weeks since this comes out every two weeks, is sneakers. Oh, that's such a good movie. That's such a good movie. I'm so excited for that. Yeah, that's such a tree.

I don't always look at the list necessarily. So this was a jedd. You could hear it my voice. I'm surprised. Sneaker was a wonderful film. Such a treat. We'll have a guess for that one too. I have to confirm it.

But we'll have someone with us for that episode. So that'll be exciting. We'll be not going to read a synopsis this time. You can look it up. All you need to know is that this movie has Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier. So, you know, reason enough to see it. Alexis, do you have anything to plug? Not really.

I mean, yes, you never forget your first. A biography of George Washington, which is currently, I think, even in two weeks will be still, I think it's on sale. It's a Barnes & Noble single, whatever, and Alice in Friedo forever. Let me say, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, The George Washington biography is terrific. I loved reading it. We did an event in a long days ago before the pandemic talking about it, which was a lot of fun. But the book is really great.

And it's something I actually return to a lot as I'm sort of like thinking about this period of American history. So I would recommend listeners check it out and pick it up. It's really great. Thank you. Well, thank you. And you have a newsletter, right? I do. Yes, that would be good.

study Mary Kill at Substack. Oh, I'm going to follow that. Yeah. There you go. So thank you, thank you for joining us, Lexus. This is a great conversation. Thank you for bringing some real knowledge and insight to our conversation. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Okay, so for myself, for John Gans, for Alexis Coe, this has been unclear and present danger We will see you next time. Thank you.