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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: U.S. Lost ‘Hearts & Minds’ in Iraq, Oscar-Winning Director Says U.S. Lost ‘Hearts & Minds’ in Iraq, Oscar-Winning Director Says Share | Email | Print | A A A Interview by Rick Warner March 19 (Bloomberg) -- Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary “Hearts & Minds” showed how lies, ignorance and hubris led the U.S. into a disastrous war in Vietnam. Someday, he fears, a similar film might be made about American involvement in Iraq. A restored version of the Oscar-winning movie will be released tomorrow in New York, followed by a national rollout in April and May. Davis said the timing couldn’t be better. “We’re still haunted by Vietnam,” the 72-year-old filmmaker/journalist said in a telephone interview from his home in Maine. “We still have this intervention monkey on our backs. We have to stop seeing ourselves as the cop on every beat in the world.” While Davis acknowledges differences between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, he sees striking similarities. “We flew into both on the wings of lies,” said Davis, who covered the Iraq War for the Nation magazine. “In Vietnam, it was lies about an alleged attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. In Iraq, it was lies about weapons of mass destruction and connections that never existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.” Ignorance of history, religion and foreign cultures played a key role in both wars, Davis said. “We didn’t understand Iraq any better than we understood Vietnam,” he said. “In Vietnam, we didn’t even understand that the Vietnamese hated the Chinese. We thought Chinese communism was rolling over the country, but the Vietnamese disliked the Chinese as much as the U.S.” Life’s Value “Hearts & Minds” was a groundbreaking film, in style as well as substance. Though it’s now commonplace in Michael Moore’s films and other documentaries, Davis was criticized for juxtaposing statements by public officials with scenes that contradicted what the officials were saying. The most dramatic example in “Hearts & Minds” involves General William Westmoreland, who oversaw the massive escalation of U.S. troops in Vietnam. After showing a grieving Vietnamese mother trying to climb into her son’s open grave and her grandson weeping next to a photo of his dead father, Davis cuts to an interview in which Westmoreland contends “Oriental” people don’t value life as much as Westerners. “I understand the objections, but I do think it’s fair,” Davis said. “The Westmoreland quote is so incendiary that no matter what you show next, it’s going to detonate everything around it.” Pulitzer Photos The film also includes footage of two iconic images from Vietnam, both of which were captured in Pulitzer-winning photographs: the point-blank execution of a Viet Cong prisoner by a South Vietnamese general on a Saigon street and a naked girl running down a road after being scorched by napalm. While many had seen the photos, it was the first time that film of the two incidents was widely shown. “I wanted to use the most graphic footage that was available to convey the war in a truthful, emotional way,” Davis said. “The true wages of war are death. It’s about killing and it’s about dying.” In addition to news footage and interviews with key Vietnam figures such as Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow and Daniel Ellsberg (who cries when recalling the assassination of Robert Kennedy), Davis used clips from Hollywood movies to illustrate the attitudes that shaped America’s Vietnam policy. “I wanted to look at the kinds of movies people were watching during the early years of the anti-communist crusade,” he said. “I think they tell us a lot about ourselves.” Sinatra, Hope When “Hearts & Minds” won an Oscar in 1975, it created a televised stir involving Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. During his acceptance speech, co-producer Bert Schneider read a telegram from the Viet Cong delegation at the Paris peace talks, expressing friendship with the American people. Sinatra later came out and read a statement from Hope apologizing for “any political references” on the program. “It was a silly overreaction,” said Davis, who has written books on Nicaragua and a small town in Ohio. “The telegram simply extended a hand of friendship. It didn’t say, ‘Long live the revolution!’” Davis said the new version of “Hearts & Minds” looks and sounds even better than the original, which was in bad shape before it was restored by the Academy Film Archive, which houses every movie that has won a best-picture or best-documentary Oscar. “It’s more a rejuvenation than a restoration,” he said. “They went through it frame by frame, cleaned it up, brought back the original color and freshened the sound.” To contact the writer on the story: Rick Warner in New York at rwarner1@bloomberg.net.
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