The Manchurian Kerry

Don’t let anyone tell you Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate is retro. It turns out to be less nostalgic and more prophetic than anyone could have anticipated. In fact, though far less witty than John Frankenheimer’s 1962 version of the still wittier 1959 novel by Richard Condon, the new version weirdly prefigures the twilight campaign Republicans are running against John Kerry, who, to trump George Bush’s claim to make Americans safer, has starkly played up his commander–in–chief credentials. Kerry has made sure no one can mistake him for, say, an on–again–off–again Air National Guard veteran.

In The Manchurian Candidate, the ultra–righteous right–wingers turn out to be the worst sort of Commie – or, currently, global corporate – mind–melters. The presumed hero turns out to be the programmed assassin, the nefarious purposes for which he was captured concealed from him, with tragic results all around. Such nightmare logic was especially tantalizing at a time when Joe McCarthy was rather bright in memory and the paradox of unintended consequences a fresh concept in Hollywood.

The turn–of–the–screw plot tantalizes still. Read Condon’s smashing novel, from which Frankenheimer’s half–camp masterpiece was made – the novel still bites after 45 years, even if the Soviet villains are running oil companies now. Today, the commander–in–chief of the present failed war – himself an artful dodger of military service in an earlier cause that he supported, if from a safe distance – finds it convenient to let his supporters carry out their own private war against Kerry, arguing something of a Manchurian thesis against the actual war hero.

The subterranean logic is that somehow Kerry is responsible for the humiliation that the United States suffered via a misbegotten war in Southeast Asia. Just as Bush seeks to imply that Kerry is as responsible for the Iraq debacle as the president himself, so do his allies lie about Kerry’s war record, thus attempting to distract from the undeniable fact that their hero–in–chief has no war record at all.

Bends the mind, it does.

In the current deeply dishonest campaign against Kerry, the Vietnam war hero is a secret agent of the cowardly conspiracy to trash American might. Something bad happened in Vietnam, the low–blowers are saying, and John Kerry, the coward, is the true culprit – de facto, an enemy agent. First he was French, now he’s a faker. Watch out for Kerry – one way or the other, he’s programmed for subversion. So go the lies – sure signs that many Bushies are close to the panic point.

This month, an aggregation that modestly calls itself “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ran a commercial in the battleground states of Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The speakers in the ad accuse Kerry of “dishonor,” “betrayal” and “lies.” They purport to have served with Kerry. None of them did so.

Kerry’s actual boatmates travel with him as a bodyguard of witnesses. Even when his campaign for the nomination was deep in the doldrums, he visibly came to life whenever they were around. Nine of his 11 boatmates stood as a sort of honour guard as Kerry appeared at the Boston convention.

But Vietnam is also fresh in the imaginations of Kerry’s current accusers. They are enraged at him for having declared – rightly declared – that American troops had committed vile acts. Ghosts of Vietnam indeed – one of the chief accusers was dogging Kerry’s trail at Richard Nixon’s behest in 1971, and spoke for Nixon at the 1972 Republican National Convention. (Shades of the Clinton–haters who started in on the future president before the ‘60s were history.)

Kerry himself has backed a few steps off from the position he took in 1971, when testimony by veterans about war crimes was ample. For his accusers, however, no time has passed, no softening will avail. A fever rages in them – suggesting that something more is behind their venom than private resentment. Like the fantasists who hold fiercely to the credo that American prisoners of war are still held captive in Vietnam today, Kerry’s nemeses cannot forgive him for lending his then–patrician voice to 1971’s vivid accounts of war damage. To them, he is the totem who threatens to rob them of the righteousness.

It will then come as no surprise that more than 60 percent of the financing for the current campaign accusing Kerry of Vietnam lies comes from the Republicans’ chief Texas donor, a Houston–area home builder named Bob Perry .

In 2004, as in 1988, free media help with their amplification work. Matt Drudge did his part. So did Fox News and MSNBC, which ran the ads earlier this month, even before they’d run in the three battleground states.

Republican Sen. John McCain has called the “Swift Board Veterans for Truth” ad “dishonest and dishonorable” and urged the White House to denounce it, too. “It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me,” McCain told the Associated Press, referring to Bush’s sneak attack on him during the 2000 primaries. Bush has remained mute, and McCain disgraces himself by campaigning alongside Bush while Bush remains mute.

Bush’s muteness is right out of the Republican playbook of 1988, when unofficial Republicans smarmily linked Father Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, to the rapist Willie Horton. Then, too, the high–minded media did much of the dirty work as Father Bush floated pseudo–benignly high above.

And finally, one further note on respectable evasions of responsibility in this sordid affair. The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg reported on 18 August that Kerry has denounced a Moveon.org ad designed to shame Bush with his own Vietnam evasions (which continue). In the course of his article, Rutenberg writes: “Democrats say [the Swift Boat Veterans’] spot was largely paid for by Bob J. Perry, a Texas homebuilder with longstanding ties to Mr. Bush’s top political aide, Karl Rove.”

Democrats say. Is it true or not? If true – and so the evidence attests – why not say so flat–out: that this is precisely a Republican dirty trick?