Last week I was in Austin and stopped into the LBJ Presidential Library, which is definitely worth a visit. It’s got the presidential limo, a replica Oval Office, and even the suit Johnson wore when John F. Kennedy was shot. Of course Johnson was in the car behind JFK. How convenient!
Speaking of which, Dominic Green returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Louis Ferrante’s Borgata: Clash of Titans: A History of the American Mafia: Volume 2 of the Borgata Trilogy.
“Ferrante is a fluid raconteur. Even his picture captions are gripping: ‘Johnny Dio socks a photographer during a break at the Rackets Committee.’ His clashing titans are the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, and the criminal fraternity headed in Florida by Santo Trafficante, in Louisiana by Carlos Marcello, and in Chicago by Sam Giancana. The road to Dallas begins with Bobby Kennedy using the McClellan Committee (a.k.a. the ‘Rackets Committee’) to launch his political career by taking down Jimmy Hoffa, the more than necessarily mobbed-up president of the Teamsters union. Hoffa backed Nixon in the 1960 presidential elections. The mafia bosses backed JFK, funneling ‘millions of dollars’ into the West Virginia primary and, it seems, fixing the Illinois vote in 1960 (‘gross and palpable fraud,’ said the Chicago Tribune).
“‘It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian city,’ Britain’s prime minister Harold Macmillan said when the Kennedy brothers arrived in Washington, D.C.
“Jack appointed Bobby as attorney general, even though Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s string-pulling had failed to win Bobby a spot at Harvard Law and Bobby had never fought a case in court. Bobby built up a ‘hit list’ of 2,300 mobsters, beefed up the Justice Department’s racketeering section by 400 percent, and mobilized every possible branch of the federal government against the Mob. ‘That rat bastard, son-of-a-bitch,’ Giancana reportedly ranted to Trafficante, ‘we broke our balls for him and gave him the election, and he gets his brother to hound us to death.’
“Bobby Kennedy, a ‘little fart’ in Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s estimation, wanted to make a big noise. He cut corners in his zeal. In April 1961, INS agents grabbed Carlos Marcello, put him and a companion on a plane and flew them to Guatemala. Expelled to El Salvador, they were put onto a bus and dumped in a jungle in Honduras. They staggered 17 miles to the nearest human settlement in ‘silks suits and alligator shoes,’ guided most of the way by two local boys with machetes. Aided by a bribe to the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and possibly by Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana, Marcello returned to the United States more than somewhat peeved.”
But peeved enough to pull the trigger? Release those files!
If you ask James Erwin, our belief in such conspiracies was driven by Oliver Stone’s movies. But films have always held sway over the culture, he explains, dating all the way back to Birth of a Nation.
“In 1915, when movies were not two decades old, Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation in the White House, the first film to be played there. A giant leap forward in the language of cinema, The Birth of a Nation was a Lost Cause paean to the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen were portrayed as a noble and chivalrous brotherhood protecting white women from the predations of their freed slaves who had turned to drink, rape, and political corruption with wicked alacrity in the absence of slavery.
“‘It’s like writing history with lightning,’ the president reportedly remarked after the screening. ‘My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.’
“Ironically, neither the quotation nor the events depicted in the film were ‘terribly true.’ The sentiment, however, was correct. Cinema has the unique power to burn a striking impression on the psyche of popular audiences far more effectively than any academic like Wilson could have dreamed. Making a historical film, biopic, or period piece is writing history with lightning, and the product is certain to dazzle the imaginations of viewers far more than any rigorously researched tome. The Birth of a Nation proved so influential that the Ku Klux Klan, which had largely been stamped out in the 1870s, was refounded in 1915 and counted some six million members by its peak in the early 1920s.
“As fewer and fewer Americans read books, movies continue to grow in their influence over public perceptions of history. Much as news consumption has moved from print to screen, historical pedagogy will be shaped more by Hollywood productions than rigorous literature. Film is simply too compelling an art form for the written word to compete.”
You know what film is not compelling? Captain America: Brave New World. Our John Podhoretz has a few thoughts to share.
“The movie can’t decide if Sam is being made to feel less-than by our evil white supremacist culture, given that Sam is black—or whether he’s exhausted because he feels like he must represent all underrepresented people, because he’s black. All I’m saying is, he’s black, and that’s pretty much all the movie is saying about Sam Wilson, who appears to have two friends and no family and no backstory and is of absolutely no interest as a character. The original Captain America, Steve Rogers, had a wonderful backstory in which he was a 90-lb. weakling genetically engineered during World War II into a giant hunk of a guy who only agreed to the tampering to help save his country but found himself relegated to being a show pony in patriotic pageants. Apparently only white guys get good backstories.
“If Sam weren’t as good as Steve Rogers, that would be evidence he was only chosen to carry the shield because he was black. Now, in one sense, that would be fine, no? I mean, if Sam is there to represent the marginalized people in our society, then he was a diversity hire—and what would be wrong with that in the eyes of Hollywood’s liberal culture? After all, Hollywood literally casts roles by putting out casting calls and saying which parts need to be ‘diverse.'”
Another failure “is how the movie also requires some knowledge of the Marvel TV show called Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which featured a Black Lives Matter-inflected plot. We learn in that series that there was a black Captain America before Sam. He was a black soldier named Isaiah Bradley who drank the serum that transformed Steve Rogers a decade later, during the Korean War. But because he was black, see, he was thrown in prison for 30 years because he couldn’t be allowed to exist by the racist country that was created in 1619.
“I’m sure this all makes sense to Ta-Nehisi Coates, but then, so does licking the undersole of a Hamas boot. Bradley is released from prison at the end of that TV series and becomes part of the plot in this movie. He is mind-controlled into taking a shot at the president, but very specifically mind-controlled, in that he’s supposed to miss. Man, that mind control is specific and accurate! In any case, what he’s doing in this picture and why makes no sense unless you watched the 2021 show. Which I hope you didn’t, because Falcon and the Winter Soldier was very, very bad and not worth your time even if you were a Chinese person in Wuhan who had been soldered into your apartment.”
It takes super-human skill to put together a show like Saturday Night Live, week in and week out for 50 years. But that is exactly what Lorne Michaels has done. Alexander Larman reviews Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison.
“Morrison uses a structure that sometimes makes the book feel like the longest New Yorker article you’ve ever read (and, at over 600 pages, this is long). She supplies sharp, pointed vignettes of a typical week’s preparations for the show, which Jonah Hill is down to host, as we go behind the scenes into sketch ideas, prima donna antics from the cast, and Michaels’s autocratic power over everything that is broadcast live on the night. Then there are flashbacks to lengthier chronological sections from Michaels’s early career as a gag writer for shows like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which made Goldie Hawn’s name but failed to make his, to his success with SNL, early disillusionment that eventually led to him quitting the show after five years, and then a triumphant return and success in making the brand a consistently beloved—if not always artistically top-drawer—one.
“It is an inevitability that the early sections, which include a fantastically annoying, drugged-up John Belushi, a smarmy and self-assured Chevy Chase, and a near-catatonically laid-back Bill Murray, feature the strongest characters and the most arresting vignettes. We learn that Michaels’s stock advice to joint-smoking, coke-snorting colleagues was to ‘rotate your drugs’ and that the famous Lennon-McCartney story, in which the two nearly appeared live on the show in 1975 to collect the check for $3,000 that the producer solemnly offered on air for the Beatles to perform, was only partially true. They considered heading down to 30 Rockefeller Plaza the following week, but the show was on hiatus then, meaning that the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime reunion was never possible.
“SNL today is a safer, less risky environment for writers and performers alike, which may also have taken some of the seat-of-your-pants thrills out of the show. It is taken as a given that staffers will attend therapy, and they are advised to meet their shrinks on Monday afternoons, when it is also expected that they will discuss their stressful and demanding work with Michaels. Although the producer is, naturally, a liberal, he has also strived to make the show as apolitical as possible—including famously inviting Donald Trump to host in 2015—and pushes back against criticism by saying, ‘On whatever side, if there’s idiocy, we go after it. We can’t be the official organ of the Democratic Party.’ He reminds the performers that ‘we’ve got the whole country watching—all fifty states.'”
