Two intriguing films about relentless American journalists have been released this year. Spotlight details how a group of Boston journalists went toe-to-toe with the powers-that-be to expose a systemic cover-up of the abuse of young boys by Catholic priests. It just won the Oscar for best picture.
Truth, a film about one of the most famous events in the history of American journalism, did not make the same impression. This is perhaps because, unlike Spotlight, Truth is a film about how the good guys lost. People don’t like that kind of movie as much. What’s more, not everyone agrees the good guys lost.
Like Spotlight, Truth focuses on a team of gung-ho journalists who go up against a formidable adversary: the president of the United States. A 2004 report, aired just before the presidential election on the weekly news magazine show 60 Minutes Wednesday, claimed that, as a young man, George W Bush had received preferential treatment during the Vietnam war because of his father’s clout, and did not fulfil the terms of his military service. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, a stateside reserve corps of a type sometimes referred to as “weekend warriors”.
The report was a disaster: because the documents used to prove the allegations could not be authenticated, and may have been outright forgeries, the story had to be retracted. After that, heads rolled. Careers were destroyed, the image of journalists was badly tarnished, and bloggers – the ones who discovered that the documents seemed to have been typed with Microsoft Word, a program that did not exist in the early 70s – got to celebrate bringing down one of the most powerful names in US news: long-time CBS anchor Dan Rather.
At the time, Rather said that, had he known what he later knew about the documents, he would not have aired the story. However, he later said this retraction was coerced. He stepped down as anchor in 2005, when it became clear that his contract would not be renewed. He left the network entirely one year later. To all intents and purposes, the controversy shipwrecked an otherwise brilliant career.
Truth stars the genial, easygoing, beloved Robert Redford as the newscaster. It is an unusual bit of casting, as Rather is a man known for being intense, ambitious and tough, but not especially beloved. The film also stars the reliably vulpine Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, the producer whose failure to vet the documents led to Rather leaving CBS after 55 years.
Though the film is based on Mapes’s memoir, the conclusions one can draw from it are ambiguous. It can be viewed as a puff piece that whitewashes the controversy by lionising a woman who dared speak truth to power and was punished for her efforts by the gutless suits who had taken over the network. In this version, Mapes may have used flawed journalism to get to the truth, but in the end she got the story right: Bush received special treatment and mysteriously vanished from the military records for an entire year. But it can also be viewed as a film depicting a woman so determined to humiliate the president that she failed to nail the story.
Dan Rather, still active as a journalist though no longer on a huge national stage, was astonished when he heard that the film was being made. “I honestly thought it was a joke,” he says, seated in his compact Sixth Avenue office in New York. “But then the film-makers came to see me. They wanted to know if Mary’s book was accurate. I was pleased and surprised – powerful people would have preferred this film not to happen. But, after that, I had very little do with it. I was on the set perhaps two days. I spoke to Redford 10, 12, 15 minutes. I sat and observed what they were doing.”
What was that like? “It is a somewhat surreal experience to see yourself being played by Robert Redford. He made me look better on screen than I ever thought I looked.”
A very young Rather was in Dallas the day John F Kennedy was shot in 1963. He reported that local schoolchildren cheered when the news came in that the president had been assassinated. Conservatives – who came to develop an intense dislike for the newscaster, branding him a linchpin of the “liberal media conspiracy” – may have started disliking him that very day.
Rather later served as chief White House correspondent, and reported from Afghanistan during the Soviet war, memorably kitted out in the very latest Mujahideen duds. Unlike some of his rivals, Rather was never merely a newsreader.
He was involved in a bizarre incident in 1986, in which he was set upon by two assailants, one of whom repeatedly demanded: “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” A decade later, one of the assailants was identified as a murderer who claimed to be receiving signals beamed into his head by TV networks. The incident inspired the 1994 REM song What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
Five years earlier, Rather had replaced Walter Cronkite. Known to Americans as “the Voice of God”, Cronkite’s soothing, avuncular style contrasted sharply with his successor’s. Despite ratings fluctuations, Rather held the job for the next quarter century. Given that Rather was such a daily fixture in American lives, in a way that no movie star ever could be, wasn’t it hard for Redford to play him?
“I’m still trying to get my head around that,” says Rather, who had met Redford socially on a few occasions. “He tried to capture at least some of the essence of me as a professional. But his role is tremendously difficult. He is given the chore of playing someone he had seen for many years on television, for virtually half a century.”
Rather despises the higher-ups at CBS for the way they handled “Memogate”, accusing them of abandoning the network’s vaunted tradition of standing by its news division. To this day, he insists his team got the basic story right. “Bush, in his youth, through his father’s political influence, got put in a ‘champagne unit’ of the National Guard that ensured he did not go to Vietnam. After he got into the National Guard, he countermanded an order to take a physical, and then disappeared for a year. The sons of the less privileged were sent into the green jungle hell to die. He got a pass.”
But what about those tell-tale documents? “The process included controversial documents,” Rather says without hesitation. “But no one has ever proved that the documents are not what they purport to be. [Critics] could not attack the basic facts. No one in the Bush family has ever denied the two basic facts. Those who did not like the story picked its weakest point to attack. They changed the conversation.”
Truth, directed by James Vanderbilt, never shows the White House responding to the report, nor the bloggers who challenged the authenticity of the documents. But it does show the network executives – in an extremely unflattering light. They are portrayed as a bunch of nasty men ganging up on a woman whose lawyer repeatedly pleads with her to play nice. She does not play nice. She comes across as relentless, unapologetic and ultimately heroic. Which plays well on the screen. But, in real life, didn’t Mapes screw up the reporting?
Rather, who seemingly harbours no bitterness toward his one-time colleague, says no. “She did get it right. The truth of the story holds to this day. The process by which we got to the truth, we made mistakes.” He adds: “Journalism is not science. It’s a crude art.”
There is a King Lear, lion-in-winter element to the Rather saga. In an unforgiving, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately society, Rather’s name is automatically linked with one disastrous broadcast, not with his decades of exemplary work as a journalist. He wishes Truth had depicted the higher-ups at CBS openly rooting against the news team because of their allegiance to the Bush administration. He singles out Sumner Redstone, the former executive chairman of CBS and its parent company Viacom: “You don’t see Sumner Redstone saying, ‘I want a Republican elected because it’s good for business.’”
On the door of Rather’s office are engraved the famous words: “Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here, obedient to their laws we lie.” It is the epitaph of the 300 Spartans massacred at Thermopylae by a vast Persian army in 480BC, after giving the invaders a run for their money. It’s pretty obvious who the Persians are here. Indeed, the very presence of the quote captures the way Rather is viewed by both friends and enemies. To his admirers, he is the warrior who fights the good fight against overwhelming odds, the guy who goes down swinging. To his detractors, he is just another pompous liberal.
Redford plays Rather as the classy, valiant warrior who falls on his sword. But he plays him soft and a bit glamorous. Go back 40 years, I suggest, and there’d be no way Redford would get the part.
“Why not?” the newsman asks. Because Redford has a certain easy charm, I reply. A rugged, courtly Texan of a kind that has virtually ceased to exist, Rather smiles with great amusement. “No one ever accused me of having easy charm.”
• Truth is released in the UK on 4 March.
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