ROBERT F KENNEDY, THE LAST CAMPAIGN: MY LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS ESSAY

My essay on the 50th anniversary of the RFK assassination is on the LRB Blog, you can link to it here. It's a little different from the one I originally wrote. Partly in layout: I led with the John Stewart quote, then explained who Stewart was. But mostly in detail: I went in to a little more description of the three assassinations I mention, to draw out their similarities, but I can understand why LRB wanted to keep
the focus tighter on the story of that campaign as well as the what ifs had Bobby not been murdered.

The RFK assassination is in many ways the most perplexing of those three. On the face of it, the evidence of conspiracy is the most obvious, but in most ways it remains the hardest to prove. I had started to write a separate essay recapping where we stand, and another drawing the parallels in the modus operandi in all three murders, recurring themes of conspiracy and cover up, as it were. But each time I got bogged down in the minutiae of what remains a conundrum for most people.

My suspicion of Bobby was real at the time. My lack of enthusiasm for Humphrey was just as real. By 1970, and in the wake of the student strike, the futility of protest began to tempered by what seemed democratic political progress; eventually George McGovern would use changes in the primary and convention process (spearheaded by his campaign manager, Gary Hart) to capture the Democratic nomination. McGovern was the man who had stepped forward to lead the 1968 delegates already won by Bobby; that he and Eugene McCarthy could never reach an accommodation that would raise a viable challenge to Humphrey is, in a nutshell, the most lasting legacy of Bobby's death.

McGovern's nomination in 1972 was probably the high point, or the last high point, of Sixties protest. McGovern, of course, would be trounced by Nixon in the '72 election; no October Surprise was necessary, though the Watergate break-in, like Russian interference in 2016, was swept under the carpet until well after the election results were known. When Nixon was finally toppled, there was no danger a McGovern would replace him.

I probably should also have added a line about the idea that Bobby was convinced his brother's killing had been the result of conspiracy. He would have known who the likely suspects were, and where to look for them and their accomplices. That in itself may have put the target on his back.

THOMAS KRUITHOF'S SCRIBE: EXISTENTIAL CONSPIRACY

Duval is a little guy, slaving away while everyone else in the office celebrates, and then he's handed a glass of champagne and a request for a report the following morning. But none of the files are where they should be, and after a few more drinks, and a fruitless night, he explodes.

Two years later he's been out of work since the incident, he's a recovering alcoholic, and out of nowhere he's offered a job. He's to sit in a room alone, listening to audio cassettes of wiretaps, and transcribe the tapes on an IBM selectric, leaving the papers on the desk at night. Then he hears something worrying, which turns out to be a murder, and suddenly he's at the centre of a conspiracy.

To this point, Scribe suggests any number of films about surveillance in which the unexpected or awkward is overheard or seen, those like The Conversation, Blow Up, Blow Out, or more recently, The Silence Of Others. But there is a crucial difference, in that Duval is not an evesdropper (apparently, the original international title for this film) himself, merely middle man, functioning anonymously in a room otherwise empty but for his cassette player and typewriter.

This is the material of Kafka, or Melville's 'Bartleby The Scrivener', an existential tale of a man lost in the system and faced with a decision about whether to go on or resist. Calling him by just his surname suggests a sort of anonymous everyman status. But the question soon becomes less existential and more political. The typewriter itself recalls other conspiracy films from the past, All The President's Men or Three Days Of The Condor, and those point the way to where Scribe is actually heading.

That path is set up very cleverly, with clues dropped in. There is an election in progress, and a slick candidate whose slogan is 'La France est la Retour', a sort of Gallic 'Make France Great Again'. There is also an ongoing French hostage crisis referred to in the background.

Scribe's title in French is La mécanique de l'ombre, which might be translated as 'the mechanism of the shadows'. This recalls the TV series Spin, whose French title was similiarly The Men In The Shadow, and signals an ongoing sense of unsettling conspiracy and 'deep-state' in France. And the real strength of the movie is the way it combines that sense with the more personal shadows hanging over Duval. He's admittedly apolitical, an office-man whose self collapses when he's lost his job. He is in that sense, a modern man, an average Jo in France, lost in the shadows.

This is director Thomas Kruithof's first feature (he also co-wrote the script) and he maintains a firm grip on the mystery. Alex Lamarque shoots the film in a brilliant collage of shadow and blankness; it moves between dark and less dark, and never undercuts the mood. The score by Gregoir Auger is more geared toward the traditional thriller, but works. But because this film is about blank slates which need to be filled it, it revolves around some fine performances: Denis Podalydes is exceptional as Clement, who hires Duval: all control and domination, even when he's engaged in crucial bartering with the authorities, but especially with Duval. Simon Abkarian is a tremendous contrast, all unleashed menance and energy, alternately affectionate and threatening, as the man who drags Duval deeper into the world of spycraft. They are like two magnets pulling Duval in opposite directions, until a third figure enters the frame, a government man played by Sami Bouajila, all bureaucratic menace, but with a lower energy than the other two.

But the key to the film is Francois Cluzet's Duval. I wrote when he starred in Tell No One about his being the French Dustin Hoffman, and the comparison is even more telling here. He acts with small movements of the face, little tics, which make the scenes between him and Clement as effective in their way as Hoffman and Olivier in The Marathon Man. As in Tell No One, he has to deal with forces well beyond his control, which in the end comes down to a crucial moment which I won't give away. The situation is made possible by the addition of a love interest for him, a fellow recovering alcoholic, played with more brilliant understatement by the Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher. But just when she seems to be impinging on Duval's existential dilemma, she becomes a plot device used to exert pressure on him.

How much you wind up liking Scribe will depend on how much you appreciate its resolution. The French October Surprise is something you should not be surprised by, but it basically slides by as if it were inevitable. Duval's own situation, again, is presented by allusion, which I took as an open-ended question: the idea is that nothing has really changed, nor will it. I might have enjoyed Scribe as a more existential drama, I might have enjoyed it more as an all-out thriller. Yet it is a beautifully constructed conspiracy thriller that, despite its smaller focus, and in an almost throwback way, is successful in its own terms.

Scribe (La Mechanique de l'ombre) France 2016

directed by Thomas Kruithof, written by Kruithof and Yann Gozlan with Marc Syrigas and Aurelie Valat

On general release

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

LAWRENCE WALSH: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel who headed the Iran-Contra investigation, is up at the Guardian online (link to it here) and should be in the paper paper tomorrow. It was difficult to write in the sense that the details and scope of Iran-Contra needed to be explained, and that required much of the space allotted to him. So there are a few points to make here.

It's important to remember that Walsh was about to turn 75 when he accepted the post of independent counsel, and led the investigation for six years; he then spent another three writing his book, Firewall. His energy and persistence belied his age, but he also was the victim of his own respect for the law, and his unwillingness to play political games. He understood that his best chance of success came if he could avoid the pratfalls of the Congressional committees, whose blanket granting of immunity hamstrung his own investigation from the start.

George Bush avoided Iran Contra becoming a campaign issue in 1992--you can easily find Bill Clinton expressing his amazement that his own draft status or trip to Moscow were burning issues, while Bush's participation in Iran-Contra was a non-starters. And when Bush's Christmas Eve pardons finally threw the monkey wrench into Walsh's efforts, his denouncing of a cover-up was long overdue. He also showed remarkable restrain in the face of massive criticism from a press corp uninterested in pursuing the Reagan administration's criminality, not just on Iran-Contra, but more members of Reagan's government were convicted of crimes that in any admistration's since Warren Hardings. And now, of course, we have to endure the retrospective sticking of Reagan's mug on a metaphoric Mount Rushmore.

Firewall is a powerful book, if so prodigiously detailed it riks losing the reader. It pulls no punches on the participation of everyone from Reagan on downward in illegal activites, and then in multiple perjuries and obstructions of justice. Walsh is scathing about the phony patriotism and bragadoccio of the Oliver Norths, and of the self-enrichment programme of many of those involved, from Albert Hakim to North himself.

It surprised me that he never delves into the Reagan October Surprise, the deal made with Iran to hold the Tehran hostages until after the 1980 Presidential elections, because many of the same people, including Reagan, Bush, and CIA director William Casey, were key players in both, and since the Surprise so clearly established the pattern followed in Iran-Contra.

And in one very interesting irony--the federal panel of judges who overturned Walsh's original convictions and hammered home another plank of the coverup, included David Sentelle, the Jesse Helms protege who would later be instrumental in manipulating the change in independent counsel that brought Kenneth Starr in to investigate Clinton. That caricature of the process finally saw the independent counsel post abolished.

Both the New York Times and Washington Post compared Walsh to one of the elite New York lawyers in Louis Auchincloss's novels, which would mean  little to audiences here, and with his lean patrician frame, classic suits, and swept back gray hair he certainly looked the part. But he was just enough of an outsider not to bend the game to the hidden rules of the club--perhaps the Dewey years had taught him that. Walsh joked that he was one of a number of Dewey's Boy Scouts who, despite their names, turned out not to be the ruthless Irish-Catholic lawyers he was expecting.

ARGO: I.T.'S OSCAR WATCH

With its copping of best picture and best director masks at the Baftas, on top of the DGA award, Argo has become the front-runner for the Oscar, which is interesting given its opposition. Argo is a very likeable film, well-made, with real suspense in its last act, and an atmosphere of menace in Iran and Washington both, contrasted with an atmosphere of anarchic freedom and humour in Hollywood.

Which is why, call me cynical, I'd popped Argo as an Oscar favourite as soon as I saw it, for two connected reasons which both have to do with Hollywood's perception of itself. The first is obvious—as much as the movie shows the CIA saving the day, it is the Hollywood producer (in fact the film's only totally fictional western character) and make-up guy who actually come up with the goods, and in the process provide us with self-satirizing boffo yucks. The second is related: the Tehran rescue contrasts with the failed attempt at rescuing the hostages in the US embassy—the signal moment of Jimmy Carter's administration. Carter gets little credit for the Argo rescue (neither do the Canadians—more on that later) but the upshot of his failure was turn to the country over to Hollywood, in the person of Ronald Reagan, who was selling America fantasies they wanted to believe, as opposed to Carter's visions of grim reality. That we now know Reagan's people made an October Surprise deal with the Iranians, not to make any hostage-releasing deal until after the 1980 elections merely reinforces the point. Reagan's election saw the US enter a post-reality based world, in which it is still entrapped, and Argo may best be viewed, depending on your political perspective, as a reminder of what the real world was like, or, more likely, a reminder that the people who brought you the world of fantasy are the only ones to trust.

Or you might perceive Argo as a 'feel-good' version of Zero Dark Thirty, in which the CIA are heroes and the interrogations are mostly John Goodman's John Chambers torturing Ben Affleck's Tony Mendez with Hollywood insider info. Or you might see it as a positive nod to a can-do America that, despite its thriller-matic finish, is actually accomplished more easily than, say, Lincoln's emancipation of black slaves was via American democratic process.

The movie itself skips between genres cleverly—and is most effective for its reconstruction of the period—not just sets and costumes but also the dirty grainy look of the film itself, which is pure 70s, and encourages the audience old enough to remember films you didn't download to transport itself back to the days of those sorts of political thrillers. In fact, there are shots of Mendez in the CIA HQ which straightforwardly evoke All The President's Men, in case you're old enough and missed the point. Ben Affleck doesn't ignore facts—the CIA's role in installing the Shah as dictator is set out right at the top—but the trope is an old one of maverick within a flawed system who eventually gets that system to do the right thing. In this contxt, Affleck the director is very good with actors in ensemble roles, much like Clint Eastwood. Affleck's ensemble contains many faces in familiar roles, faces who espcially shone in such parts on quality TV: Titus Welliver, Zeljko Ivanek , Clea DuVall (Carnivale), Tate Donovan, and Kyle Chandler (as Hamilton Jordan). Less like Clint is also good at minimising his own part, which is good because Ben Affleck the actor still has limitations when it comes to carrying a film—I think he works best as a straight man. I still believe George Reeves was Affleck's best role, and that may be at least partly because he sensed a kindred talent.

There were, however, moments that left me feeling uneasy, that I was being manipulated, particularly in the rousing end sequence at Tehran airport. It struck me as odd that the children would have put together the right photo at just the wrong time; that the guards would chase a Swiss Air commercial flight down the runaway, firing at it; that the pilot would not notice any of that, and that the tower would not simply stop the plane's takeoff, if they thought spies were escaping. As it happens, none of those things are true: the departure from the airport went off without a hitch (for reasons described below). But you couldn't have the suspense without tampering with the facts. I was even more sceptical of the guard making a phone call to the film's production office in LA, for two reasons: one being long-distance calling and time zones, and the other being why would a Canadian film crew not have a Canadian office number, and why would a phone number in the Babylon of America not arouse suspicion?

There has been a lot of discussion in this year's Oscar run-up about historical fact—what with Zero Dark Thirty trying to have it both ways about torture, and Lincoln being accused of being Caucacentric, and also gilding the lily of remembrance by anointing its hero prematurely, or Django inventing sunglasses and a pre-Civil War Ku Klux Klan. Much of the criticism is unjustified, in the sense that film scripts will inevitable consolidate multiple characters and re-order events to serve their own purpose. Thus, the fact that most of the hostages stayed not with the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (played very well by the Candian actor Victor Garber) but with one of his assistants, John Shearwood, is hardly crucial; it makes dramatic sense to keep them all together. The scene in which the Brits and Kiwis turn the refugees away is also apparently false: the Brits took them in and Kiwis transferred them to the Canadians, where it was thought they would fit in more naturally and be safer. The jibe,if gratuitous, does serve to emphasize the plight of the Americans, and obviously the Bafta voters didn't hold it against Argo.

But it should be pointed out that the Canadians did far more than simply sit back and wait for the CIA cavalry to arrive (shades of Independence Day!). In fact, Ambassador Taylor manipulated his staff's travel to help create the necessary visas, and it was the Canadians who got the airplane tickets—thus the whole cancellation and restoration by the CIA sub-plot is fiction.

I was also put off a bit by the separated husband/lonely father sub-plot for Tony Mendez; Affleck plays it with suitable moroseness, but as it turns out, it too is a fictional construct. The reason for it is obvious and familiar—Mendez not only has to redeem himself at the CIA but he has to conquer personal adversity along the way; this is the arc that dominates Hollywood—though they just couldn't figure out a way to have Abe Lincoln reunited with Mary Todd at movie's end.

Complaining that Alan Arkin's Lester Siegel didn't really exist would be silly—they need him to carry those sections, and his double-act with Goodman is one of the high points of the film. In reality, another special-effects genius, Robert Siddel, who did ET, was announced as the co-producer with Chambers when the ads went into the trades. Interesting, the original screenplay was based on Roger Zelazny's Lord Of Light, one of the key sf novels of the Sixties, and the film was intended for use in an sf theme park that never happened. Michael Parks has a cameo as comics genius Jack Kirby, who actually did draw the storyboards for the fake film, which also had Ray Harryhausen and Buckminster Fuller attached to it (!). Which ought to be enough to get Lord Of Light made, after all these years. I'm sure they could get Lester Siegel to produce. He could make the 'argo fuck yourself' joke another twenty times, and get a laugh every time.

NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Norman Schwarzkopf, the general who led Operation Desert Storm, is online at the Guardian (link to it here) and may be in the paper paper today (Saturday 28th). There are a few changes to what I wrote, as I was unavailable for the editing process after writing it on short notice, but they are mostly changes of omission. I will confess that after studying his life, I was more favorably inclined to Schwarzkopf than I had thought I would be--it is not his fault that America tends to provide its military heroes with unquestioning adulation, nor that the American military tends to reward them with a prolifigacy which might embarrass the soldiers of the past. He also didn't seem to be a careerist who rose quickly through the bureaucratic army, like say, Colin Powell, whose rise began when he helped cover up and spin the My Lai massacre. Although I don't agree with the pervasive belief in the 'Vietnam Syndrome', I could respect the way Schwarzkopf decided to fight his war to win it, with the fewest possible casualties on his side, and with the public presented with a positive media experience of it. It helped that the First Iraq War was relatively more straightforward than the second; Iraq had indeed provided a causus belli.

Schwarzkopf's biggest error, in retrospect, was allowing the Iraqis the means to put down the insurrections that rose up against Saddam--but his instinct against becoming an occupying power in Iraq was sound, and the ultimate political decisions, of course, were not his. As we saw in the Second Iraq War, and in Afghanistan, he was absolutely right on that count. Although he supported the 2003 invasion, that support was quickly moderated by his realisation the war was being fought on fabricated grounds, that 'mission creep' led to an occupation far worse than he had imagined a decade earlier, and by his intense dislike of Donald Rumsfeld's ways of waging war, using reservists and contractors to replace the standing army.

His public stances on that war were not profound, but his absence of cheerleading for the second Bush administration spoke volumes. I also found the quiet life he led in Tampa relatively admirable, as he was active with charity work alongside the usual board memberships on arms companies. That he never sought political office or power, or to cash in publicly on his name seems to me the sign of a man with a strong personal compass. A contrast, say, to David Petraeus.

The paper cut a few interesting things about his father, whose main fame comes because he led the New Jersey State Police during their investigation of the Lindbergh Kidnapping, the 1930s' crime of the century. (That's him with Lindbergh in the photo on the right). The guilt of Bruno Richard Hauptman remains in some doubt, and his role in getting Hauptman convicted was crucial. For some reason the paper took out what became the most lasting legacy of his consultancies, for the Shah of Iran just after a CIA-backed coup installed him in power. Schwarzkopf, Sr. basically organised the SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, and it must be said, he did a good job because they were efficient in their work. It was because of that work that Norman was educated in Tehran and in Europe, which I think had a profound effect on his world-view.

The legacy of the Shah and his Savak, of course, was the Ayatollah Homeni, the Embassy Hostages, the October Surprise and Reagan's election, and then the Iran/Iraq wars, where we were, whisper it softly now, on Iraq's side, and provided them with the weapons of mass destruction they used first on Iranian troops and then on their own people, pace the famous photo of Rumsfeld and his buddy-in-democracy Saddam shaking hands after another arms deal had been done. Eventually, that would lead to Desert Storm, where, as we discovered a decade later, we could have done a lot worse than a general like Norman Schwarzkopf.

CLAIR GEORGE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Clair George, the highest-ranking CIA official convicted of perjury during the Iran-Contra affair, was in the Indy on 31 August, while I was in the USA, and if you missed it you can link to it here. That's George with CIA chief William Webster and the head of Pakistan's ISI, General Hamid Gul visiting our then-buddies in the Mujahadeen at a training camp. Of course terrorism didn't exist in the world at that point....

Although Lawrence Walsh's independent counsel investigation of Iran-Contra was full and extremely convincing, very few people paid the price for illegally promoting murder in Nicaragua, violating the law to provide arms to our so-called enemies in Iran, and engineering the wholescale export of drugs to the USA. Far from paying the price, the US names airports and anything else that isn't tied down after Reagan, elected Bush and his son president, allowed them to bring back the same bozos into the Bush II regime and quickly make the world safer for terrorism. That these ops were run out of the White House didn't preclude deniability--and although the CIA were merely facilitators in the business, they, and especially George, paid a higher price for their lies.

Iran Contra was an outgrowth of the second October Surprise, where the Reagan people persuaded the Iranians to keep the American hostages in Tehran hostage until after Jimmy Carter was beaten in the election. In return the USA armed Iran, via Israel, and thus made the world safer for democracy. I say second October Surprise because in 1968 Nixon had made a similar deal with the Vietnamese, convincing them they'd get a better deal from him than from the Hump. Sad thing was, they believed him. Robert Parry continues to produce material on the Reagan October at his excellent consortiumnews.com site, to which you can link here.

I described Clair George as a kind of American Smiley, but the reality is that Smiley came from the British equivalent of the CIA's 'old boys' whereas George was of the next generation, and perhaps deemed more expendable as a result. His life after the CIA is incredible: Jeff Klein's stories on it can be followed here. There should be an investigative sub-genre dedicated solely to the antics of ex-CIA people.