The date: July 28, 1965.
The scene: the White House East Room, packed with reporters, cigarette smoke swirling. President Johnson is speaking slowly.
”I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men into battle,” Johnson says. ”I think I know how their mothers weep and their families sorrow.”
Behind a curtain stands John Frankenheimer, the director of HBO’s ambitious Vietnam drama, ”Path to War.” He is on the film’s set, a reception room at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, staring at a monitor as Michael Gambon, the British actor, makes the speech in a slow Texas drawl. At some camera angles, Mr. Gambon’s resemblance to President Johnson is remarkable.
”This is a Greek tragedy really,” said Mr. Frankenheimer, whose films include ”The Manchurian Candidate,” ”Birdman of Alcatraz” and ”Seven Days in May.” ”This is the bigger-than-life hero who was taken down by his own weakness. He believed what the generals told him, he believed what his advisers told him. He was insecure on foreign issues; he was not going to be the first president to lose a war. In the end, the war killed him too.”
”Path to War” appears to be television’s first dramatic exploration of the Johnson administration’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War. The film, based on extensive research and interviews by the screenwriter, Daniel Giat, was planned long before Sept. 11, but the director finds striking parallels between then and now.
”You also have a president today who has American troops on foreign soil, you have a president who’s facing an enemy, he doesn’t know who they are,” said Mr. Frankenheimer. ”You have a president who wants to be re-elected, you have a president who’s not expert on foreign affairs and is dependent on his advisers. The similarities are tremendous.”
There are obvious differences. In contrast to Vietnam, the country today overwhelmingly supports the president and the war in Afghanistan. But the film still carries resonance. Just last week it was reported that the Bush administration was debating whether it should shift more attention to domestic concerns — an issue that dominated the Johnson White House, especially as the war escalated.
The film begins on Jan. 20, 1965, at an inaugural ball at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington — two months after Johnson’s unprecedented landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. In the film, Johnson describes, with delight, his aides and cabinet members: ”I’ve got three or four Rhodes scholars, four or five graduated of Harvard, a couple from Yale and why there’s even one here tonight from Southwest Texas State Teachers College. And don’t you know that one rules the roost.”
The film ends on March 31, 1968, when Johnson, beleaguered by the war, unexpectedly announces that he will not seek a second term. The film shows Johnson, bewildered and frustrated, finally accepting that the war is unwinnable. At first, he is furious and blames his advisers. Eventually, he accepts his own responsibility.
”How can you not like this man?” Mr. Gambon asked as he stood near his dressing room trailer, just a few blocks from the Civic Auditorium. ”He had a heart, a big heart, and he genuinely wanted to do something about civil rights and improving the lives of people. But then he got trapped by the war and he didn’t know how to get out of it.”
Mr. Gambon, who played an American tobacco executive in ”The Insider,” examined Mr. Johnson’s television appearances and read numerous biographies about him. ”He was surrounded by Harvard graduates,” Mr. Gambon said. ”He admired them, but part of him didn’t like them at all. Beneath it all, beneath the bluster, he was insecure, he had a chip on his shoulder.”
The screenplay depicts the administration’s internecine battles — especially between Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary, played by Alec Baldwin, and George Ball, the deputy secretary of state and an opponent of the war, played by Bruce McGill. In the film, Ball compares McNamara, other hawks in the cabinet and the joint chiefs of staff to ”buzzards sitting on a fence discussing the price of carrion” — a line paraphrased from his 1982 memoir.
In an imagined scene, a furious Ball gazes at McNamara at a cocktail party at the home of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. ”Look at him,” Ball says. ”His wife’s got an ulcer, his kid’s got an ulcer — everybody’s got Bob McNamara’s ulcer but Bob McNamara. Sometimes I think it’s just an academic exercise to him.”
By the end of the film, however, McNamara is, like Johnson, a broken man.
Mr. Giat said it was unfair to blame any one person for Vietnam. ”I believe that McNamara is contrite,” Mr. Giat said. ”I believe he’s in deep, deep grief over what happened.”
Mr. Giat, 46, said his fascination with Vietnam began when he was very young. ”My bar mitzvah was in May 1968, two months after Johnson said he wasn’t running and cutting back on the bombing,” said Mr. Giat. ”I remember at the time thinking, ‘This is wonderful; the war will be over for my bar mitzvah.’ That’s how naïve I was. The war went on for another five years for the United States.”
The film itself took more than 10 years to research and produce. In June 1991, Mr. Giat teamed up with Howard Dratch, a classmate from his days at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The two men had just read excerpts in The New Yorker of ”Counsel to the President,” Clark Clifford’s memoir of his career as a presidential adviser.
”It’s a drama that everybody thought they knew but nobody really did,” said Mr. Dratch, who became a producer of the film. Their journey was marked by detailed research, constant script revisions and vain efforts to snare actors like Gene Hackman to play Johnson and Ed Harris to play McNamara.
Mr. Dratch and Mr. Giat interviewed numerous members of the Johnson administration. (Mr. McNamara declined.) Many White House aides, including Joseph Califano, Richard Goodwin and Jack Valenti (now president of the Motion Picture Association), as well as several historians, read the script and said it was an accurate portrayal of the White House decision-making.
The source list for the drama covers eight pages, including books, newspaper and magazine articles, and Congressional documents as well as papers and oral histories from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Tex. (In a 1997 letter to Mr. Dratch, Lady Bird Johnson wrote that she hoped the project worked out and suggested that perhaps Tommy Lee Jones could play her late husband).
Colin Callender, president of HBO Films, said that he first heard about the screenplay seven years ago when he was a lower-level executive. Edgar Scherick, a veteran producer, showed up at a lunch date with Mr. Giat and Mr. Dratch and an unusual film treatment. Not only was the story detailed, but the pitch included a visual presentation of about 20 photographs, mostly of Johnson meeting his advisers. Beneath each photograph were historical quotes that were later used in the screenplay. For instance, the screenplay paraphrases Johnson’s famous quote, ”We’re going to turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley.”
”What I responded to was the way it drew back the veil from the way in which we go to war, the way in which decisions are made by the generals in the hills, with the footsoldiers in the valley,” Mr. Callender said. ”I see this actually as a war movie.”
The usual Hollywood dickering delayed the project — Mr. Giat did more research and script revisions; HBO had new executives and other priorities; there were overtures to other cable networks. And then there was the material itself.
”This has been very long in the making because we wanted the history to be right, and turning this into a dramatic shape was a real challenge,” Mr. Callender said.
In 1999, Barry Levinson agreed to direct, and he cast Mr. Gambon in the role of L.B.J. Two years later, Mr. Levinson asked for a delay in filming. HBO declined and offered the director’s job to Mr. Frankenheimer, who had read the script and was eager to do it. The actors themselves — some of whom demonstrated against the war — said the characters were almost all complex men overwhelmed by events.
Donald Sutherland plays Clark Clifford, who served as defense secretary in the final months of Johnson’s administration. In an early version of the script, ”it looked like Clifford was responsible for those final three years of Vietnam under Johnson, and he was not,” Mr. Sutherland said. ”His advice to Johnson since ’64 was to get out of there. He kept giving that advice, and Johnson took the other advice. His whole job was to get Johnson re-elected. So he was labelled a hawk by some. He wasn’t.”
Mr. Sutherland said the role of Clifford in the screenplay was altered, and he accepted the job.
Walking to the film set a few blocks away from his trailer, Mr. Gambon said that he had become fascinated with Johnson after he left the White House. Johnson, who had a heart condition, died in 1973.
”After Johnson left the White House he went back to his ranch and sat there,” said Mr. Gambon. ”I saw a film of him giving a speech at a college shortly before he died. He was popping pills. And you see photographs of him with long hair, long gray hair. As soon as he retired he let his hair grow. Just like the people who were standing outside the White House shouting at him.”