Richard Nixon was sometimes called a Shakespearean figure, partly for the tragedy his presidency became, but the real Shakespearean figure in 20th-century American politics was Lyndon B. Johnson. He was in fact cruelly lampooned in his time by being made the subject of an off-Broadway play called “MacBird.”
“Path to War,” the new HBO movie about Johnson and Vietnam, may not have Shakespearean aspirations, but it certainly depicts Johnson as a toweringly tragic figure. The movie is so powerful and passionate in its portrayal, and actor Michael Gambon so commanding in the role of LBJ, that “Path to War” could play a major role in the reevaluation of this widely maligned chief executive.
The film, premiering at 8 tonight on HBO and only 15 minutes shy of three hours, is remarkably and unrelentingly compelling, a major accomplishment for the filmmakers when one considers that it’s to a large degree a dramatized debate among government figures. It isn’t easy to make a meeting cinematic, and the path to war is paved with meetings — meetings in the Oval Office, at the Pentagon, in Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson’s bedroom, and virtually wherever a meeting can be held.
Daniel Giat’s screenplay skillfully shows us how Johnson’s grand plan for a Great Society unraveled as he took America deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy. But Johnson was being taken, too, led into this mother of all quagmires by a battery of yammering advisers, many of them military men who kept insisting the war was winnable even as they spectacularly proceeded to lose it. Eventually, “stalemate” was the highest hope even they could hold out.
Giat’s words come thrillingly to life because a great director, John Frankenheimer, is at the helm. Frankenheimer has experience with political thrillers and he tightens the screws with artful efficiency. His use of a somewhat melodramatic musical score on the soundtrack may make the film seem at times old-fashioned, but old-fashioned in a good way. That is, not so much old-fashioned as classic — classic in tone, in style and finally, classic in stature.
Gambon is entirely up to the task of making a larger-than-life icon seem painfully — and in the end, helplessly — human. It is a performance of fire and brimstone, yes, and when Gambon as LBJ backs down a political foe or turns some underling into quivering mush, we can see what made Johnson so intimidating and so effective — one character calls him “the best politician this country’s ever seen” — but he had more than one bete noire. As Vietnam flared up and criticism of Johnson reached a feverish pitch, he was always quick to blame the Kennedys, the Kennedy-lovers and the Kennedy legend for his troubles.
Where his martyred predecessor had been elegant and charming, the darling of the intellectuals (or Washington’s version of intellectuals) and a symbol of sophistication, Johnson was, of course, a magnificent vulgarian for whom a nuance was a nuisance — a man of action and not words who, if he’d had his way, might easily have gone down in history as the greatest liberal president since FDR. Instead, his time and indeed his soul were eaten away by a futile war in Southeast Asia that America had inherited from the French.
Implicitly the film asks one of the most maddening questions of history: If Kennedy had lived and served a second term in the White House, would America have become just as fatally entangled in the madness of Vietnam? Johnson had many of the same advisers Kennedy would have had, and Kennedy would have been no more anxious than Johnson to be known as the first American president to lose a war.
But then the movie is not some fleshed-out version of a political board game. It is foremost a truly shattering drama, a character study of a man who didn’t have time to wrestle with his own inner demons because there were so many outer demons nudging him this way, urging him that way.
Gambon’s portrayal is enormous and easily dominates the film, but with few if any exceptions the other members of the cast stand up to him, and Giat’s script is especially commendable in the way it gives complexity to each characterization. It’s no simple matter of hawks and doves competing for Johnson’s heart and mind. George Ball (Bruce McGill) is indeed the one man in the inner circle who from the beginning warns that pursuit of the war is folly, that any increase in America’s involvement can only lead to ruin. And yet gradually we see Ball become consumed by the war and by his sense of being a lone voice of reason and logic, as if being the only sane person has managed to drive him insane.
Similarly, Donald Sutherland’s portrait of Clark Clifford is full of trenchant shadings and provocative details. What seems compassionate one moment turns coldly cunning the next. Clifford softens his opposition to escalation because he thinks it’s best for Johnson’s image to do so. Before it’s all over, he’s become nearly as hawkish as the colossally misguided Gen. William Westmoreland (Tom Skerritt). The tragedy of Vietnam is partly that the misguided were doing most of the guiding.
Alec Baldwin has the critical role of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a man relying on old ideas to fight what was for America a new kind of war (though perhaps not unlike the war in which the country won its own independence a couple of centuries earlier). One problem for Baldwin is that he’s one of those actors who’s chosen to have a high political (liberal) profile off-screen, so some viewers may find themselves looking for ulterior motives, rather than artistic ones, in the way he plays the part. But Baldwin does seem to find him an essentially honorable man — honorable and pitifully self-deluded.
Gambon may not have Lyndon Johnson’s accent down perfectly, but his raging-bull comportment seems right on the money. We see Johnson at his best as well as his worst, as when he cagily invites George Wallace up to the White House at a particularly crucial juncture in the civil rights movement. The pugnacious and bigoted Wallace (Gary Sinise) is brilliantly manipulated by Johnson into doing precisely what Johnson wants him to do. Before the meeting, Johnson says of Wallace, “I want his pecker in my pocket,” and who could doubt the authenticity of a Johnsonian line like that?
Johnson takes immense pleasure in his political victories and indeed in his own performance as president; in an early scene he watches a videotape of his inaugural address and gives himself what amounts to a rave review. His devotion to the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights legislation is seen as more than a matter of personal pride, however; he zealously believes in the changes he thinks he can make. As loud and rambunctious and physical as he could be, Johnson could also wax poetic on the beauties of “the Texas hill country in the spring,” then in the next moment regale colleagues with a metaphorical tale about a stud bull entering a corral full of cows. He uses a Cutty Sark bottle as a prop; you can probably guess what it’s supposed to represent.
The war goes on and on and Johnson’s popularity sinks lower and lower. He vows never to send in ground troops and a moment later, they’re there. The numbers escalate wildly. At each stage he is assured by the generals that this next step will be decisive — and often it is, but in the opposite way it was intended.
In a reflective moment, Johnson describes himself as a man going down in a plane: “I can crash with it and burn up, or I can jump and die.” He is, finally, left with no desirable alternatives, his elite brain trust outsmarted by a nation of peasants whom they snobbishly regard as primitives. Those of us who lived through the era — perhaps as college students marching around with burning candles, or doing whatever we could to avoid going to Vietnam ourselves and becoming part of the tragedy — may be able, perhaps for the first time, to see the ordeal from Johnson’s perspective.
We can sense the anguish he must have felt as he personally signed letters to parents of those who died in the war, ostensibly in service to their country. Frankenheimer and Giat for the most part stay inside Johnson and his lush isolated world, but the growing protests from outside make their way through the walls of the White House, and the filmmakers suggest that, unlike Nixon, Johnson was truly wounded by the vitriol he inspired, by such merciless and penetrating rhetorical chants as “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?” He may himself have been dying inside; we didn’t really know that then.
The film isn’t entirely grim. A scene in which LBJ, at the wheel of a big ol’ white Lincoln convertible, with Lady Bird (a rather colorless Sarah Paulson) at his side, brings back the glorious, posterity-be-damned esprit of the man. The film’s verisimilitude is helped by such minor details as the casting of John Valenti as his father, presidential adviser Jack Valenti, even though the young Valenti won’t be winning any acting prizes. From whatever angle you approach it, though, “Path to War” is a tremendous achievement — not as a history lesson but as a profoundly emotional experience.
Michael Gambon conveys both Lyndon Johnson’s bluster and his anguish. Donald Sutherland, left, brings both cunning and compassion to the role of Clark Clifford, one of many officials to give President Johnson (Michael Gambon, right) questionable advice on escalating the Vietnam conflict in HBO’s “Path to War.”