THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (80 page)

As American standards fell, so to did the
world’s. The term “Cold War” became
passe
. The economy
tanked. Gas prices went through the roof amid
loooong
lines.
Lacking fundamental faith in the economy, interest rates made it
almost impossible for ordinary folks to pursue the American Dream
of home ownership.

In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola finally
released his Vietnam epic,
Apocalypse Now
, starring Martin
Sheen, Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall. Like Stone’s
Wall
Street
and a number of other movies, the political intent of
the filmmaker was reversed, with audiences ultimately grasping an
entirely different message. In the case of
Apocalypse
, the
politics of its screenwriter, Right-winger John Milius (who went to
USC with Tom Seaver, Tom Selleck, and George Lucas) prevailed.
Coppola intended to make a film excoriating America’s involvement
in Vietnam. At least over time, when conservatives and militarists
dissected how the Left first failed to support the war; forced the
President to fight with “one hand tied behind our backs”; then
allowed “The Killing Fields” to occur by not putting any teeth
behind Nixon’s 1972-74 agreements with the Chinese, Russians and
North Vietnamese; the Wagnererian helicopter attack on a Communist
village became the symbol of how America
should
have fought
the war. This was the mindset that propelled Ronald Reagan to
victory in 1980, and backed his eight-year crusade to undo Vietnam
by defeating Communism once and for all.

In Coppola’s case, it was the second time he
misread the American public. He wrote the screenplay for the 1970
war film
Patton
, starring George C. Scott. With the Vietnam
War raging at the time, Coppola’s
Patton
was supposed to
depict a warmonger who enjoyed the art of battle. By Coppola’s
definition, such a man was insane. He assumed audiences would see
just that. Three things prevented this from happening. First,
Patton’s
Scott was brilliant; slightly unhinged, but
charismatic, a leader at a time in which America was searching for
one (Dwight Eisenhower had died the previous year, 1969). Second,
director Franklin Schaffner had served under Patton and knew that
men like that were heroes, flawed or not. Third, the fact that wars
must be fought to win resonated as a self-evident truth with
filmgoers, Vietnam or no Vietnam.
Patton
inspired Nixon’s
incursion into Cambodia after he saw the film several times.

Hollywood’s brilliance mixed with an elitist
inability to read the real America can be found in several other
movies. Oliver Stone never seemed to understand his audience.
First,
Wall Street
drove thousands not away from but
into
investment banking during Reagan’s go-go ‘80s. In
1991’s
JFK
starring Kevin Costner, Stone portrays John
Kennedy’s killers as Right-wing wing militarists and Republicans.
When historians picked the film apart as a great piece of art but a
pack of lies, blaming everybody except the likely real killer(s) -
Communists Lee Harvey Oswald and/or Fidel Castro – it served to
discredit the Left. In 1995, Stone went after the ultimate hated
figure of his generation,
Nixon
(starring Anthony Hopkins).
Stone made the “mistake” of too-accurately describing Nixon’s
attempt to destroy Communism. Apparently, the filmmaker thought
audiences were not as opposed to the ideology as they were. Most
found favor with the real Nixon, a man who saw evil in his time and
tried to beat it, despite the efforts of people in his own
country.

Finally, in 1992 liberal Rob Reiner directed
A Few Good Men
, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. This
was supposed to “correct” the mistakes of
Patton
by showing
an out-of-control militarist (Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessup)
during peacetime. The idea was that America no longer needed
“dinosaurs” like Jessup/Patton. However – Reiner, as well as
screenwriter Aaron Sorkin deserve credit for writing and leaving in
this scene – Nicholson/Jessup makes a classic speech about the true
purpose of the military, which protects the Leftists (symbolized by
Cruise’s Daniel Caffey, a thinly-disguised ACLU-type lawyer) while
the Marines live by “honor, code, loyalty,” and a “life spent
defending something.” His classic admonition that Cruise/Caffey
“say thank you, or pick up a weapon and stand a post, because
either way I don’t give a damn what it is you think you’re entitled
to,” followed by his sneering description of all those liberals as
“you (expletive deleted) people!” may be the most accurate
description of how Right-wingers feel about the Left ever
uttered.

To the consternation of Coppola, Stone, and Reiner
(and delight of Milius):

1. Patton
   ,
   Apocalypse Now
   and
   A Few Good Men
   are to this day a hit at boot camps, Marine
   movie-watching parties, officer’s candidate school, and various
   gung-ho militarist encampments.
   

2. Wall Street
   is a must-see among
   “young Turks” trying to find the fighting edge in the investment
   banking industry.
   

3. JFK
   and
   Nixon
   are used by the
   conservatives to demonstrate Left-wing media bias as well as show
   Nixon as a great-but-flawed President prevented from his destiny by
   unpatriotic liberals.
   

One film that did not have such “unintended
consequences” was
The Killing Fields
, starring Sam Waterston
as
New York Times
reporter Sidney Scheinberg, who covers the
terrible reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge after the U.S. pulled
out of Vietnam. Conservative Clint Eastwood was offered the role,
but turned it down because it tried to convolute the blame of mass
murder, instead of depicting the Communists as being just as evil
as the Nazis, which they were. The political message of the film is
fairly muted, but if watched closely attempts to convey the notion
that had the U.S. not
been in Vietnam
in the first place,
then the Communists would never have been justified, or motivated,
or whatever it was they were, to kill 1.5 million Cambodians,
Laotians and fellow Vietnamese between 1975 and 1979.

The Deer Hunter
(1978), starring
Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken, was a decidedly conservative
film that made no bones about showing the true face of murderous
Communism, and smalltown American heroes as seemingly the last,
best hope of beating them back.

These two films mirror essential differences
between the Left and the Right. The moral relativism of the Left
says we prodded these people into this action. Conservatives
observe
The Killing Fields
and note that it was precisely
because such people did exist
, and did such things, that we
fought them in the first place.

Since the 1.5 million murders in “The
Killings Fields” represents just a small drop in the bucket of the
now-100-102 million killed by this ideology roughly between 1917
and (according to recent reports from China and North Korea) 2007,
it is therefore a self-evident truth that the conservatives are
right on this one.

Today, the argument persists with different
players. The Left says Islamic Jihadists kill because America
forces their hand. The Right says that prior to the American
invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003),
terrorists/Muslims:

• Attacked Israel (1967).
  

• Killed Robert F. Kennedy (1968).
  

• Murdered the Israeli wrestling team at the
  Munich Olympics (1972).
  

• Attacked Israel (1973).
  

• Kidnapped American diplomats in Iran
  (1979-81).
  

• Blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut
  (1983).
  

• Kidnapped a Navy pilot (1984).
  

• Blew up a disco in West Germany frequented
  by U.S. military personnel (1986).
  

• Killed an American on the cruise ship
  Achille Lauro
  (1987).
  

• Blew up a plan over Scotland (1988).
  

• Tried to blow up the World Trade Center
  (1993).
  

• Took over Mogadishu, prompting
  Black Hawk
  Down
  (1993).
  

• Blew up the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia
  (1998).
  

• Blew up a Navy ship (2000).
  

• Flew planes into the Pentagon, the World
  Trade Center, and tried to fly into the White House on 9/11
  (2001).
  

• All among many other incidents, not to
  mention that with which is classified.
  

Certain truths we continue to hold as
self-evident.

In November of 1979, Iran gave terrorism a
religious ideology, beyond simply an Arab one (Iranians are
Persians, not Arabs). They kidnapped all the American personnel at
the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It was the final nail in President
Carter’s coffin.

The rise of Ronald Reagan and conservatism
can be directly attributable to 1960s radicalism. By 1980, America
saw that the protest generation was, if not entirely wrong,
certainly more wrong than right. They saw that it had led to “The
Killing Fields,” Communist adventurism in Africa and Latin America;
and by extension to the new threat of Islamo-Fascism in the Middle
East.

The country reacted by electing Reagan over
Carter in a landslide. He won again in 1984 by a bigger blowout of
49 states, a margin almost as huge as Nixon’s victory over George
McGovern in 1972. While conservatism has its merits, it wins the
votes only when combined with liberalism’s most glaring faults,
which in 1980 were more like an open soar. The Left really has
nobody to blame but themselves for starting a Republican winning
streak that has, for the most part, lasted 28 years (depending on
the standards, 36 years since Nixon’s runaway).

Reagan’s Presidency is considered one of if
not the best of the 20
^th
Century. Its twin pillars were
a tremendous economy and the winning of the Cold War, which he
brought about by challenging Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at
Reykjavic, Iceland in 1985. Reagan pressured the Soviets to “keep
with the Jones’s” militarily, and refusing to budge on missile
defense. The emotional resonance of all this was a renewed sense of
American pride and patriotism.

Reagan was actually out of office when the
Cold War finally was won. That occurred during a period roughly
lasting from November of 1989 (when the Soviets heeded Reagan’s
call to “tear down this” Berlin Wall) and Christmas Day of 1991,
when on the symbolic birth of God’s son the atheist empire
officially called it quits.

The winning of the Cold War can be viewed
through more than 30 years of historical reflection as the first
victory of the Vietnam War. Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson
started Vietnam in 1964. By 1969, Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew it
was not going to be won in traditional manner, with parades and the
high approval ratings that go with it. They chose then to set out
on a course that could be described as a combination of George
Kennan’s original containment policy of 1947; combined with the
realpolitic
of Kissinger’s post-Napoleonic hero, Austrian
Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich; and a superpower’s use of
attrition, as utilized by the Romans over Hannibal, the Americans
over the Japanese, and a thousand other times in between. This
approach was like geology: all it needed was time and pressure. By
1989, mountains were finally moved.

The reason the 1989-91 Cold War victory can
be attributed in part to Vietnam is because the Communists were
forced to expend so much treasure, time, human cost and effort in
fighting us that, even though they captured that small piece of
geography, it was a
Pyrrhic
victory. That meant that the
cost of winning was greater than the value of the victory.
Eventually, after their failed Afghanistan adventures of the 1980s,
it was perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back, or one of
them.

By the 2000s, America’s historical victory
in Vietnam was complete. Vietnam became a semi-capitalist country,
still quasi-Communist, but with no bite or desire to expand beyond
its borders. In effect, they became that with which we began to
fight for them to become in 1964-65. Again, there are those who
will disagree with this analysis and state that had the U.S. never
gone in, they would have gone this route anyway.

This is sophistry. Vietnam became one of the
loser’s of history in a war of attrition won by America. It was not
glamorous. There are no pictures of sailors kissing nurses in Times
Square over our victory there. It was like many Roman triumphs
during the 1,000 years of their empire; won by waiting it out
because, to use the Mick Jagger line, America knew that “time is on
my side.” Had Vietnam been able to, they would have been part of a
worldwide Communist expansion. America stopped it from happening.
Only when they became tiny, marginalized and frankly, needed our
help via trade in order to survive, did they come around to be the
kind of people the anti-war crowd said they would have been if we
simply had left them alone in the first place.

Reagan was succeeded by his Vice-President,
George H.W. Bush. A native of Greenwich, Connecticut, the nephew of
Mets part-owner Herbert Walker, Bush is the unlikely catalyst of
the Southern power shift that has dominated politics for two
decades. LBJ started it. Nixon and Reagan cultivated the South.
Bush brought it to fruition. When the “South rose again” it was
another unlikely downer in liberal circles.

The civil rights movement was more than
anything else liberal in nature, and perhaps the Left’s proudest
20
^th
Century accomplishment. To their great
consternation, the political beneficiaries of it have been
conservative Republicans. Nixon and Reagan were palatable to the
South. When they finally made the shift away from the Jim Crow, Ku
Klux Klan wing of the old Democrats, it was the GOP that husbanded
them back into the Union. It was the GOP that appealed to their
anti-Communist, patriotic, evangelically Christian tendencies, and
thus got their votes in landslides.