David L. Robb Responds

Dear Sir:

I am shocked that you would agree to publish such a false and libelous review of my book by someone who is so obviously a rival in the field of military film history.

I am not a bit surprised, however, by the tone of this self-serving review, as it comes from an author who has allowed Mr. Phil Strub at the Pentagon's film office to review his book—the updated version of Guts and Glory—before it was published. (See the note on page 235 of my book where this is discussed.) No legitimate historian would ever do such a thing. I would very much like to know if he sent this review to Mr. Strub before he sent it to the editors of Film and History.

I would also like to know if Mr. Suid actually read the book before he wrote his demonstrably false review.

He says that Mr. Strub has nothing to do with determining whether or not a film receives military assistance. This is not only false; it is a lie, because Mr. Suid knows that it is false.

Mr. Suid writes: "...Strub simply reads the scripts and sends them to the appropriate public affairs offices of each service for consideration. Strub has no authority to decide whether a service should cooperation (sic) or refuse to cooperation (sic) on a project. He only conveys the decisions back to the filmmakers and then becomes a facilitator during subsequent negotiations to produce a script which a service will find acceptable for cooperation."

As Mr. Suid well knows, this is not true. Mr. Strub has a great deal of say in deciding which films get military assistance. This is shown throughout my book, and is demonstrated in Mr. Strub's own memos and letters to producers. One such letter, dated Dec. 15, 1993, is quoted on page 125-127 of my book. In that letter, Mr. Strub tells James Webb, the former Secretary of the Navy, that the Department of Defense had declined to assist the production of a film based on Mr. Webb's book, Fields of Fire, even though the Commandant of the Marine Corps was eager to support such a film.

Mr. Suid also claims that "the military has never once prevented a movie from being made or distributed." This, sirs, is demonstrably false. My book documents four films that were not made because they could not get military assistance:

- Mr. Webb's "Fields of Fire"

- A film project about Adm. Hyman Rickover based on the book by Clay Blair (pages 353-55).

Mr. Suid's review also takes exception to my claim that the deal between Hollywood and the Pentagon is "Hollywood's dirtiest little secret." He appears to suggest that because the DOD receives a little "thank you" acknowledgement at the very bottom of a film's end credits, that everyone should know that the military had a hand in shaping the content of the film. He also shamelessly uses the pages of your magazine to promote his own books—which completely overlook the fact that the military censors the movies—to make his point that this is no secret.

Finally, Mr. Suid tries to rely on a specious analogy to make his most important point - one that he knows has no validity, and which is demonstrably false. He writes:

"General Motors was never going to help Ralph Nader make a movie about the Corvair. No organization wants to be portrayed negatively. Why should the armed services be any different and be required to provide help to a film which portrays historical events or military procedures inaccurately?"

If Mr. Suid had read my book, which I doubt, he would know that the First Amendment does not allow the government to favor speech that it likes, while refusing to grant those same favors to speech that it doesn't like. As I point out on pages 47 and 48, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, in Rosenberger v. The University of Virginia and in numerous other cases, that "in the realm of private speech or expression, government regulation may not favor one speaker over...