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4 ‫ﱜ‬ Vietnam In the Year of the Pig From White Hawk to Vietnam Even before he completed Rush to Judgment, de Antonio was filling notebooks and boxes with research notes that would sustain him through a year of shooting with 35mm color film in dozens of locations across the continental United States. In 1966 he was planning a documentary film about Native Americans and the “loss of tribal dignity, [and the] retention of tribal dignity.” His goal was to explore the conflict between Native Americans and the dominant culture and to examine “the plight of the [Native] American as a lost minority in an affluent society.”1 However,theambitiousprojectneverquitegotofftheground, even after he narrowed its scope to focus on the plight of Thomas James White Hawk, a Dakota Sioux whose murder conviction was a source of great controversy in the mid-1960s. De Antonio communicated with American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders such as Dennis Banks, as well as with the actor Robert Redford, who seemed interested enough to finance the project. But the business relationship with Redford did not work out, and after looking into the various avenues for receiving grants for the project, de Antonio abandoned it in frustration. In one letter while he was researching this topic, he later wrote: “This is how good ideas die before their time. . . . No $.” Although he was unable to bring this project to fruition over the next few years, 76 Vietnam 77 he was able to make a film about another indigenous people’s resistance to U.S. culture.2 LikemostofhisfriendsontheLeftinthemid-tolate1960sand a growing portion of the general population, de Antonio strongly opposed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. When the Jesuit priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigan and the other members of the “Catonsville Nine” were imprisoned for destroying draft files in 1968, de Antonio sent out dozens of letters that appealed for money, “not in the name of charity but for a revolution which will change the values that have polluted our heads and rivers.” Receiving a check to help underwrite their defense was small recompense to the Catonsville Nine, who went to prison for the principles of many, he pointed out in the letter, a copy of which he mischievously sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.3 De Antonio was also willing to go to jail to protest the war, and in a wellpublicized act of civil disobedience he was arrested with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and the actress Candice Bergen in the foyer of the U.S. Senate in 1972.4 Actions such as these were designed to focus media attention on dissenting views on the war, which was an even greater challenge in 1967. At that time only a few journalists had countered the administration’s position in a meaningful fashion, while in general their colleagues in the press had “painted an almost one-dimensional image of the Vietnamese and Vietcong as cruel, ruthless, and fanatical,” as Daniel Hallin put it.5 The few dissenting voices were drowned in a sea of homogenized information that flowed from television, which de Antonio recognized as a serious danger: “Power no longer resides in the universities, as it once may have, but in the television aerial.”6 This did not mitigate his disgust with his social peers, the middle-aged Harvardand Yale-educated policy makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—he singled out McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for special scorn—who “like most intellectuals when they play politics . . . were much more cruel in their capacity to treat people as abstractions.”7 But television was always the great demon from de Antonio’s 78 Vietnam perspective, and he distrusted the medium’s presentation of the war. “Variations on the official line” reported “in a vacuum,” was how Neil Compton described the television coverage of the war, and two decades later this sentiment was echoed when the historian Bruce Cumings noted that from watching television one would think the war had no historical context, no discernible past.8 In part this was by design, part of the need to maintain the uncontroversial, noncritical perspective that sponsors and sometimes even the White House demanded from the television networks.9 With only a few noteworthy exceptions—CBS’s Morley Safer’s Vietnam (1967) or Inside North Vietnam (1968) by Englishman Felix Greene—television had tended to support the administration’s position up until 1968 and more often than not thereafter.10 Fromhispre-1968vantage,deAntoniowasespecially concerned about the ubiquitous...

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