High life
War record
Taki
'd like to say a few words about a great American hero, the Hollywood director Oliver Stone. If he gets an Oscar for his film Born on the Fourth of July, Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who invented a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict and won a Pulitzer prize as a result, should not only be reinstated in the paper but should also be given back the prize. (Pat Buchanan was the first to suggest this, but only asked for her job back, forgetting about the Pulitzer.) Stone wrote and directed the film, the tantrum rather, and his libel will make the Cockburns and Pilgers of this world very, very happy. In fact, not since Jane Fonda went to Hanoi, put on a pith helmet and posed next to a downed American fighter plane have the Yankee-haters had such an opportunity to rejoice. Stone's anti- American propaganda makes poor old Dr Goebbels sound like Hamlet. But first a word about 011ie.
I've dined with him a couple of times, and even played tennis with him. At first he appears a nice enough fellow. He sweats a lot, and he's sort of a slob, but who among Hollywood's elite isn't nowadays? You can tell he's taken a lot of drugs not only because he's gone on record as having done it, but because he still seems spaced out, and has trouble focusing on a con- versation.
But perhaps it was my conversation in particular that he couldn't concentrate on. You see the trouble with me is I never talk about money for too long, a failure that must bore Stone almost as much as his craven anti-Americanism enrages me.
The reason I'm writing about this sweaty and greedy chap is because I hear his film is now playing in London, but also because it may have escaped a few of you that Stone has recently gone on record saying that if he were President Bush he'd shoot himself. Stone is anxious to establish his left-wing credentials in order to have the financing one needs nowadays to make films in Hollywood, the only place except for universities of the West that is still full of communist sympathisers.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. Stone's main theme in his 'oeuvre' is the maltreatment of patriotic American youths who went to fight for their country in Vietnam. He conveniently forgets that it was the anti- war zealots who branded those very youths war criminals, and to whom the Stone film genuflects. The anti-war merchants like Fonda and Ellsberg who contributed to the maltreatment of the veterans Stone now turns into heroes.
It is as if the victims of the Gulag raised a monument to Stalin, or the survivors of the forced repatriation of the Cossacks to Britishers . . . er . . . unknown.
But I shouldn't go on. Stone is not the first nor the last Hollywood type to lie through his teeth on film. People who pay more attention to detail than I do have found so many things wrong in the picture it would take a Tolstoy length book to list them all. I will simply list one truth. About a genuine hero this time.
Lieutenant Colonel Nick Rowe was mur- dered in Manila last year while serving his country. No film will ever be made of his life. And yet on 29 October 1963, he was captured by the Viet Cong and spent five years in captivity. He was tortured but never broken. Anti-war types of the Fonda persuasion provided his captors with in- formation about his family in order to help break him. They never did break him and he escaped. The sort of people who gave info to his captors are the same who undoubtedly will profit from this film. Keep it in mind when you pay to see it.
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