SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

 

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed entitled, “Why Does the Pentagon Give a Helping Hand to Films Like ‘Top Gun’?” by Roger Stahl, a communication studies professor at the University of Georgia and director of the documentary film “Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood.”

The op-ed pointed out that if a proposed film does not meet with the approval of the Pentagon and the CIA, it will probably not get made. Moreover, according to 30,000 documents from the Department of Defense that Stahl and his team of researchers secured under the Freedom of Information Act, “the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows.”

There is one film from the early 1960s that did not meet with the approval of the Pentagon and the CIA that was nevertheless put into production. That film was entitled Seven Days in May and starred Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, and Frederic March. You can watch a trailer for the movie here.

The movie is based on the overwhelming power of the US national-security establishment within America’s federal governmental structure. America’s military generals decide that the president is leading America to doom and decide that they have no choice but to remove him from office in order to save the country. The president gets wind of the scheme and moves to foil it.

As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the movie was based on a novel that had the same title as the movie — Seven Days in May. President Kennedy read the novel and decided that it should be made into a movie to serve as a warning to the American people of the grave danger posed by the national-security establishment.

Of course, Kennedy was not the first president who issued such a warning. In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower, the president who preceded JFK, warned the American people of the grave danger to the rights and liberties and democratic processes of the American people posed by the “military-industrial complex,” which was the name he used for the “national-security establishment.”

In fact, in an earlier draft of his speech, Ike had used the term “military-industrial-congressional complex” to denote the symbiotic relationship between the national-security establishment and the members of Congress. That intimate relationship was most recently demonstrated by the quick passage of the $40 billion aid package that the Pentagon wanted for Ukraine.

In fact, the Founding Fathers felt much the same way. That was why they fiercely opposed “standing armies,” the name they used for a national-security establishment. That was why America did not have a Pentagon, a vast and permanent military-industrial complex and “defense industry,” an empire of foreign military bases, a CIA, or an NSA for more than 125 years. There was a relatively small, basic military force designed primarily to protect settlers from attacks by Native-Americans.

America’s army was so small ...

GRTWT.