politics

DEATH BY LIGHTNING: a statesman, a hack, a lunatic and one great story

by
Photo caption: Matthew McFadyen in DEATH BY LIGHTNING. Courtesy of Netflix.

In the four-part Netflix miniseries Death By Lightning, Mike Makowsky (Emmy winner for Bad Education) creates a cracking good story out of an exceedingly obscure segment of our history. In a boring history class, this would be a period in which one President (James Garfield) served only six months and the other (Chester Arthur) was never elected President in his own right, with the big political debate being about patronage versus civil service. But there was also political intrigue, corruption, double crosses, a down-to-the-wire election, madness and murder – and Makowsky makes the story pop.

I’ll be commenting on the series itself, and then the history, and finally a personal perspective from my own life in politics. First, Death By Lightning itself. It’s 1880, and the Republican Party, desperate to keep control of the White House, faces a three-way race between the political heavyweights of the time; none of the three can muster a majority, and, after 33 ballots, the delegates settle on a compromise choice who wasn’t even running – James Garfield (Michael Shannon). And, they choose a guy with a completely conflicting political profile, Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman) as Garfield’s running mate; Arthur hadn’t been running, either. Now the fractured party has to reunite behind the unexpected standard-bearers, refill the empty party coffers and navigate though the minefields of controversy.

Most of us have heard of Garfield and Arthur because they were Presidents, but the most powerful and visible leaders of the age were James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling – political giants and personal rivals with a visceral hatred for each other. Death By Lightning accurately shows how Garfield and Arthur try to make their way within the overall battle between Blaine (Bradly Whitford) and Conkling (Shea Whigham). It helps that Conkling was an outrageous, venal, womanizing character with a unique haircut that Whigham gets to flaunt. Whigham’s colorful portrayal of Conkling is reason enough to watch Death By Lightning.

The other best reason to watch Death By Lightning is the performance of Matthew McFadyen as the series’ real main character, Charles Guiteau. Guiteau was a highly functioning schizophrenic narcissist who saw himself as deserving of high office and deluded himself into thinking that he had great value as a political advisor. Guiteau, in his grasping for status, also showed himself to be a cunning fraudster and an audacious compulsive liar. Guiteau’s frustration was that everyone he met saw through his harebrained scheming, crank ideas and pathetic pretensions. As insignificant as was Guiteau, he managed to significantly impact history as a presidential assassin. In Death By Lightning, as Garfield, Arthur, Blaine and Conkling engage in real political competition, Guiteau flits around as a crazy pest – and as a ticking bomb.

The acting in Death By Lightning is superb. Shea Whigham, one of my favorite character actors, and Offerman get the flashiest roles, because Conkling and Arthur were such scallywags. Shannon has both gravitas and reserved magnetism as Garfield. Other standouts include Paula Malcomson as Guiteau’s fictional enabling sister, Betty Gilpin as Lucretia “Crete” Garfield and Dominic Applewhite as a young, idealistic party activist.

But the soaring, award-worthy performance is Matthew McFadyen’s star turn as Guiteau. McFadyen (Tom Wambsgans in Succession) is able to show how Guiteau could opportunistically turn on a dime as he reached for the influence he thought he was due, and how Guiteau just couldn’t keep it together when his lies were exposed. Ever watchable, McFadyen’s Guiteau never fails to entertain.

Incidentally, Death By Lightning was shot in Hungary on Hungarian sets with a Hungarian technical crew, but everything passes for America in 1880-81.

Shea Whigham and Nick Offerman in DEATH BY LIGHTNING. Courtesy of Netflix.

The history (contains some spoilers)

Death By Lightning is fictionalized, but accurately captures the politics of the day and the overall arc of the Garfield/Arthur/Conkling/Blaine/Guiteau story.

Even major American political figures, like Presidents and presidential candidates, had no real security at the time. People of the period must have thought of the Lincoln assassination as an awful, unthinkable one off. A regular person could approach and get up close to any politician or elected official, including inside the White House up to the door of the president’s office; (the Oval Office hadn’t been built yet.) 

Unlike today, when all the regular government employment is civil service, essentially all federal jobs were appointed politically. So, if you wanted to be a small town postmaster or a clerk in the Interior Department or consul to Naples, you needed to ask the President (or somebody else who could ask him) for the job. Indeed, that meant that the President of the US himself was always swarmed with job seekers.

Guiteau definitely had historical encounters with Blaine. I couldn’t find documentation of Guiteau meeting Garfield, Arthur or Lucretia Garfield, but those encounters depicted in Death By Lightning are all plausible, especially for someone as devious and persistent as Guiteau, who was always on alert to ambush famous people.

Other things that Death By Lightning gets right historically:

  • Arthur did feel compelled to reverse himself and enact Garfield’s program, which he had initially opposed.
  • Crete Garfield was indeed a key White House advisor of her husband’s. It’s not depicted in Death By Lightning, but the Garfields’ marriage became close after a very rocky first few years, as you can read on Crete Garfield’s Wikipedia page.
  • Guiteau really did join (and get kicked out of) a “free love” sect, the Oneida Community. The creeped-out women, who were having sex with the other men in the sect, did nickname him “Charley Gitout”.
  • All the details of Guiteau’s capture, trial and execution, including his expectation that President Arthur would pardon him in gratitude, his attempts to monetize his notoriety and the song he composed for the gallows, were EXACTLY as they happened in real life.
  • Roscoe Conkling really was that arrogant and flamboyant and really did sport that haircut with the curly locks on his forehead.

But this IS a fictionalized account:

  • Death By Lightning portrays Garfield as some sort of citizen farmer who was reluctantly involved in politics. In 1880, Garfield had been in Congress for 17 years and had risen to become the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and then the Republican Floor Leader in the House. He was a professional politician and a national figure. This was a guy who had been elected to the State Legislature in his 20s, was able to recruit his own Civil War regiment at age 30, serve with distinction and rise to Major General rank by 34.
  • In Death By Lightning, Guiteau has a good-hearted, gullible sister Franny who enables his misadventures. In real life, Guiteau had no sister, but had a father who didn’t cause Charles’ mental illness, but who used corporal punishment and toyed with the Oneida Community himself, which certainly didn’t help.
  • Roscoe Conkling really did blunder his career away by resigning from the Senate, but I couldn’t find any source attributing his defeat to the combined efforts of his wife and his mistress.

It’s also not depicted in Death By Lightning, but Garfield, who was both a classics scholar and ambidextrous, would astound folks by writing in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other SIMULTANEOUSLY. Best Presidential party trick ever.

The politics (contains some more spoilers)

I really enjoyed Death By Lightning, and, as a history buff, especially as a student of American political history, I am admittedly a sucker for historical movies. But I also have spent four decades as a political professional, so I frequently DISLIKE movies about politics that I find naive, simplistic or implausible. So, please pay attention when I heap praise on Death By Lightning for capturing how people in politics really behave – especially those at the margins of politics.

Politics draws a lot of hard-working, ambitious people who are motivated by idealism, duty, hunger power, need for attention, and all kinds of reasons. But American democracy is, by definition a public process, and the high visibility attracts lots of mentally unstable people, too. Every politician – from school board member to presidential candidate – has been surprised by some unbalanced person with a crank fixation or worse. It;s the worst in California, where the Brown Act allows anyone to address any local government body on any topic, resulting in psychotics ranting nonsense at their captive audience of elected officials.

Of course, politicians WANT to be visible at public events. In what’s called the grip and grin, it’s traditional for candidates and their surrogates to get their photos snapped (and now we’re in the Selfie Age) with anybody, even those unknown to them. One anonymous guy who got his picture taken with First Lady Roslyn Carter turned out to be serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

While often a person immediately presents as crazy, sometimes you get a ways into the conversation before it happens. What I really love about Death By Lightning are the scenes with both Blaine and Lucretia, where Guiteau eventually makes the one overreaching remark that causes them to instantly recognize, oh, this guy is a crank.  

What people didn’t understand in 1880 was that Guiteau hadn’t opposed Garfield, as John Wilkes Booth did with Abraham Lincoln. Guiteau was a huge Garfield fan, who was disappointed when Garfield’s team found Guiteau too crazy for them to hire. (It was also crazy for Chapman to shoot Reagan in an attempt to impress Jody Foster.) I have spent my life in politics, and I can verify that there are a lot of Guiteaus out there.

Makowsky even takes shot at a contemporary politician; he has Garfield proclaim, “No matter how long America stands, there will still be Roscoe Conklings.”

Death By Lightning is streaming on Netflix.

THE NEUTRAL GROUND: the supremacist legacy of old statues

by
Photo caption: C.J. Hunt in NEUTRAL GROUND. Photo courtesy of PBS POV.

In the pointed documentary The Neutral Ground, C.J. Hunt explores the continuing legacy of Confederate monuments in America. Finding the backlash against removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments so absurd, Hunt, a producer for The Daily Show, started out to make a snarky YouTube video. But he found himself drawn more deeply into the history of Confederate monuments, so intentionally braided with white supremacy.

In my view (and C.J. Hunt’s), it’s a no-brainer to remove monuments that should never have been erected in the first place. After all, these monuments celebrate men who led a traitorous insurrection against their own country, who sought to keep other human beings enslaved and who lost a disastrous war. Traitors. Slavers. Losers.

But Hunt is fascinated by the chorus of White Southerners advocating for the preservation of Confederate monuments to maintain pride in (White) Southern heritage. All of them claim that the Civil War was not about slavery. And none of them would say that they are White supremacists or that slavery was acceptable. Hunt notes a disconnect with historical fact:

“The founding documents of the Confederacy talk so obsessively about slavery, the real mystery is how so many people came to believe that Confederate symbols have nothing to do with it.”

I am a student of American history, and this is one of my pet peeves. If you’re interested, you can read more thoughts about THE NEUTRAL GROUND and the Lost Cause lie.

Now back to the movie, The Neutral Ground.

Hunt is very funny. To a woman who wants to keep all the statues in their prominent places with plaques for context, he suggests this wording: “Hi, I’m Robert E. Lee. A long time ago, I turned on my country and led over 200,000 Southern sons to their graves, so we could keep our basic right to own human beings as property. #SorryI’mNotSorry“.

After meeting a round of genteel “as long as you stay in your place” racists, Hunt is unnerved by encounters with the “I want to kill you” variety of racists.

For me, the highlights of The Neutral Ground were Hunt’s sparring with his own African-American father. His dad, moving about his kitchen in an Aunt Jemima apron, critically recounts the evolution of C.J.’s own racial awareness and imparts his own unblinking view of institutional racism in America. This repartee sets the stage for The Neutral Ground to become even more personally-focused for C.J. Hunt.

I watched The Neutral Ground on PBS’ POV; it’s now streaming on PBS.

MY NAME IS BULGER: two brothers, two paths to power

by
William Bulger in MY NAME IS BULGER. Photo courtesy of discovery+.

The documentary My Name Is Bulger traces the life of one fascinating man – made even more compelling by the life of a second man. Bill Bulger, one of nine kids raised in the projects, was a political wunderkind. First elected at age 26, his 35-year career in the Massachusetts State Legislature was topped by 18 years as President of the State Senate. No less than the squeaky clean former Governor Michael Dukakis credits Bill Bulger for cleaning up the previously corrupt institution.

Now, here’s the kicker – while Bill Bulger was dominating Massachusetts politics, his brother James “Whitey” Bulger was the state’s most fearsome crime lord.

Politics is public, and crime is private. Politics requires self-promotion, and crime requires secrecy. The brothers Bulger are parallel studies in power.

For decades, my day job has been in politics. It’s not unusual for politicians to deal with embarrassing, and even unsavory, relatives, but what do you do if your vocation is politics and your older sibling is a notorious criminal?

Very bright and armed with wit and charm, Bill Bulger was able to artfully, even miraculously, keep his career separate from Whitey’s. As Whitey became more infamous, Bill was able to delay being hurt by the association. It was widely known that Whitey had been in Alcatraz as early as 1959.

We meet Bill Bulger himself, now 85, and several of his adult children (who also remember their “Uncle Jim”). Dukakis appears, along with another former governor, William Weld. There’s also a former crime partner of Whitey’s. And we hear from the recently released Catherine Greig, Whitey’s longtime girlfriend and fellow fugitive, captured with Whitey in Santa Monica.

As sympathetic to Bill Bulger as is My Name Is Bulger, it doesn’t hide his opposition to busing in the 1970s, a political necessity that put him on the same side as South Boston’s ugliest racists. Nor does it shy away from the moment Whitey became a high-profile fugitive and Bill was cornered into taking the Fifth.

William Bulger in MY NAME IS BULGER. Photo courtesy of discovery+.

My Name Is Bulger is told from the point of view of Bill Bulger’s family. The Bulgers are understandably resentful of Bill’s political enemies in the press (and former Governor Mitt Romney). It’s more difficult to appreciate the family grudge against the government for harshness to Whitey, who, after all, was convicted of 19 murders.

For the story of how Whitey was able to use the FBI to eliminate his competition in the local Italian Mafia and the Irish mob, I also recommend another recent doc, Whitey: The United States vs. James J. Bulger.

My Name Is Bulger will stream on discovery+ beginning June 17.

VICE: like Macbeth, only funny

by

Christian Bale in VICE

Vice is the comic biopic of Dick Cheney by writer-director Adam McKay (The Big Short).  Cheney is played by a physically transformed and unrecognizable Christian Bale.

McKay’s take is that Cheney’s driving motivation and genius is the accumulation and exercise of power – to whatever end and by whatever means.  McKay also sees Cheney as a mediocre slacker molded and fueled by Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams), whose own ambitions were limited in the 1960s by her gender.  So, this is a tale of ruthless grasping along the lines of Macbeth or House of Cards, only mostly non-fiction.

McKay drops in the horrifying real impacts of Cheney’s exercise of power, but this is mostly a very funny movie.  Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s mentor in power-grabbing, and George W. Bush, Cheney’s stooge, are played for laughs in very broad performances by Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell.  McKay also tosses in a funny faux ending and has Dick and Lynne, in bed for the night, erupt in Shakespearean dialogue.  Jesse Plemons plays a fictional Everyman narrator.

Bale’s performance is extraordinary, and goes well beyond the impeccable impersonation, down to every Cheney mannerism – stoneface, sneer and grunt.  Adams is excellent as his Lady Macbeth.  So is the rest of the fine cast, especially Alsion Pil as lesbian daughter Mary, Tyler Perry as Colin Powell and Shea Whigham as Lynne Cheney’s probably murderous father.

Vice is pretty good history, biography from a sharp point of view and a damn entertaining movie.