Back to Kerry’s Vietnam

The word “Iraq” is mentioned only once in passing during George Butler’s new documentary, “Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry,” which was shown at the film festival here. But it’s there, hovering in the air like a ghost, haunting this 90-minute film virtually from start to finish.

Iraq is there in the film’s scenes from the Winter Soldier Investigation hearings in Detroit in 1971, when Vietnam veterans publicly confessed to rapes, murders and mutilations. It is inescapably there when a soldier shows a photograph of himself in Vietnam and says shamefully, “That’s me, holding a dead body, smiling.”

It is there when the movie chronicles 1968’s Tet offensive, the surprise assault on South Vietnamese cities and American troops by North Vietnamese, a turning point in American attitudes about whether the war in Vietnam had a definable objective and could even be won.

And it is there when President Nixon proclaims with confidence that the “American people will support the war if they are told why we are there.”

While the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are striking, this is not, ostensibly, a movie about that. It is a love letter of a movie about John Kerry by a filmmaker who has known and admired the Democratic presidential candidate since they were young men. “Going Upriver” focuses on a narrow slice of Kerry’s life, his transformation from Navy Swift boat commander in the Mekong Delta in late 1968 and early 1969 to leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971, which catapulted him to national fame.

The film has Super 8 footage that was shot by Kerry in Vietnam and, strikingly, an audio interview that Butler conducted with Kerry in 1970 that matches the footage. For instance, Kerry filmed a dead Viet Cong soldier lying in a field, and an American soldier torching a hut, both recounted as indelible memories by Kerry in that 1970 conversation. Using Kerry’s several hours of footage, as well as film shot by Wade Sanders, who later became an undersecretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, Butler was able to piece together what he calls “the story of the river war.” There are no reenactments in the film, Butler said.

Inevitably, the documentary, loosely based on historian Douglas Brinkley’s laudatory Kerry biography “Tour of Duty,” will be perceived by some as a piece of campaign propaganda or as a response to accusations leveled by the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has run ads challenging the nominee on his Vietnam record.

Some news reports have suggested that Butler altered the film at the last minute to refute the attacks on Kerry, which Butler denied. “The problem with these documentary films is that they look chaotic until the very last moment,” he said. “If anyone had influence on me making the film, it was the five or six editors who were working with me.”

An executive of ThinkFilm, the movie’s distributor agreed: “A few weeks ago, it was longer,” said Mark Urman, who heads U.S. operations for the Toronto-based firm. “There was much more biographical stuff -- his mother, father, education, general information about his background. It was breathtaking for me to see in the space of the last two weeks, to see the movie become something that spoke louder and could be heard amid the din of what had transpired.”

To be sure, the film has been used for political purposes: Butler has allowed the pro-Kerry independent political group MoveOn.org to include a short clip from his movie -- interviews with boat mate Del Sandusky and Jim Rassmann, who credits Kerry with saving his life in Vietnam -- on a DVD that was part of a recent mass political mailing.

A spokesman for President Bush’s re-election campaign responded with sarcasm when asked for a comment about “Going Upriver.” “Oh, how shocking,” Reed Dickens said. “A film about Vietnam.”

Urman said ThinkFilm is prohibited by federal election law from advertising the movie on television and radio for its Oct. 1 opening in 200 theaters across the country. Executive producers Bill Samuels and Vin Roberti said Friday that they are working right now to develop “an aggressive viral campaign on the Internet,” as Samuels put it, and that the DVD should be in stores by Oct. 19.

When Butler introduced the film Tuesday night at its Toronto Film Festival world premiere, he said the movie had just been finished that morning.

In an interview here, Butler said the movie had “evolved enormously” since its inception. In 2002, he’d conceived of a documentary that would tell the story of Kerry’s life from cradle to (potentially) his ascendancy to the White House. As the campaign took its twists and turns, so did the film. In the summer of 2003, Butler left the country to research a movie on lowland gorillas in the Congo. When he returned, however, Kerry’s prospects were looking bleak. “When I got back,” Butler said, “his campaign was a disaster. At one point he was below Al Sharpton in the polls.”

At that point, when Kerry’s campaign seemed dead in the water and Howard Dean’s effort was going full steam ahead, Butler said he was one of very few people who still believed in Kerry. “When I projected he would win, people shook their heads. It was very lonely.”

Kerry, of course, swept the Iowa caucuses and went on to win the New Hampshire primary on his way to the Democratic nomination.

Taking notice

Butler, 60, is one of those men who seem to have noticed things before everyone else. In 1972, he began taking pictures of an obscure Austrian bodybuilder who was competing for the Mr. Universe title in, of all places, Baghdad. That project evolved into the 1977 movie “Pumping Iron” and, one might argue, California is living today with the long-range effects of that particular chronicle of ambition and charm.

In 1964, he began taking pictures of a friend named John Kerry, whom he’d met through a mutual friend, Dick Pershing, grandson of Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the American military hero whose exploits spanned wars in two centuries. The Pershing family had a home in Jamaica; Butler’s father, who’d been a British military man, had retired there.

In January 1968, Butler was in New Hampshire on the farm owned by his American mother’s family, when he opened the Manchester Union Leader and read the headline “Pershing kin killed in Vietnam.”

“I decided on the spot that I would not go to Vietnam,” Butler said. He volunteered for VISTA, the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps, and found himself assigned, without much supervision, to Detroit. He started a local newspaper and published it twice a month through the summer of 1969.

In 1970, Kerry asked Butler to help in his first political campaign, a brief attempt at running for Congress in Massachusetts that was preempted by the entrance of the antiwar Jesuit priest, the Rev. Robert Drinan, into the primary.

What Kerry did next is the focus of much of “Going Upriver,” a bracing refresher course on the antiwar movement of Vietnam veterans. In April 1971, Kerry helped lead an estimated 1,100 vets to Washington for “Dewey Canyon III” (the name is a reference to a Vietnam military operation), where they spent five days in generally peaceful demonstrations against the war. The week culminated with Kerry’s famous testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which he asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

The next day, vets lined up to throw medals, ribbons, citations, combat boots and other war memorabilia over a fence at the Capitol steps. In one scene, Boston Globe Washington columnist Thomas Oliphant, who was an eyewitness to much of Kerry’s postwar activism, recalled a poignant moment. A group of women from the Daughters of the American Revolution told the vets that “our troops aren’t going to like this.” And, Oliphant said, the vets replied, “Ma’am, we are the troops.”

Executive producer Samuels, an old friend of Butler’s and a “passionate supporter” of Kerry, said he raised the film’s $1.3-million budget from about 35 individuals. He said he knows this film will not have the widespread appeal of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” “This is not ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ ” he said. “This is a fairly serious movie.”

As serious as it is, a few scenes drew laughter from the Toronto audience. Nixon’s nervousness about Kerry’s increasingly high profile as an emerging star of the antiwar movement provided a mordantly humorous moment when Nixon aide Charles Colson is caught on tape saying, “Let’s destroy this demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader.”

And there is a sequence that shows the White House recruiting someone to counteract Kerry’s antiwar vets. That person is John O’Neill, who meets with Nixon in the Oval Office and debates Kerry and another antiwar activist, Bobby Muller, on Dick Cavett’s television talk show. This year, O’Neill, a Houston lawyer, became co-chairman of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and wrote the anti-Kerry bestseller “Unfit for Command.” O’Neill, whose daughter is getting married this weekend, was not available for comment, his spokesman said.

Muller, a former Marine lieutenant who lost the use of his legs in Vietnam after a bullet severed his spinal cord, founded Vietnam Veterans of America in 1978 and co-founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which received an Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

“I cannot believe how I have been transported back 33 years and have an anger that is welling up in me,” he said after seeing the film for the first time Tuesday. “The only redemptive value of Vietnam for those sacrifices was that the war should be a lesson.”