An interview with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki

Juliana Kiyan Staff WriterElizabeth Pacheco Senior Editor

In 1942, Frank Capra began making a series a propaganda films entitled Why We Fight to bolster American war support against Nazism. Director Eugene Jarecki’s 2005 documentary of the same name examines President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he admonished Americans about the rise of the military industrial complex. But over the last half of the century, Jarecki argues, militarism has dominated American foreign policy.

The film interweaves personal stories with commentary from Senator John McCain, former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, President Eisenhower’s son John S.D. Eisenhower and writer Gore Vidal, among others. Why We Fight was released to critical acclaim and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and the 2006 Peabody award.

On Nov. 28, Jarecki came to Vassar to lead a documentary workshop and screen his film, followed by a question-and-answer session. The Miscellany News sat down with Jarecki before the workshop.

The Miscellany News: What inspired you to make Why We Fight?

Eugene Jarecki: Why We Fight has been seen by many people as a movie that is very focused on the Iraq War. The interesting thing is that we started making the movie before there was a war in Iraq. There were murmurings about war and an increase in militaristic language by the Bush administration, and I was focused on that in the context of the last film I had made, The Trials of Henry Kissinger [2002]. I had come across the farewell address of Eisenhower, the 34th president, who was a two-term Republican president and a hero of World War II. At the end of his two terms in office, he had made an extraordinary farewell address to the American people in which he warned them of what he called “the military industrial complex.”

When you see the address for the first time, it’s really arresting...By putting these three simple words in a constellation that presented a tremendous threat to the status quo, he gave Americans a window into the forces that shape defense policy, why a country like America goes to war. No American president has spoken as openly on any circuit before or since. The reason to make the film in large part was Eisenhower’s address and the way in which it spoke to me at a time of increasing military inclinations out of Washington.

MN: Describe the movie.

EJ: Why We Fight is very much a film about America undergoing a real sort of sea change over the course of her history. For a lot of people, the Iraq War represents a kind of case study in how one administration sort of ran away with American foreign policy…but a look at American military activities in the past century, and let alone since the dawn of the republic, reveals that this is a country that has been at war almost since its inception, and that politicians of both parties have at different times led the country to war for reasons that vary in their legitimacy.

Certainly Bush isn’t the first president to have led this country into a war that later turned out to be built on false pretenses, and when you learn about that, it’s too late to get out. We saw this with President [Lyndon] Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin, and all of sudden we found ourselves in the Vietnam War, which lasted more than a decade.

Why We Fight is about how America got to be in a place in which we see war as the most natural solution to the problems that we face. It looks at the Iraq War, but it puts it in a historical context...We’ve asked ourselves many times, “How the hell did we end up in this war or that war?” and the reason we’re so confused about it is that the actual forces shaping this decision to go to war, such as the military industrial forces and others, are invisible to us. The film tries to go a long way in examining how military industrial interests and alliances contribute to the tendency of the country to go to war.

MN: What was the process of making the film?

EJ: We started to make the film before there was a war in Iraq, and that meant that we were really making a pretty analytic film about the forces that shape American war-making. Then all of a sudden the war started, and the film changed a great deal...[The film] was now the Iraq War in the context of Eisenhower’s farewell address and the history of foreign policy that has been creeping ever farther away from our founding principles and ever closer to a militarized national policy.

Suddenly we had to play a balancing act between the highly analytical and highly personal...You couldn’t make the film and not deal with the war that was unfolding around you—that would be insane. We started to capture the stories of everyday people whose lives were intertwined with this war and past wars. In doing that, the film took on a very personal dimension, and the challenge was creating a hybrid between the personal and analytical.

MN: How did you select the participants for your film?

EJ: I was looking for people whose stories would speak to audiences about aspects of the very confusing questions we face as Americans regarding war.

Anh Duong, a Vietnamese woman in the film, is best described as one of the leading bomb designers in the country. She is a refugee from Vietnam who came to this country, adopted this country as her new home and wanted to give back by making bombs in the event of future wars.

That’s a story with so much pathos in it, of a child of war who grew up to be a practitioner of war…it has an internal irony in it. When you think about her story, think about how she answers the question “why we fight.” In her mind, we fight to avoid the experience she had as a child, for those values. Think about how misused that emotional investment of hers is by an administration that goes to war frivolously...Each person has their own way of accessing “why we fight” and the American story from its best to its worst.

MN: How would you address the critical reaction to your film?

EJ: Bill O’Reilly called the film “un-American,” and I was pretty pleased with that. That’s one of those double negatives…O’Reilly is a person who represents the demise of real honest truth-seeking reporting in this country...It’s a real stripe as a filmmaker to get attacked by certain people.

I have also been attacked by America’s liberal left, who have a lot of difficulty accepting that a man like Eisenhower, a two-term Republican, can represent such a visionary for today...In many ways, if you make the film right, you get attacked from all sides. We live in a world of status quo thinking, so if you get at some issues that make people uncomfortable, then they were probably a little too comfortable in what they thought.

MN: What are you planning on doing in this documentary workshop? What are you hoping to impart to Vassar students?

EJ: Well, there are two sides to it. At the end of the day, I am first and foremost a person trying to promote public dialogue, and I’m also trying to promote the prospect for change.

When I visit schools, I try to use the movie as a talking point to a much larger discussion about engagement: what you’re doing, if you have strong feelings about this country, its role in the world, the issue of the war or other issues that are important to any of us. [If you’re not engaged,] this is not your world. This is a world in which you’re increasingly becoming an accidental participant. If they don’t want that, if they want to be living in a world where they have definition of any issue, they have now to do it. These are the years during which young people represent a real army for making the kind of change that the world ultimately feels.

Right now, my job here is on some level to help people think if they want to be filmmakers, and if they want to make political change or social contribution in film. But more broadly, I’m really a person who’s just trying to spread information and ideas and understanding; if it weren’t film, it’d be something else.

MN: Anything you’d like to add?

EJ: I make films as a form of engagement, and they make me feel alive. And if I didn’t make them, I’d feel like a little pawn in a world created by much more powerful people. For anybody who’s contemplating work in film or any other issue they feel strongly about working in, engagement is living.

Non-engagement is spiritual death. And that’s not for me.

To read the complete interview with Eugene Jarecki, please visit misc.vassar.edu.