“ARGO”: THE JIMMY CARTER EXPERIENCE

Jimmy Carter is out with his review of “Argo.” It’s a rave with a caveat.

Here’s the relevant exchange, from a Piers Morgan interview that aired last night, on CNN:

MORGAN: You’ve seen “Argo,” I take it? How accurate is it from your memory?

CARTER: Well, let me say, first of all, it’s a great drama. And I hope it gets the Academy Award for best film because I think it deserves it. The other thing that I would say was that ninety per cent of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the plan was Canadian. And the movie gives almost full credit to the American C.I.A. And, with that exception, the movie is very good.

But Ben Affleck’s character in the film was only—he was only in, stayed in, Iran a day and a half. And the main hero, in my opinion, was Ken Taylor, who was the Canadian Ambassador who orchestrated the entire process.

I was informed about it the first day. And I was very much involved with the Canadian government because the Canadian government would not legally permit six false passports to be issued. So the Canadian Parliament had to go into secret session the first time in history, and they voted to let us use six Canadian passports that were false.

MORGAN: But when you first heard about this outlandish plan to create a fictitious science-fiction movie to get these hostages out, you’re the President of the United States. I mean, if this had gone badly wrong, you would have been an absolute laughingstock. So it’s a bold moment for you, for the Presidency, for the country.

CARTER: Well, I don’t deny that. But it was much bolder for the Canadian government to do it, because the Canadian government was not involved in the hostage crisis, as you know. They could have been hostages themselves had it been revealed.

But as I said, you know, they did the primary work. And as a matter of fact, the American hostages left Iran and landed in Switzerland and landed before the Iranians ever discovered that they had been there.

When I left office, I ordained that we would not reveal any American’s involvement in the process, but to give the Canadians full credit for the entire heroic episode. And that prevailed for a number of years afterward.

But I think it’s a great film, and it tells a dramatic story. And I think it’s accurate enough.

This clears up a point I’d been wondering about. When I saw the movie, it occurred to me that if the “Argo” mission had crashed and burned—as the Desert One rescue mission crashed and burned, literally, three months later—it would have been a huge political catastrophe for Carter. He did what? He risked the reputation of the United States of America on a ludicrous Hollywood science-fiction slapstick scam that only an idiot would think might work? Typical Carter! What naïveté, what incompetence! If you think Dukakis in a tank looked silly, try Carter dressed up like a Klingon.

We can now see that the political risk Carter took wasn’t quite as great as the movie makes it appear. Yes, the idea for the caper was the C.I.A.’s. Agent Tony Mendez deserves his belated accolades. Carter deserves a few, too, for green-lighting the thing. On the ground, in Tehran, this was overwhelmingly a Canadian caper—the ultimate Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.

If it had turned out to be a public fiasco, Ottawa would have taken the fall—and the fall wouldn’t have been nearly as precipitous, the landing not nearly as hard, as it would have been if, as in the movie, Washington had played the starring role. Plucky little Canada, people would have thought. It didn’t work, but they tried. Good for them.

As it was, Canada got all the credit. Carter and the C.I.A. got almost none—certainly much less than they deserved. That was part of the plan, of course. But Carter and his top aides—Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Gary Sick, and many more—sat on this incredibly juicy story for nearly twenty years, long after there was any national-security reason to stay silent. There’s nary a word about it in the memoirs they published in the nineteen-eighties. I was there—I was Carter’s chief speechwriter at the time—and I had no idea. Say this for Carter and his confidants, Georgian and not: these guys knew how to keep a secret.

I share Carter’s enthusiasm for the film. And I admire his modesty. It says a lot about him that his big objection to it is, essentially, that it gives him too much credit.

I also share his forgiving attitude toward the historical liberties the movie takes. It has its full share of what can fairly be called inaccuracies. (The Wikipedia entry has an excellent rundown.) With the possible exception of the one Carter has reservations about, though, they’re all anodyne. Pretty much all of them are amply justified by the exigencies of cinematic dramatization. And some—such as the perils-of-Pauline car-and-plane chase at the Tehran airport—telegraph their own made-up-ness through their sheer over-the-topness.

“Argo” has a shot at winning Best Picture on Sunday. It’s a good old-fashioned American story about good old-fashioned American ingenuity. It’s tight and intelligent. Its satire of Hollywood is as affectionate as it is sharp. Its politics, to the extent it has any, are basically liberal. How can the Academy not love it? To beat it, you’d have to make a movie starring, I don’t know, Abraham Lincoln himself.

“Zero Dark Thirty,” however, has no chance. I haven’t seen it, so for all I know it may be greatly superior, simply as filmmaking, to “Argo.” It probably contains a smaller number of historical inaccuracies than “Argo” (or even that other movie about American history). But what is widely seen as its one huge inaccuracy—its suggestion that torture “worked,” that without torture Osama bin Laden would still be watching videos in his suburban villa in Pakistan—is fatal. Kathryn Bigelow’s previous outing, “The Hurt Locker,” won the Oscar not just because it was a terrific movie but because it hit the political sweet spot. People who were against the Iraq War loved it, and so did people who were for the Iraq War. Fairly or unfairly, though, for many Academy members, to vote for “Zero Dark Thirty” is to a vote for Bush, Cheney, and torture.

Me, I’m rooting for “Life of Pi.” If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you see the 3-D version. And try to get a seat about two-thirds of the way back, in the middle.

 HENDRIK HERTZBERG, newyorker