Last week I re-watched the spy flic Three Days of the Condor, to mark Robert Redford’s passing at the age of 89. I always liked Redford, because it was difficult not to. There was something about him that exuded honesty, good intentions and a complete absence of cruelty or malice.
All these qualities obviously stand out by their absence from the malignant lying gargoyles who are making America great again. These are people you can expect to find when a society is rotting in front of your eyes. Redford was the product of different times. Like James Stewart before him, he embodied the possibility of a different America. Even when he appeared in films that criticized his country’s failings, his artistic trajectory always contained the hopeful idea that America contained values worth defending.
Three Days of the Condor belongs very much to the liberal Hollywood tradition that he was part of. It’s something of a period piece, from its funky jazz soundtrack to its historically-rooted critique of CIA overreach
The film came out in September 1975, just over a year after Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, and 6 months after the North Vietnamese Army rolled into Saigon. In 1971, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and passed on information on the agency’s covert and illegal COINTELPRO program, which the Washington Post famously published. In January 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also known as the Church Committee, began its investigations into the CIA’s activities abroad.
In short, this was a moment of American vulnerability and introspection, when the US government and its institutions were subject to unusual levels of critical public scrutiny. It was against this background that Hollywood also began to hold the government up to scrutiny, in a slew of films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and Alan J. Pakula’s ‘paranoia trilogy’: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976).
The paranoia in these 70s conspiracy films was not the rightwing ‘paranoid style’ of the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism or the John Birch Society, which Richard Hofstadter analysed in his seminal 1964 essay. Combing neo-no Irish cynicism with liberal disenchantment, these films plucked their conspiracies from the headlines, and turned them into critiques of their own government.
Three Days of the Condor’s script was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr, a former intelligence officer, who also scripted The Parallax View, and the two films have a very similar vibe. Where Warren Beatty’s dogged reporter discovers a corporation that recruits psychopaths to kill politicians, Robert Redford’s bookish college boy Joe Turner, codenamed ‘Condor’ works for the American Literary and Historical Society in New York - a CIA front which reads books and then feeds them into a computer. It’s not clear - to me at least - why the company does this. Is it in order to detect potential enemy operations by seeing who might be imagining them in fiction? Or is it to see if actual CIA operations are being written about in spy fiction and pulpy novels?
Once you put that somewhat implausible scenario aside, we are in familiar early 70s territory: the truth-seeking individual trapped in a dangerous, unfathomable world in which no institution or individual can be trusted, where even the mailman might be trying to kill you. When Turner goes out to buy lunch, he returns to find that his colleagues have been massacred, and he must then find his way through the conspiratorial maze in order to find out what happened and also to save his life.
Redford is perfectly cast as the all-American innocent who finds out that the agency he works for is not innocent. It’s no good him protesting that ‘I just READ BOOKS!’, when he realizes that one of his own reports has led elements high up in the CIA to murder his colleagues, using the freelance assassin Joubert, played by Max von Sydow with an icy amorality.
Naturally, these elements are intent on murdering Turner, in order to cover their tracks. With the initially unwilling help of Faye Dunaway’s lonely photographer, Turner stumbles through the labyrinth, and gradually shines a flashlight into the darkness. Using his Signals Intelligence background, he eventually find his way to the architect of his colleagues’ destruction: Leonard Atwood, CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East.
It turns out, in those post-OPEC years, that Turner’s readings have inadvertently revealed a secret CIA plot to invade the Middle East. ‘You mean this whole damn thing was about OIL?’ Turner yells at Cliff Robertson’s New York CIA deputy director chief Higgins - a question that has a new poignancy in the 21st century.
Even then, it was about oil, and Higgins is also in on it, even as he tries to bring the Condor back in from the cold. In the final scene, Higgins claims that the plan to seize the Middle East oilfields is just a war game. At the same time, he suggests that if it was real, most Americans would support seizing the oil fields in order to perpetuate their high standard of living.
Turner then tells Higgins that he has given details of the plot to the New York Times. Checkmate to Turner, or so it seems. Except that Higgins asks him,’ How do you know they’ll print it?’
‘They’ll print it,’ Turner replies, with more confidence than he actually feels. ‘How do you know?’ Higgins yells, as he fades into the crowd - a fugitive for the rest of his life unless the New York Times can save him. This is Parallax View ‘deep state’ conspiracism - the suggestion that every American institution is subordinate to the all-powerful secret forces that pervade American life.
It’s all a bit of a mess, and even though it lacks The Parallax View’s atmosphere of claustrophobic dread, it’s engaging nonetheless, once you suspend disbelief, and abandon yourself to the charms of Redford and Dunaway. At the time, the critic Roger Ebert called it a ‘well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it’s all too believable.’ Ebert also saw the film as a symptom of a cultural shift:
Conspiracies involving murder by federal agencies used to be found in obscure publications of the far left. Now they’re glossy entertainments starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. How soon we grow used to the most depressing possibilities about our government - and how soon, too, we commercialize on them. Hollywood stars used to play cowboys and generals. Now they’re wiretappers and assassins, or targets.
How soon indeed, and it’s interesting to consider these premises in an era in which the American republic is collapsing in front of our eyes, under an administration whose criminality and corruption makes Watergate look like the political equivalent of parking on a double yellow line.
To some extent, films like Three Days of the Condor were a liberal counterpoint to right-wing movies such as Death Wish and the Dirty Harry films, which also came out in the same period. These films were also critiques of systemic failure, that presented the lone man with the gun as the solution to liberal America’s failings. Nevertheless, for a brief period in the second half of the 70s, it seemed as though the liberals were actually winning. In April 1976. the Church Committee published its findings, and concluded that there was no constitutional authority for intelligence services to break the law and carry out assassinations in pursuit of US foreign policy objectives.
That same year All the President’s Men (Redford once again) seemed to answer Higgins’ question ‘How do you know they’ll print it?’ in its heroic account of the dogged reporting of the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story. In 1977, Jimmy Carter won the presidency. And in 1978, the US government enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which attempted to provide judicial oversight to intelligence-gathering and warrantless surveillance.
Under Carter’s human rights policy, the US government attempted to bring a new moral dimension to American foreign policy, and curb the excesses of the ‘national security state’ doctrine that had dominated the thinking of successive administrations since the beginning of the Cold War. For the first time in American history, a US government set out, as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance put it, to ‘speak frankly about injustice, both at home and abroad.’
This policy often fell short, but it also had real impact. These were the years in which the US cut off military aid to the Uruguayan ‘torture chamber of Latin America’. Where Henry Kissinger had given the Argentinian military carte blanche to do murder and torture its opponents in order to fight ‘terrorism’, Carter’s intrepid and outspoken Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Patricia Derian infuriated the Argentinian generals with her denunciations of the ‘systematic tortures’ and ‘summary executions’ practiced by the regime.
ThenSoviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions, and the revolutionary tide in Central America brought an end to these efforts, and an end to Carter. Like Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson’s murderous avenger, Ronald Reagan portrayed all these outcomes as the result of American weakness in the face of ‘Soviet aggression’, and launched what was effectively the world’s first attempt to ‘make America great again’ in the 1980s.
Under Reagan, the CIA recovered all the powers it had lost, and gained others it had not had, as it implemented Reagan’s ‘rollback’ agenda, by conducting the most wide-ranging and expensive covert operations in its history in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. Throughout the 80s, America gave direct military and political assistance to some of the worst regimes in the world. These were the years that produced Contragate, the global jihad in Afghanistan, support for both Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, and the massacres that drowned the Central American revolutions in a sea of blood.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the liberal critique of the national security state was more or less erased by America’s ‘victory’, and the conspiracies in the paranoia movies of the 1970s already seemed like quaint relics of a distant era. In the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans joined survivalist groups and ‘patriot militias’ to fight the government they called the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), and the United Nations black helicopters that heralded the New World Order.
This was conspiracy thinking on an entirely different level to the grounded conspiracies in Three Days of the Condor and the other 70s paranoia movies. In 1976 a Gallup survey found that 72 percent of the American public trusted the media - an outcome that was a direct consequence of the Woodward and Bernstein investigation into Watergate, and the release of All the President’s Men that same year.
Last week, the Washington Post - a newspaper now owned by a billionaire who has pledged allegiance to the Trump administration - sacked the columnist Karen Attiah for criticizing Charlie Kirk. To millions of American voters, the mainstream media is now the ‘legacy media’ and a purveyor of fake news, compared with the Internet, Fox News, and theninfluencers and podcasters who now dominate the MAGA media landscape.
Today, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories have rotted the American mind, to the point when millions of voters who believed in a shadow-world controlled by child-eating celebrities helped elect the worst president - and the first American president to be accused of paedophilia - in American history.
All of which brings me back to Robert Redford. When Redford died, Donald Trump was unusually fulsome in his praise, declaring:
Robert Redford had a series of years where there was nobody better. There was a period of time when he was the hottest. I thought he was great.
These feelings were not reciprocated. Given Trump’s propensity to vengeful mean-spiritedness, it is likely that he had forgotten Redford’s 2019 op-ed for NBC News, in which Redford denounced Trump’s government as a ‘monarchy in disguise’, which was launching a ‘dictator-like attack…on everything this country stands for…our shared tolerance and respect for the truth, our sacred rule of law, our essential freedom of the press and our precious freedoms of speech.’
It’s unlikely that Redford saw anything to change his mind in the years that followed. He was on every level, the moral and intellectual opposite of the man he denounced, a principled and generous campaigner as well as an actor, who defended environmental causes, lobbied for clean energy legislation and stood up for Native American rights for decades. He created the Sundance Film Festival as a space for independent filmmakers. He used his celebrity platform with grace, humility and integrity, to try and make his country a better place and help people who had not had the same luck he had.
None of that can be said of Trump and his fascistic minions. And perhaps now, more than ever, we need to remember the man who played Jeremiah Johnson, the Condor and the Sundance Kid, and remind ourselves that not every rich man is a sociopath, and that Americans like Redford have always existed, and still do.
Thanks for the reminder - time to rewatch the film.
Both Redford and Newman were fine role models, even more so off screen, matching their words with substantive deeds.