BEFORE: Johnny Cash carries over from "Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon". This is another doc that seems to be part of a Netflix series, like "Music Box" or "Trainwreck", but I'm not interested in any of the other episodes, just this one. So I'll just treat this like it's a stand-alone hour-long doc - I don't know what makes it "Remastered", like did they try to tell this story before and find they had to re-edit it? The term is usually used with albums when they're re-released and some sound editors remix the songs, so it's a bit confusing. I'm still trying to figure out why "The Current War" was released with "Director's Cut" in the title, and also I'm still trying to determine why the doc about the ship disaster was released under the heading "Trainwreck", because no trains were involved.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Elvis Meets Nixon" (Movie #1,126), "Elvis & Nixon" (Movie #3,507)
THE PLOT: Concerned by a rising rock-n-roll influence on a growing liberal fanbase, President Nixon invited Johnny Cash to the White House to solidify his base in the traditionally more conservative genre of country music. What Cash did instead was subversive and surprised everyone.
AFTER: Before watching today's film, I went down to the basement and rummaged around in the pile of clean t-shirts until I found the one with the image of Elvis shaking hands with Richard Nixon, something I would probably wear anyway around the July 4 holiday, because it's got big lettering on it that reads, "I Call It America...and I Love It!" I guess I was hoping for a similar bit of crazy here, similar to that time that Elvis visited Nixon and they made him some kind of fake honorary drug enforcement officer, which is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. But that's neither here nor there -
The difference with Johnny Cash meeting Nixon is that he wasn't just invited to visit, they wanted him to put on a concert and everything, Nixon's handlers had convinced him that as Johnny Cash goes, so goes the country, and the country at the time was very divided, half of the U.S. hated Nixon because of the unjust war in Vietnam, and the fact that U.S. servicemen were dying far from home in a war that made no sense. The other half of the U.S. hated Nixon just because he was a total dick, but I guess since he was Republican and good for their business interests, they put up with him. I don't know, this all seems a bit familiar...the whole unjust war thing reminds me of Bush/Cheney and the whole being old and clueless thing is Trump all day.
This documentary interviewed a LOT of the same people as yesterday's doc about Johnny Cash, well, sure, if they wanted to get opinions and insight from his family and friends, they're going to draw from the same circle of people. At first I thought maybe tonight's film was just cut together from outtakes and archive footage left over from "The Redemption of an American Icon", but that's not possible because this Netflix doc was made four years earlier. So it's just the same pool of people that they were able to interview.
There's a lot covered here in a short time about the politics of the late 1960's, not just the Vietnam War but the race relations in America, the black Civil Rights movement and also Mr. Cash was an advocate for the rights of Native Americans, he even recorded a song about Ira Hayes, who was a Native American man that was one of the U.S. Marines that raised that flag over Iwo Jima, and appeared in that iconic photo. In addition Cash had his variety show, and although he had on several guests from the "counter culture" of hippie rock, Cash was raised to support the U.S. President during troubled times, after all FDR had given his family 20 acres of farmland in Arkansas so they could struggle for years picking cotton. (No wonder he wanted to be a musician and go out on tour.)
So the wonks in Nixon's administration figured they could invite Johnny Cash to perform at the White House, and Cash could bring his whole family, they could wear fancy clothes and eat a dinner first because Cash would have to sing for their supper. Nixon was using this as a bit of political theater, because he wanted the support of the "silent majority" (aka white people) in the South, this was a standard tactic of Republicans, they needed the Conservative Southern vote to win elections and they didn't want Tennessee to turn into a swing state. That would come later, with all the Nashville music people going all liberal and stuff. I know Texas is a purple state now, and the voting in the big cities like Houston is kind of balanced by all the rural areas that tend to vote the other way.
Nixon kind of messed up, because he had two requests, that Cash perform "Okie from Muskogee", which is a Merle Haggard song that was anti-hippie and anti-drug, and "Welfare Cadillac", which was a satirical song at the time that poked fun at people on welfare. Well, Johnny Cash didn't like being told what to sing, and also, some of his best friends were hippies, and also some of his friends were drug addicts, plus he was raised poor, so he found a way to deny Nixon's request by saying he didn't have time to learn those songs. OK, fine, but then what was he going to sing instead? The set list was kept secret, some even say that Johnny Cash didn't know what he was going to sing until he got there and read the room.
Bear in mind, there was precedent for using the White House concerts as a form of political commentary, Eartha Kitt had accepted Lyndon Johnson's invitation to perform, only to chastise his policies once they turned her mike on. And in Nixon's first term, one of the Ray Coniff Singers had held up a sign during their White House performance urging him to stop dropping bombs on Vietnam villages, which was of course a key part of his strategy. So there was some question over whether Cash's rebel side would show itself, or if he'd toe the line and thank Nixon for the opportunity to perform, as set up through their mutual friend, Rev. Billy Graham.
You can see in the footage that Johnny Cash was sweating - a lot. Maybe it was warm that day, or maybe he knew that the eyes of the world were on him, and it was a lot of pressure. Cash sang "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", that song about the Native American U.S. Marine who was at Iwo Jima, and then whipped out a new composition of his own, called "What Is Truth". It was a song about the younger generation, how they looked to their parents and teachers to try and understand the world, and how important it was not to lie to them. While it was not directly an anti-war song, singing that song in front of a politician carries some extra weight with it - and Cash had prefaced it by saying he had visited Vietnam just a few weeks before and performed for the troops, as many as he could in the time he was there.
You want to talk about "walking the line", this was doing that, plus threading the needle. The song's metaphor was clear, even if the implication wasn't blatant. A lot of people have had to find the middle ground, perhaps, like how do you support the troops while still saying you're against the war? Well, if you support the troops, don't you want the war to end so the troops can come home safely? Cash could have performed a song like "Blowin' in the Wind", which asks about when can the cannonballs be banned and such, but he didn't, he just wanted to make Nixon uncomfortable a bit, but still, a bold move nonetheless. Maybe he liked the dinner and he wanted to make sure he got invited back, I don't know.
It didn't help Johnny Cash hang on to his TV show, though - but again, he was a rebel so he was always going to buck the system. Even when he closed his show by saying that he supported the President, his liberal producers couldn't believe it, because saying anything political like that would automatically alienate half of the viewing audience. And then a few weeks after his White House Concert, his new protest song managed to alienate the other half - so as a variety show host, Cash was essentially done and ABC pulled the plug on his show.
But maybe Johnny Cash got inside his head just a bit, because not long after, Nixon revealed his bold new strategy to win the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia (which the U.S. had been doing for some time, apparently, on the down low) and at this point, even some of the people who supported the war in Vietnam felt that Nixon was going too far. This was when Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite started to turn against the futility of the war, and man, if you've lost Cronkite, you lose the country. Nixon had decided to tell the truth about his intentions in Southeast Asia, and it was a bit more truth than the American people could take - even if the U.S. military could ultimately take over Vietnam, they were just going to move on to the next country and keep going. The morale of the soldiers was at an all-time low, because they felt they might never be able to go home.
And then a few weeks later came the Kent State protests, and all the fallout from the shooting of students there led to university protests across the country. Well, I guess we can now lay at least some of the blame for Kent State on Johnny Cash, but if it hadn't happened that way, it might have played out a different way that meant the war could have lasted longer and more troops would have died. So Cash probably saved more lives in the long run, if you look at it that way. A few months later, in December 1970, Elvis visited Nixon at the White House, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Directed by Sara Dosa (producer of "Becoming") & Barbara Kopple (director of "Havoc" (2005))
Also starring John Carter Cash, Don Reid, Jimmie Snow, Mark Stielper, Joanne Cash Yates (all carrying over from "Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon"), Aram Bakshian, Pat Buchanan (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Alexander Butterfield (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), W.S. Holland, Bill Miller, Lou Robin, Bill Zimmerman
with archive footage of Richard Nixon (last seen in "Join or Die"), David Brinkley (last seen in "The Mystery of D.B. Cooper"), Bill Brock, June Carter Cash (also carrying over from "Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon"), Ray Charles (ditto), Bob Dylan (ditto), Billy Graham (ditto), Marshall Grant (ditto), Joni Mitchell (ditto), Tommy Cash, John Chancellor (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Ray Conniff, Walter Cronkite (last seen in "I Am MLK Jr."), Lyndon Johnson (ditto), Neil Diamond (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Cass Elliot (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Albert Gore Sr., Merle Haggard, H.R. Haldeman, Lady Bird Johnson (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "Joan Baez: I Am a Noise"), Eartha Kitt (last seen in "Boomerang"), Jim Lovell (last seen in "Apollo 11"), Pat Nixon (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Dan Rather (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Tex Ritter, Pete Seeger (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Jack Swigert, Fred Thompson (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), William Westmoreland
RATING: 6 out of 10 future Watergate criminals in attendance
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