David Halberstam on "Apocalypse Now"

The Vietnam reporter and author of "The Best and the Brightest" says that Coppola's epic has only gotten better with time.

By Jeff Stark

Aug. 3, 2001 | On a rainy night last month, in a screening room in New York, David Halberstam and several other former Vietnam correspondents and "people connected to the war," as Halberstam put it, gathered with director Francis Ford Coppola to see what sort of difference 21 years and 53 minutes of new footage had made to the original film. Those in the room included Daniel Ellsberg, who worked on staff with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and later leaked the Pentagon Papers, news anchors Dan Rather and Peter Jennings, and reporters such as Kevin Buckley, who wrote about Vietnam for Newsweek.

Halberstam was in good company. The former Vietnam correspondent had spent two years there himself, early on in 1962 and 1963 and again for a stint in 1967, covering the war for the New York Times. Later, he wrote his classic book "The Best and the Brightest," an explication of events leading to Vietnam as well as an indictment of McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and the other elite decision makers who led America into the war. He would follow that book with several others, some of which touched on Vietnam, including "The Making of a Quagmire."

He's about ready to release his latest book, "War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals," in September. I spoke with Halberstam over the phone about his reaction to the new cut of the movie earlier this week.

You've called "Apocalypse Now" the best film about Vietnam.

Before I saw the "Redux" I would have put "Platoon" ahead of it. But I think seeing it again, having 20 years of time, much of the allegorical stuff works better. I exempt the bullshit stuff at the end with Marlon Brando because I think it diminishes the film a little bit. Because it's about Brando, always Brando and his enormous narcissism, which is not about American narcissism but Brandonian narcissism. But I think it's more brilliant.

And I think the other thing of course is the [contrast of "Apocalypse Now" with the] low landscape of every other movie these days, particularly the large-budget movies. It's an age where the big movie has been back-to-back "Titanic" and "Pearl Harbor" and those movies. This is a movie of extraordinary creative ambition. Whatever else you think about Coppola and what he did -- did he go crazy there? Was it the perfect screenplay? Did he lose control of his own movie? My God, did he put himself artistically and financially completely at risk? -- it's in great contrast to what we see today. Look at "Pearl Harbor." "Pearl Harbor" is nearly a blood libel against the event. The people who made that movie should be ashamed of themselves. Then you see "Apocalypse" and you see what real filmmaking really is.

Why is it that after 20 years that allegory seems sharper?

A couple of years ago, when Robert McNamara's really dreadful book ["In Retrospect"] came out, I had gone over to Charlie Rose. (I wasn't on with the dreaded McNamara because he won't be on with us.) There was a question: "Why does Vietnam hang on us so heavily, long after, 20 years after, the last troops left?" I had said, not even thinking about it, that it was the second Civil War, us against us, and the Vietnamese were bystanders. I think that if you had that belated epiphany, and then you see "Apocalypse Now," I think that theme runs through it, the idea that it's us against us and this is what we've done to ourselves and to these other people. I think that you get it more now. I think 20 to 25 years ago, you would have thought it was us against the Vietnamese. Later, it's "What does this tell us about us?"

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