NEW YORK
For a guy who just made a documentary about the life of Sen. John Kerry, George Butler spends a surprising amount of time discussing "The Life of Samuel Johnson." This might seem odd: Butler's film doesn't even mention the celebrated 18th-century biography of the English writer. But it's relevant when you remember that "The Life" was written by one of Johnson's closest friends, James Boswell.
Knowing and admiring your subject isn't necessarily a liability, Butler will tell you. It can actually be an asset.
"I'm not Kerry's best friend, but I'm one of his best friends," he says in an recent interview. "And I don't think I would have been able to make such an interesting film about him if I didn't know him so well."
Butler was an eyewitness to the second half of the story told in "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry," which opened yesterday in Washington. The movie starts by recounting Kerry's four-month tour on a Swift boat in Vietnam, then traces his decision to speak out against the fighting and his subsequent involvement with a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In 1971, the organization gathers in Detroit for a series of anguished first-person testimonials, and a few months later, there is a tense but successful march in Washington, where Kerry and hundreds of other disillusioned vets demand that Congress bring home the troops.
Kerry impresses enough key politicians to win an invitation to speak before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His performance April 21 earns the VVAW a national audience and transforms him into a political celebrity. For most of the D.C. action in "Upriver," Butler is standing just a few feet from Kerry.
These were all dramatic but dimly remembered events until August, when a group of Swift boat veterans began running TV ads that accused Kerry of exaggerating his war valor and slandering the military with his claim as a 27-year-old that U.S. atrocities in Vietnam were commonplace. For several weeks the campaign for the presidency was about little else. Kerry's service record was reexamined and the allegations of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, as the anti-Kerry force called itself, were given a vigorous frisking.
The charges -- among them, that the Massachusetts senator had unfairly finagled some of his medals -- have mostly wilted under the attention. But the candidate's time in Vietnam was suddenly controversial, instead of the vote-winning asset it seemed like a few months ago.
Butler, now 60, dismisses the kerfuffle with a single, unprintable word. (It translates, roughly, as "nonsense.") "Upriver" is not intended as a rebuttal to Kerry's antagonists, none of whom is among the handful of present-day interviews in the film. He considers them liars, for one thing, and he says there wasn't room for their viewpoint in the tight narrative arc of this 90-minute movie.
The absence of naysayers, and Butler's friendship with Kerry, will no doubt lead Republicans to dismiss "Going Upriver" as sophisticated agitprop disguised as an evenhanded account of the facts. But if this is a campaign movie, it's a pretty unconventional one: It never mentions Kerry's campaign for the presidency, nor is there any recent video or audio of Kerry. There's little critical here, but Butler, in the interview, mentions details that a dedicated lionizer would have left out (that some members of the VVAW thought Kerry was a spotlight-hogging stiff, for instance). Most of the movie is just unblinking archival film and photographs of the fighting in Vietnam and of Kerry's brief, impassioned career in the antiwar movement.
Butler, not surprisingly, believes his friend would make an excellent president, and when he talked about Kerry last week, as part of a pre-release publicity push, he occasionally veered from enthusiasm into something like hero worship. ("In the last 30 days of this campaign, he's going to transform himself into Superman, mark my words.") The two haven't talked much in recent months and Butler says there are campaign laws that make it awkward for him to discuss the movie with the candidate. Kerry called on Memorial Day, according to Butler, and when asked if he knew anything about "Upriver" he replied, "Next to nothing, George."
"I've learned that the smartest thing I can do is not take up John's time," Butler says. "I leave phone messages on his private lines that I know he'll pick up in two weeks and either immediately erase them because he doesn't have time to listen, or to listen and kind of get a message from them."
Butler is under no illusions about the reach that a film like this can have, and he knows that most ticket buyers will already be squarely in Kerry's corner. "Upriver," he says, isn't intended to swing this election, if such a thing were possible.
"Very few films have changed people's minds, and if you set out to make a film that will change people's minds, you'll never do it. All you can do is make something that is credible and good. Mainly, the movie shows the John Kerry that I know."
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