PBS FRONTLINE, May 26, 2026: "The War Cabinet" (WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2026)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“The powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must.” That’s how David Sanger of The New York Times summed up Donald Trump’s philosophy of the world and humanity’s role in it in an interview for a recent episode of PBS’s long-running TV documentary series Frontline, “The War Cabinet,” aired Tuesday, May 26. Directed and co-written by Michael Kirk, with the familiar dulcet tones of Will Lyman as narrator, “The War Cabinet” was an attempt to show how a man who sold himself during all three of his Presidential campaigns as a “peacemaker” morphed into an all-out war leader after he regained the White House in 2024.

Another reporter interviewed for the program, Eric Cortellessa of Time, said, “Part of the appeal with President Trump is that he is going to reshape the world in a way that outlasts him. That there will be a pre- and post-Trump world. Part of what he wants his legacy to be is to be able to say, ‘I did what nobody else could.’” I’d long suspected that Trump wants to be so profoundly transformative a U.S. President – more so than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan – that the history of America will be divided into B.T. and A.T.: “Before Trump” and “After Trump.” Now Cortellessa, who’s done at least two major interview features with Trump for Time, suggests that that ambition extends to the entire world.

“When I talk about [Trump’s] foreign policy doctrine, it’s the ‘me, me, me’ foreign policy doctrine,” said The New Yorker reporter and essayist Susan Glasser. “For Donald Trump there’s another factor, and that is the glory of Donald Trump. It seems so incredible that a great nation of 350 million people could actually be acting in the world because of the whims and interests of one guy who wants to pursue his self-aggrandizement.” Not that it hasn’t happened before. Do the names “Alexander the Great,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Joseph Stalin,” “Mao Zedong,” and “Adolf Hitler” mean anything to you?

The idea that a President of the United States is comporting himself under the philosophy that “the powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must” is chilling enough, especially in this 250th anniversary year of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. It’s exactly the opposite of the belief that “all men are created equal.” Even though when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words he effectively meant, “All white male landowners are created equal,” it was still a philosophy that definitively rejected the idea that a handful of people are destined to rule, and everybody else is supposed to accept, meekly, humbly, and gratefully, whatever crumbs their overlords are willing to dole out to them.

The Frontline documentary began with a montage of clips from Trump’s three Presidential campaigns in which he repeatedly declared himself an anti-war candidate. That was the claim he made in his second-term inaugural address on January 20, 2025, in which he said, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.”

That got a lot of horselaughs from people all too aware that Trump’s whole strategy as a politician has been to seize on the divisions within the American people and exploit them for votes. Trump’s rhetoric began to change with a bizarre series of demands to acquire territory held by other countries. He insisted that Canada become “the 51st state.” He threatened to attack Panama in order to retake the Panama Canal, which had been U.S. territory until it was returned to Panama by a treaty negotiated by the Carter administration in 1978. Trump also threatened to attack a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, Denmark, to seize control of Greenland.

And though thus far he hasn’t attacked Canada (except for starting a massive trade war with them), Panama, or Greenland, Trump has ordered bombing raids in Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and Venezuela. The Frontline show actually began with an account of Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on February 28, which went off the rails when Vice-President J. D. Vance upbraided Zelensky for not wearing a suit and tie to the meeting.

“Mr. President, Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said. “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. Have you said ‘thank you’ once in this entire meeting? No, in this entire meeting, have you said, ‘Thank you’? Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country – and let’s go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong. We know that you’re wrong.”

“Vance brought that righteous indignation to that meeting,” Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative and one of a number of true Trump believers who agreed to participate in the Frontline telecast, said. “For a lot of the people on the so-called New Right, who are the national populist or the hard-core MAGA base or people who really want to see change in American foreign policy, and I’m one of them, it was the coup de grâce of a new generation of approach. In some ways it was the high-water mark of Vance’s political career to that point.”

The program also discussed U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ran for President against Trump in 2016. The Frontline documentary included some of the bizarre posturing between Rubio and Trump over the relative size of their “hands” (presumably a metaphor for a body part just below the waist) as well as a clip from a campaign debate in which Rubio endorsed George W. Bush’s war against Iraq – and Trump said, “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, all right? We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” Trump overwhelmingly defeated Rubio in the 2016 primaries, including in Rubio’s home state of Florida.

“I think Marco Rubio spent a couple years after that defeat wavering over what course to take,” said Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. “He believed Donald Trump was a dangerous force in the world. He believed what he was doing was antithetical to American interests. But then he looked at what happened to those Republicans who spoke out against Donald Trump and essentially ended their own political careers, and Marco Rubio’s political career – he didn’t want it to be over.”

So Rubio wrote a book, Decades of Decadence, in which he basically reinvented himself as a Trump-style phony “populist,” and by the 2024 Republican National Convention he was giving full-throated endorsements of Trump’s re-election as “the only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again.” Rubio’s conversion was so complete that long-term Trump ally Steve Bannon appeared on the Frontline show and said that when he read Decades of Decadence, he had a hard time believing Rubio wrote it.

A number of interviewees for the Frontline program made the point that Trump, during his first term, had had a number of Cabinet members and other high officials who tried to talk him out of some of his nastier initiatives. Trump had wanted to bomb Mexico to deal with the drug cartels, and to send U.S. military troops into the streets of American cities to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. In his second term, as Cortellessa of Time explained, his goal was “to remove people who saw themselves as guardrails, to eradicate any possibility of having people who were going to act as brakes on his desires.”

One of Trump’s key appointees in that campaign was Pete Hegseth, Iraq combat veteran and co-host of a weekend program on Fox News, whom Trump chose as his Secretary of Defense – or, as Trump and Hegseth have unilaterally renamed him, “Secretary of War.” The Frontline depiction of Hegseth began with a speech from one of Trump’s televised Cabinet meetings in which he demands fulsome praise from all his appointees. It’s a ritual Trump started in his first term and has continued in this one. “From the troops directly, which they ask me to say all the time, thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity, for providing a shield for the rest of us to put America first and to apply peace through strength,” Hegseth told Trump. “We’re in the strength business, that’s our job.”

Among Hegseth’s priorities was a housecleaning of America’s top military leadership, targeting anyone who’d been promoted by the Biden administration, anyone who wasn’t a white male, and, as Hegseth himself put it, “any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] woke shit.” Hegseth particularly targeted the Judge Advocates General (JAG’s). Among their responsibilities are to warn commanders whether the orders they are about to give are illegal.

In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth recalled one JAG officer told his company it was illegal to shoot somebody just because they were carrying a weapon. Once the lawyer walked away, Hegseth told his troops, “I will not allow this nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed.” As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth called the entire U.S. officer corps to an in-person meeting at Quantico, Virginia and laid down the message: either get with the program of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” or leave.

The new Trump doctrine would face its first test in dealing with the Houthis, Iran-backed rebels in Yemen. The Houthis were attacking civilian vessels in the Red Sea, and Trump’s war Cabinet called a remote meeting to discuss what to do about it. Amazingly, they not only used a commercial messaging app, Signal, they inadvertently invited a journalist, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, to join the chat. At first, Goldberg told Frontline, “I thought it was a disinformation operation or some elaborate spoof. … The senior-most officials of the United States government were using Signal to talk about upcoming bombing campaigns, and inadvertently invited a journalist. I’ve never been involved in anything this absurd or surreal.”

As a result, Goldberg ¬– and, ultimately, the entire world – got a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the current U.S. government decides issues of life and death. Vance was reticent about ordering a bomb strike against the Houthis, calling it a bailout of Europe since almost all the ships the Houthis had targeted were European. Hegseth was gung-ho to do it. Then Stephen Miller, Trump’s most controversial aide and one who’s been a continuous part of both Trump Presidencies, entered the chat with the message, “The President was clear: green-light.” At that moment, all debate ceased and the conversation turned to planning the details of when and where the attacks would take place, itself a serious breach of security protocol.

After the attack, Trump, as is his wont, declared it a complete and total victory. “It’s not even close to true,” said Jamie McIntyre, reporter for the conservative Washington Examiner. “That war went on for 52 days. Achieved almost nothing, except the expenditure of billions of dollars. The Houthis are still there.” Meanwhile, Trump and his administration needed a scapegoat for the security breach of allowing a journalist onto a top-secret chat planning military actions, and they found him in National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Trump fired him and gave the post to Rubio, the first person since Henry Kissinger to be both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the same time.

“Donald Trump treats even the most senior officials of the U.S. government as courtiers,” Susan Glasser told Frontline. “It’s the sort of Trump 2.0 version of the adults in the room. People like [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio essentially have a sort of shoulder-shrugged, you know, ‘what-can-you-do’ kind of version of playing the adults in the room. Maybe they have different opinions than the president, but in the end they’re not going to really do anything to stop him from doing whatever he wants.”

Trump’s next attack on a foreign country came about in June 2025, two months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House to discuss a coordinated U.S./Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Rubio made statements to the effect that the U.S. would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Vance, who like Hegseth served in the Iraq war, said an attack on Iran “would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” But Trump went ahead and ordered the strikes anyway, then claimed they had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Right-wing activists like podcaster Steve Bannon and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills saw the parallels between Trump’s attack on Iran and George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq – and they didn’t like them. Bannon said, “This is exactly the same pitch as the Iraq War – weapons of mass destruction – you have to get it. So they understand one thing: They think the playbook works. This could suck us into a war that make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Sunday afternoon picnic. You’re talking about a major country, an ancient civilization, 90 million people, the Persians. These are the same folks the Romans fought, and the Greeks.”

Another person within the Trump administration who argued against the attack on Iran was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who insisted based on the intelligence agencies that reported to her that Iran was nowhere near developing either a nuclear weapon or the capability of delivering one. But after Israel launched the attack on Iran, and Trump joined in with American forces, he bluntly told a reporter who asked about Gabbard’s comment, “She’s wrong.” As a result, Gabbard became persona non grata in the Trump administration. Members of Trump’s staff joked that the initials of her title, “DNI,” now stood for “Do Not Invite,” as she was frozen out of key meetings. More recently, she has resigned, ostensibly to take care of her husband, diagnosed with advanced cancer.

Trump’s next aggressive campaign against another country’s leadership targeted Venezuela, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the Florida-born son of Cuban expatriates – heartily supported. “He has very strongly held beliefs, from a very young age, about left-leaning dictatorships in Latin America,” said Ashley Parker of The Atlantic. “And there is also a sense that if Venezuela can fall, and there can be regime change in Venezuela, then Cuba might be next.”

Knowing that Trump couldn’t care less about free and fair elections, either in Venezuela or in the U.S., in order to get Trump to authorize an attack on Venezuela he needed an ally. He found one in Stephen Miller, and the two decided to use drugs as the issue to persuade Trump to attack Venezuela, “They changed the argument to drugs – that was a big deal,” said American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “The president is undoubtedly prudish about drugs. He is a teetotaler himself. I think it’s a very underexplored element of his psyche. His older brother died of alcoholism. That was a richer vein to persuade the president.”

Trump began the campaign against Venezuela by ordering air strikes against small boats in the open seas off the Venezuelan coast. The claim was that the boats were being used to smuggle cocaine and fentanyl into the U.S., even though Venezuela does not produce fentanyl at all. Not only did they target the boats and destroy them, Trump posted on his Truth Social Web site, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. Beware!” Eventually the boat strikes killed 110 civilians, including two sailors who were the victims of a so-called “second tap” attack, illegal under international law because once you have rendered your enemies helpless, you’re supposed to take them alive.

When Venezuelan President Maduro continued to defy Trump – even mocking him by dancing at a rally the way Trump does – Trump ordered a U.S. ground invasion of Venezuela to capture Maduro and bring him to the U.S. for a so-called “trial” on drug charges. Rubio was hoping that the successful capture of Maduro would restore democracy to Venezuela. Trump wanted no such thing; instead he allowed Delci Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice-president, to take formal control of the country on condition that she sign over Venezuela’s vast oil resources to U.S. companies. “We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said of Venezuela’s oil industry, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will be paid for by the oil companies directly.”

“If I were Marco Rubio, I would be deeply pained and distressed by the course of events in Venezuela,” said Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. “You have to wonder what rationalizations he’s telling himself to justify what’s just happened. He’s finally now gotten the results he wants in removing Maduro from power, but none of the reasons why he believes Maduro should be removed from power are actually being respected on the merits. The Maduro regime persists. There’s this explicit claim made about the value of extracting oil from the country. You basically have now the [same] Chavista regime in power in Venezuela, but answering to the Americans. I mean, it’s a pretty tangled situation for somebody like Rubio, on the ideological merits, to defend.”

New Yorker and former New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins believes that the quick and easy success in Venezuela emboldened Trump to do another all-out assault on Iran, either at Netanyahu’s behest or with his help. “Trump is on a roll, and I think he knows he’s on a roll. He believes he’s on a roll,” Filkins told Frontline. “I think the Venezuela operation emboldened Trump to believe that he could do these very effective one-shot missions. Go in, do what you need to do, destroy what you need to destroy, get out, done. No consequences.”

“One factor that people don’t talk about enough is luck,” Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic told Frontline. “So far Donald Trump is one of the luckiest people in the history of the planet. He sends American troops into the middle of Venezuela. Pulls it off. He practically destroys the Iranian nuclear program without losing a plane or a pilot. Luck is a factor, and momentum is a factor in all this. It’s luck, it’s roll of the dice, it’s the pure expression of power.”

In February 2026 Netanyahu came to the White House for another visit with Trump. This time there was no official ceremony, no joint press conference, no fanfare. This was when Netanyahu allegedly talked Trump into an all-out air campaign against Iran involving killing the long-time Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to American Conservative editor Curt Mills, “Netanyahu is pretty canny at saying, ‘You’ll be one of the great presidents. You’ll be like Reagan or Lincoln or Roosevelt if you do something substantial. No other president has been able to handle the Iran portfolio – Carter, Reagan, H.W., Clinton, Obama, W., Biden. And you can just solve it.’”

Instead Trump’s war against Iran – launched without any Congressional approval, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, which states only Congress can start a war – has lasted four months so far and produced exactly the sort of quagmire Trump used to criticize George W. Bush for getting us into in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s also upended the global economy and raised U.S. gasoline prices by 50 percent. And it has sent Trump’s already negative poll numbers into dismal territory, with just 33 to 37 percent of Americans surveyed saying they approve of the job Trump is doing.

Not that Trump really cares about all that. It’s become clear that Trump has no intention of allowing himself or the Republican Congress ever to be voted out of power. His total dominance of the Republican primary electorate has enabled him to destroy the political careers of Senators Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) as well as Congressmember Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). These, along with the other metaphorical trophy heads on Trump’s wall – Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and many others – successfully intimidate any Republicans in either house of Congress who might otherwise stand up to him.

Trump has also launched an aggressive campaign to redraw Congressional districts to make sure Republicans keep their House majority in 2026 despite the growing unpopularity of their policies. He was aided in this by the Right-wing revolutionary (often mistakenly called “conservative”) majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which in May hammered the final nails into the coffin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Trump is on a roll to make sure not only that he transforms the American Republic into the American Empire, but that he does so without any chance of being reversed, either in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 Presidential election. Either he will declare an “emergency” that allegedly requires him to suspend the 2028 election and remain in power indefinitely, or he will run what the Latin Americans call an imposición candidate: a totally loyal stooge who will allow him to maintain effective control of the U.S. government even though he won’t technically hold the title, “President of the United States of America.”

37th Annual National Memorial Day Concert (Michael Colbert Productions, National Park Service, Lockheed Martin, PBS, aired May 24, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 24) I watched the 37th annual Memorial Day “Concert” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. featuring the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly – who’s been leading these productions since the founding conductor of the pops series of the National Symphony, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009. I used the quotes around the word “Concert” above because it’s less a concert and more a tribute to the heroism shown by various American servicemembers in the country’s wars. Most of the program consists of memoirs of actual servicemembers read aloud by actors, though some of the more recent authors are actually there “in the flesh” and are shown greeting the actors who read the memoirs they wrote. In previous years this format has occasionally become quite oppressive, but this year it seemed to blend together surprisingly well. The concert began with African-American country singer Mickey Guyton (and it’s a sign of our racial progress that “African-American country singer” is no longer a contradiction in terms: thank you, Charley Pride!) pouring her heart out into a spectacular rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” after which Andy Grammer lowered the emotional temperature a bit but still excelled in a song called “Don’t Give Up on Me,” which he co-wrote (with Bram Inscore, Jake Torrey, and Sam Farrar) and sang in 2019 for a romantic drama film called Five Feet Apart. Then actor Noah Wylie came out for the first dramatic recitation of the evening, a bit of a memoir by Revolutionary War soldier Joseph Plumb Martin read over the U.S. Army Fife and Bugle Corps (did anyone know the U.S. Army still had a Fife and Bugle Corps?) playing “Yankee Doodle” and other Revolutionary War-era songs. After Laura Osnes did an O.K. version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (the 1833 song in which American writers audaciously took over the national anthem of our enemy, Great Britain, and turned it into our own) the show abruptly shifted forwards several generations. The next memoir was by a Pearl Harbor survivor named Chuck Kohler, read by actor Jonathan Banks (who, though far younger than Kohler, looked old and crusty enough to be believable as a Pearl Harbor survivor). The most interesting aspect of Kohler’s tale was that Pearl Harbor happened on a seemingly bucolic Sunday morning during which he decided to take it easy and read inside an office in one of the Navy buildings in Hawai’i. Suddenly he felt fragments of glass hit him on the back of the neck, his first intimation that the base was under air attack from dive bombers launched from Japanese aircraft carriers. There was a touching moment after the recitation in which the real Chuck Kohler met the actor who’d just played him on stage.

Then there came another song by an artist who somehow has evaded my attention even though he had his first record in 2004: Jamey Johnson. Johnson was born July 14, 1975 in Enterprise, Alabama and was influenced by Alan Jackson, whom he says was the first singer he saw in concert. After graduating from Jefferson Davis High School (that name says it all!) Johnson attended Jacksonville State University for two years before he dropped out to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve for eight years. During his stint in the Marines he started playing country music, and in 2000 he settled in Nashville, Tennessee to make a serious run at country stardom. After hooking up with veteran violinist Greg Perkins, whose credentials included stints with Tammy Wynette and Tanya Tucker, Johnson landed a recording contract in 2005 with a small label called BNA Records. He recorded a single called “The Dollar” that made it to number 14 on Billboard’s country charts and led to a full-length album, also called The Dollar. But when his second single, “Rebelicious,” failed to chart, BNA dropped him. After a four-year period during which he divorced his wife and wrote songs for other artists, he put out an album of his own called That Lonesome Song. At first he only released it online, but it attracted the attention of executives at Mercury Nashville, which issued it commercially and put him under contract. The first song Johnson played last night, “In Color,” was from That Lonesome Song and was co-written by Johnson, James Otto, and Lee Thomas Miller. It’s told from the point of view of a young man looking at old photos of his family in black-and-white, and his older relatives are saying, “You should have seen it in color!” It got a stunning staging on the Memorial Day Concert telecast: for the first chorus the image was kept in black-and-white, but when the chorus ended the screen erupted into full color. After Johnson’s song there was a tribute to the victims of World War II and then a brief appearance by a man who was identified as the last surviving recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Korean War (though I didn’t catch his name and when I went to search online I found that the last Korean Medal of Honor winner Google lists, Ralph Puckett, Jr., died in 2024). Then there was a brief “Why I Serve” segment featuring Matthew Mays explaining why he enlisted and a tribute to Viet Nam War veterans hosted by Jim Miner and Eric Castvo (and don’t hold me to the spelling of Eric’s last name, since I got it off my carelessly and hastily scribbled notes).

The next actual song on the concert was “Lift Me Up” by Blessing Offor, a Nigerian-born Christian singer/songwriter whose parents emigrated to Connecticut when he was six to get treatment for his glaucoma. He was born blind in one eye and with limited sight in the other, and took up music in his teen years. Offor was a contestant on the series The Voice in 2014 and his best-known song is called “Brighter Days,” written for an album in 2022 to promote the careers of artists with disabilities. After another “Why I Serve” segment by Mauricio Hidalgo, the show cut to a Nashville performance by Alan Jackson, who played his song “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?,” a tribute to the survivors and victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thank goodness they programmed Jackson’s song, which asserts the power of love in the face of unspeakable evil, instead of the late Toby Keith’s bellicose “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” After that there was a tribute to a nurse who was working at the Pentagon that day, narrated by actress Melissa Leo. Then in honor of the 9/11 victims a woman played “Taps,” and I noticed she was playing it on a valved trumpet rather than a bugle (though I don’t recall seeing her actually use the valves). Then Jamey Johnson came back out on stage for another intensely emotional song, “Lead Me Home,” written by Randy Houser and Craig Monday for Johnson’s first album, The Dollar. Once again Johnson impressed me big-time; his voice has the same quiet intensity of Willie Nelson’s (with whom he’s collaborated), and YouTube features a live performance by Johnson at Nelson’s annual FarmAid concert in 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rbW8rbpQ9I&list=RD3rbW8rbpQ9I&start_radio=1). After more “Why I Serve” testimonials, Jack Everly and the National Symphony played the traditional medley of the Armed Forces service songs: the Coast Guard’s “Semper Paratus,” the Space Force’s whatever-it-is (the Space Force is the rump branch of the U.S. military created by Donald Trump through executive order in his first term even though it’s the authority of Congress to create new service branches), the Air Force’s “Wild Blue Yonder,” the Navy’s “Anchors Aweigh,” the Marines’ “Halls of Montezuma,” and the Army’s – well, its original title was “The Caisson Song” but it’s been decades since the Army actually used caissons (little wheeled trailers whose function was to transport artillery balls to the front), so the caissons have been omitted from the current lyric, much to my disappointment.

Following that there was an unwitting tribute to the success of current Defense Secretary (though he insists on being called “Secretary of War”) Pete Hegseth’s racist and sexist purge of the top ranks of the U.S. military. The seven members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were introduced – and they were all white men. When Hegseth took office after Donald Trump returned to the White House, he immediately fired the head of the Coast Guard because she was a woman and the chair of the Joint Chiefs because he was Black. By chance, Helene Cooper, military correspondent for The New York Times, had just appeared on the PBS news program Washington Week two days before and described Hegseth’s attitude towards women and people of color in the command and control structure of the U.S. military: “I remember one afternoon, these are the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I remember one afternoon standing at the end, because the press hallway, the old press hallway, was near there, and watching as each one Black officer after the other walked down that hallway, and I kept watching, each one pause when he got to Colin Powell. And there was like this moment where you stop, and you're like, oh, yes, and then you keep going. Because at that time, there had only been one Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it had been Colin Powell. And then Lloyd Austin came in. You had a Black Defense Secretary, and not soon after that, President Biden appointed C.Q. Brown as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and you had two Black men leading the military. And I remember a Black Marine saying to me, ‘This is never going to fly.’ And there was this belief that there's no way this military was ready to be led by, and it would've been the same way if you had been two women leading the military. It just wasn't ready for that. And I think what you're seeing in many ways with Pete Hegseth is sort of the embodiment of what – you know, what that Marine was afraid of.” The program introduced General Christopher J. Mahoney, current vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, who introduced the current chair, General Daniel Caine, for the brief obligatory speech on these occasions.

The program closed with Mickey Guyton singing “God Bless America,” and while these shows have a bit of the lumbering beast about them, this one I found unusually moving for the quality of the recitations as well as Jamey Johnson’s beautiful and heartfelt songs. One odd aspect to this program is that, for the second year in a row, Joe Mantegna bailed out on his usual co-hosting duties (with Gary Sinise) for health reasons. His explanation for missing the 2025 concert was an ear infection; this time he announced for the event and then cancelled at the last minute. His statement read, “I truly wish I could be there in person this year, but due to unforeseen circumstances, I need to remain in Los Angeles. I’m looking forward to joining the millions of Americans watching this Sunday’s concert on PBS and continuing to do everything I can to support this important event for years to come. The National Memorial Day Concert, and its mission of remembering those we’ve lost, honoring those who have served, and recognizing the sacrifices made by military families is something I will always hold close to my heart.” Instead Mary McCormick, an actress who became a particular favorite of mine after starring for four seasons (2008-2012) in a TV policier about the Witness Protection Program called In Plain Sight, stepped in as co-host with Sinise, and though she’s a bit more heavy-set than she was during the show’s run (but then think of how much I’ve changed physically in the last 15 years!), hers was a welcome presence and, of course, I wish the 78-year-old Mantegna all the best and hope to see him at the 2027 Memorial Day Concert.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (MGM, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 23) I watched an installment of Turner Classic Movies’ three-day program of war movies in honor of the Memorial Day holiday, which is officially commemorated tomorrow even though the actual date, May 30, is next Saturday. The film was Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, an elaborate 1944 MGM movie based on the Doolittle Raid against Japan on April 18, 1942 in which 16 B-25 twin-engined Mitchell bombers dropped incendiaries on Tokyo, Yokohama, and two other cities on the main Japanese island of Honshu. Doolittle was played in the film by Spencer Tracy, though it was really just a supporting role and he agreed to be in the movie as a morale booster for the American war effort and to support the careers of the young actors actually playing the flight crews, notably pilot Ted Lawson (Van Johnson) and gunner David Thatcher (Robert Walker). Lawson had actually co-written a memoir with pop journalist Bob Considine, also called Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which was published in 1943 and served as the basis for the movie. The film was produced by Sam Zimbalist, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and written by future Hollywood 10 blacklistee Dalton Trumbo. There are faint traces of Trumbo’s Leftist politics in the script, notably an interlude in which two of the characters express the since dashed hope that this will be the last war of all time. What’s most surprising about Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo today is how sentimental much of it is; Lawson is married to Ellen (Phyllis Thaxter), she’s carrying his child, and the first hour or so of the movie deals largely with their relationship and her insistence that he has to return from the secret combat mission alive so their kid can have two parents. Parallel to this domestic love story is a series of briefings from Doolittle on the need for absolute secrecy about the mission. LeRoy and Trumbo maintain the suspense about just what the mission is and why the flight crews are getting bizarre levels of training for it, including learning how to get a B-25 airborne in 500 feet of runway when they’re used to having three times that. They had to learn that because the planes were to be launched from aircraft carriers; the plan was to get the carriers as close to Japan as possible, fly the planes there, then land them again at presumably safe airfields in China, which was at war with Japan in 1942 (that had started when Japan attacked Manchuria in 1931 and the Chinese mainland six years later) and quite frankly not doing too well against the Rising Sun.

The film basically divides into three acts: the opening training sequences, the Doolittle raid itself, and what quite frankly is its best and most gripping dramatic sequence, the attempts of the stranded pilots and crews to get to safety in China ahead of the Japanese, who seemed to be gobbling one Chinese village after another. Just when the crew members seem to have a safe refuge, the Japanese surround it and attack it again. The Doolittle raid was greenlighted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as early as December 21, 1941, exactly two weeks after Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor. It was designed as a morale-booster for the U.S. and a morale-buster for Japan, aimed at shaking the confidence of the Japanese people in their military leadership. The flight crews taking on the assignment are told they will be away from their homes for at least three months, though most of them don’t think of that as a particular hardship since, aside from Lawson and one other participant, they’re all single. They are also repeatedly warned not to talk about the mission, since leaking even the most innocuous details about it could alert the ever-present Japanese spies. (They were nowhere nearly as ever-present as the American propaganda machine made out, but the fear that all Japanese-Americans were potential spies and saboteurs, which turned out to be racist B.S. concocted by U.S. military leaders, was one of the stated reasons for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.) And when they’re not training the American servicemembers are having so many sing-a-longs Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo practically qualifies as a musical. Among the listed songs are not only the service anthems and patriotic songs you’d expect (including a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in Chinese by a group of schoolchildren) but also “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “I Love You (Sweetheart of All My Dreams),” “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” and even “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” which gets sung to Van Johnson and Phyllis Thaxter when Johnson’s colleagues realize they’re going to have a baby. There’s even a few allusions in Herbert Stothart’s background score to the title song of the 1943 musical Oklahoma!, a bit of a surprise given how notoriously protective Richard Rodgers was of his intellectual property.

The actual shots of the Doolittle raid and the havoc it was wreaking on Japan’s industrial base are quite well done model work – the film won that year’s Academy Award for special effects, and deserved it – and there are hints of Trumbo’s politics in his speech for Spencer Tracy as Doolittle when he says they have taken pains to avoid bombing civilian targets, though inevitably civilians will be killed in what today is called “collateral damage.” (Later, under the guidance of General Curtis LeMay, the strategy would shift to large-scale fire bombings of Japanese cities, deliberately targeting civilian populations, in an effort to end the war as quickly as possible. Estimates are that LeMay’s indiscriminate bombing raids on Japanese cities killed 500,000 Japanese civilians and left 5 million homeless. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay later acknowledged.) For me the final third of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was the most interesting part of the film, as all the crew members of the “Ruptured Duck” (the bomber piloted by Johnson’s character) survive their crash-landing off the Chinese coast but all but Thatcher (Walker’s character) are injured. Lawson (Johnson’s character) is severely wounded in his left leg and, not surprisingly, gangrene sets in and the leg eventually has to be amputated. When a group of Asian-looking people approaches the crew, Thatcher at first thinks they’re Japanese and is ready to shoot them, but they turn out to be sympathetic Chinese who lead Our Heroes to a small village, then to another and still another as each village in turn is overrun by the Japanese. The responsibility for their care is assumed by a father-and-son team of Chinese doctors (Hsin Kung and Benson Fong; usually during the war Benson Fong was stuck playing Japanese villains, so it was probably a relief for him to be acting a sympathetic character of his own nationality and true sympathies in the war), though the actual amputation is performed by “Doc” White (Stephen McNally, who like Fong was getting a break from his usual casting as villains), who’s able to score a limited supply of anesthetic, which itself creates a suspense issue as he has to work fast before the stuff wears off and puts Lawson in unendurable pain.

Among the things Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo gets right are the jocular but still real antagonism between the flight crews of the Army Air Corps (the U.S. Air Force didn’t become a separate service branch until 1955) and the sailors on board the Navy carriers that are taking them to launch their mission. There are also some intriguing cameos by Leon Ames as a former U.S. diplomat to Japan who’s brought in to warn the crew members of what’s likely in store for them if they’re captured by the Japanese; and Robert Mitchum as one of the crew members on another plane. Mitchum made this movie just before another war film, The Story of G.I. Joe, which would catapult him to stardom. The film ends with a quite poignant scene between Mr. and Mrs. Lawson; for reasons of personal pride he hadn’t wanted to see her again until he’d been outfitted with an artificial leg, but she had tracked him down and shown up anyway. In their reunion scene Lawson loses his balance and falls forward in a sequence that reminded me of The Big Parade (MGM, 1925) – the second highest grossing silent film of all time (after The Birth of a Nation) – which likewise featured a male lead (John Gilbert) returning home minus one leg. (The effects work to make Van Johnson appear as an amputee is excellent.) Col. Doolittle startles both Lawson and us when he tells Lawson that he has no intention of letting Lawson out of the service just because he’s lost a leg in combat, though just what he intends to have Lawson do to continue to support the war effort is unclear. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is very much a film of its time, what I call the portmanteau movie in which the producers’ strategy appeared to be to put in elements every audience member would like. Such films told you, “You don’t like this? Well, wait a bit and there’ll be something in the movie you will like.” It’s quite different from the way a story like this would be filmed today (though the 2001 Pearl Harbor likewise had a surprising degree of sentimentality – and it ended with the Doolittle raid, which as a New Yorker reviewer joked they probably brought in at the last minute after they realized Pearl Harbor was an American military catastrophe): as more or less straight action with just hints of the characters’ human emotions and drives.

Final Episode of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" (Spartina, Paramount Skydance, CBS-TV, aired May 21, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 21) my husband Charles and I watched the last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In case you were wondering whether Colbert would use his final show to open up on Donald Trump with all guns blazing, think again: it was actually a low-keyed affair aimed more at thanking his staff and his audience than scoring any last-minute political points. Not that that saved him from Trump’s wrath. In an interview on Wednesday, May 20 Trump made an ominous statement: “I'll have a message at a later date.” The later date came in the wee hours of May 22 just after Colbert’s last show came to an inspiring end. Trump issued a tweet on Truth Social (“Lies Social,” the site should be called) that read, “Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” Colbert’s final show began with the title “Hello Goodbye,” and he built up suspense as to who his last interviewee would be. He had various celebrities in his audience, including Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, Tim Meadows (a Black comedian Colbert worked with in Chicago at the fabled Second City improv troupe), Tig Notaro, and Ryan Reynolds, all pretending to assume that they would have the Colbert’s-last-guest honor. They also did a bit with an actor playing Pope Leo XIV angrily turning down the honor because His Holiness was dissatisfied with the hot dog they brought him.

The actual final interviewee was … Paul McCartney, who’d just done a guest shot on Saturday Night Live and therefore was still in New York. Mostly they talked about the history of the Ed Sullivan Theatre and how The Beatles made their U.S. debut there 62 years ago. Colbert also did a last “Meanwhile” segment (“Meanwhile,” with its collection of bizarre news stories from across America and the world, was always one of my favorite parts of Colbert’s program), only during both “Meanwhile” and Paul’s interview there were odd green flashes across the back of the stage. Later Colbert descended into the theatre’s basement and made the discovery that they were actually part of a wormhole in space that had opened up because of the disparity between Colbert’s ratings (he was leading the pack in late-night) and his cancellation. He even brought Neil de Grasse Tyson to explain the physics of this, and Tyson got sucked into the wormhole himself. (I said, “It serves you right for leading the campaign to de-list Pluto as a planet.”) The next segment introduced Jon Stewart, whose The Daily Show still survives even under the leadership of Trump groupies Larry and David Ellison, who took over CBS’s parent company and offered Trump Colbert’s head on the proverbial silver platter, and who mentored Colbert during his early years on the Comedy Central channel playing a pretend Right-winger for satire. It also brought on the other four members of “Strike Force Five,” the podcast Colbert and his fellow late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver started doing when the Writers’ Guild of America’s strike against the major film and TV studios prevented them from doing their shows.

The last episode concluded with a quite beautiful musical segment which brought on McCartney, Elvis Costello (working together for the first time since they got together in the late 1980’s for Costello’s album Spike and McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt: in the wake of John Lennon’s death I had already decided that Costello would be the perfect person to take Lennon’s place in a reunited Beatles ¬– the glasses, the slightly nasal voice, the wordplay in his lyrics, the penchant for politically and socially conscious songs – and when he and Paul actually started writing together, I thought, “Dare we hope?”), Colbert’s former music director Jon Batiste, and his last one, Louis Cato. They did a new song called “Jump Up” and then Paul led the jam band on a cover of the Beatles’ classic “Hello Goodbye,” which had given the episode its title. While the band was playing Colbert’s wife, Evie McGee, came out with their three adult children, one of whom will be working with Colbert on his next project: writing the script for a new The Lord of the Rings movie. (I rather testily posted that information on Facebook and made a snotty comment to the effect that just about the last thing the world needs is another Lord of the Rings movie.) The closest thing to a political comment all night came from Paul McCartney during the interview, when he named his native Britain as a country that’s still a democracy and added, “America is still a democracy, too … I hope.”

I guess Colbert figured he’d had his anti-Trump bases covered the night before, when he had Bruce Springsteen on his program as his last musical guest (I had thought from the way they’d announced his appearance that he'd do both an interview and a song, but the administration of “The Colbert Questionert” to Colbert himself ran so long it ate up the time for a Springsteen interview). Springsteen performed the angry political song “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he’d written to protest the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), respectively. He introduced it by saying, “I am here tonight in support of Stephen, because you’re the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we’ve got a president who can’t take a joke, and because Larry and David Ellison feel the need to kiss his ass to get what they want. Stephen, these are small-minded people who’ve got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about. This is for you.” That’s about as good an envoi as any for a TV program that’s been required viewing for both Charles and I for a decade now (ever since Trump got elected President in the first place) and a key element in enabling us to keep our sanity in the face of the madness of Trump’s AmeriKKKa (as we used to spell it in the 1960’s).

American Masters: "W. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With a CAuse" (RCW Media Productions, Black Public Media, Thirteen Productions, American Masters Pictures, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Center for Independent Documentary, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 19) PBS presented a stunning documentary called W. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause as part of their American Masters series. (I’ve often wondered how they decide who’s an “American Experience” and who’s an “American Master.”) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois has long been a particular hero of mine. He was born in 1868, three years after the South at least technically lost the U.S. Civil War, in the relatively emancipated town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois’s father was descended from a French Huguenot (Protestants who fled France during the religious wars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) slaveowner, and his dad bailed on the family when William was 10. He always insisted on pronouncing his last name “Doo-BOYS” in the English fashion rather than the French “Du-BWAH,” and that caused a bizarre controversy when in the early 1960’s, just after Du Bois’s death, Richard Nixon denounced the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, a movement set up by the Communist Party U.S.A. to attract young African-Americans to the cause, as a Communist front organization. This did collateral damage to the Boys Clubs of America, who’d seen their donations nosedive because a lot of people thought Nixon had meant them. Nixon’s reaction was to blame Du Bois himself for the confusion and demand that the clubs use the “Du-BWAH” pronunciation of his name, whereupon the people running the clubs on behalf of the Communist Party dug up an interview with Du Bois himself in which he explained, “I am an American. My name is Doo-BOYS.” Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington in a community that was otherwise almost all white. His teachers recognized his intellectual ability and insisted him to study hard; he graduated from high school with honors and set his sights on getting into Harvard University. Unfortunately, his family didn’t have the financial means even to consider sending him to Harvard, but the congregation of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington, which the family attended, raised enough money to send him to the historically Black Fisk University in Nashville. There Du Bois was hit with the realities of institutionalized racism and Jim Crow segregation for the first time in his life. Like most Fisk students, he had to work his way through school, which he did by becoming a schoolteacher after his sophomore year. After he graduated from Fisk, he finally got into Harvard, but Harvard wouldn’t accept his course credits from Fisk, so he had to repeat two years as an undergraduate before he was admitted to Harvard’s graduate school.

He got a masters’ degree from Harvard and then sought a grant offered by former President Rutherford B. Hayes to study the new discipline of sociology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Germany, where among other people he met pioneering sociologist Max Weber. Weber liked to cite Du Bois as a counter-example to people who insisted that Blacks were incapable of high intellectual achievement. Du Bois later recalled that in Germany “I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in. With me were white folk – students, acquaintances, teachers – who viewed the scene with me. They did not always pause to regard me as a curiosity, or something sub-human; I was just a man of the somewhat privileged student rank, with whom they were glad to meet and talk over the world; particularly, the part of the world whence I came.” Du Bois had hoped to win his Ph.D. in Germany, but the university required that you live in the country for at least three years, and the stipend he’d received only lasted for two. He finally won his Ph.D. by returning to Harvard, and his was the first Ph.D. ever awarded by Harvard to a Black scholar. Du Bois got a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he met and married one of his students, Nina Gomer. After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois received a grant to do a sociological study of the Black community of Philadelphia, particularly the Seventh Ward. He moved himself, Nina, and their young son Burkhardt into the roughest part of the Seventh Ward and conducted over 500 interviews for what became his first published book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Before the book was published, Du Bois had left Wilberforce and taken a teaching position at Atlanta University. There he coined the phrase “The Talented Tenth,” referring to the most intellectually gifted Black Americans whose demonstrated abilities would help lift the entire race out of bondage. In 1900 he went to London to attend the world’s first Pan-African Congress, despite the misgivings of the British government that the group was really intended to bring down the British Empire by encouraging its colonies in Africa to rebel and declare independence. He also went to Paris and organized an exhibit for the 1900 World’s Fair to commemorate the achievements of Black people worldwide. Du Bois returned to the U.S. at a time when the country’s most influential African-American was Booker T. Washington, who argued that Black Americans should accept segregation in exchange for vague promises of equality within it. Washington famously said, “In all purely social matters, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hands in all things essential to mutual progress.”

During his years in Atlanta, Du Bois was hit hard by Jim Crow personally; his young son Burkhardt took ill and died at a time when all three Black doctors in Atlanta were out of town and no white doctor would care for him. He also was angered by the lynching of Sam Hose, a Black man who was hanged by a freelance mob in Atlanta in 1899. The lynchers not only took pride in what they’d done, they literally cut off pieces of Hose’s body and traded them amongst each other as souvenirs. Ironically, Du Bois spotted Hose’s knuckles on sale in a souvenir shop while walking through Atlanta with white journalist Joel Chandler Harris, then associate editor of the Atlanta Constitution and later internationally famous (and more recently reviled) as the author of the “Br’er Rabbit” stories based on folk tales he’d heard from Atlanta’s African-Americans. Du Bois’s growing activism led him to seek opportunities to write for the popular press, both white and Black. Despite difficulties in selling his pieces to Black outlets, most of which were sympathetic to Washington, Du Bois wrote a negative review of Washington’s memoir Up from Slavery in 1901 and published an entire book, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. The Souls of Black Folk was mostly a collection of essays, but it included one fictional story about “John,” a sympathetic African-American character who ends up the victim of a lynching. In 1905 Du Bois and others organized a meeting of Black activists at Niagara Falls, New York, and set up a group called the Niagara Movement. It didn’t last long, but in 1909 Du Bois was the only Black participant in a meeting to set up another organization for African-American civil rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which still exists. He was offered the presidency, which he turned down because he had decided that the real power of the organization lay in its ability to change public opinion of both whites and Blacks about racial issues. So he demanded and got the editorship of the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, which he held for the next 14 years until the combination of the Great Depression and increasing encroachments on his editorial control by new NAACP leadership (notably its controversial new chair, Walter White, who got a lot of jokes made about his last name because he was so unusually light-skinned for an African-American a lot of people who saw him thought he was white) caused Du Bois to leave The Crisis in 1934.

According to this show’s writer/director, Rita Coburn, The Crisis became so popular among Black Americans that many of them who hadn’t known how to read before learned to read so they could read The Crisis. In the premier issue in November 1910, Du Bois wrote the mission statement, which said the publication’s purpose would be to "set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people." He called The Crisis "a record of the darker races,” and added, "It will first and foremost be a newspaper: it will record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American. Secondly, it will be a review of opinion and literature, recording briefly books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem. Thirdly, it will publish a few short articles. Finally, its editorial page will stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy, and for reasonable but earnest and persistent attempts to gain these rights and realize these ideals. The magazine will be the organ of no clique or party and will avoid personal rancor of all sorts. In the absence of proof to the contrary it will assume honesty of purpose on the part of all men, North and South, white and Black." The Crisis was on the scene, and frequently was the first publication outlet, for many of the authors who made up what became known as the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s. Along the way DuBois and his wife Nina had a second child, daughter Yolandé, who in the 1930’s began dating Black bandleader Jimmie Lunceford. But Du Bois didn’t think a bandleader was an appropriate husband for his daughter, so he forced her to marry the Black poet Countee Cullen. Unfortunately, Cullen was Gay, and instead of going on a honeymoon with the new Mrs. Cullen after the ceremony he went off on a vacation with the best man at the wedding. (This anecdote startled me because, while I’ve known about Lunceford for years and have collected all his records, I knew absolutely nothing about his private life.)

One important Du Bois story that wasn’t mentioned in this film was a debate in Chicago in March 1929 between Du Bois and a white supremacist author and publicist named Lothrop Stoddard on the topic, “Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?” The story of this fascinating event was told by Ian Frazier in the August 26, 2019 The New Yorker (available online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist). Du Bois went on first and said, that contrary to the claims made by racist pseudo-scientists like Madison Grant (whose own racist books had provided most of the material for Stoddard’s), “the proofs of essential human equality of gift are overwhelming.” Du Bois said that the “Nordics,” the people Stoddard held out as the epitome of the white race, “have overrun the earth and brought not simply modern civilization and technique, but with it exploitation, slavery and degradation to the majority of men. … They have been responsible for more intermixture of races than any other people, ancient and modern, and they have inflicted this miscegenation on helpless unwilling slaves by force, fraud and insult; and this is the folk that today has the impudence to turn on the darker races, when they demand a share of civilization, and cry: ‘You shall not marry our daughters!’ The blunt, crude reply is: Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?” Stoddard in turn quoted Booker T. Washington’s fingers-and-hands metaphor and said, “The more enlightened men of southern white America … are doing their best to see that separation shall not mean discrimination; that if the Negroes have separate schools, they shall be good schools; that if they have separate train accommodations, they shall have good accommodations.” At this point the published record of the debate by its organizers, the local magazine The Forum, contains the bracketed word, “[Laughter.]” The report of the debate in the Baltimore Afro-American explained that the laughter came from the Black people in the audience who knew full well that the accommodations offered Blacks under Jim Crow segregation were far from “equal” to those offered whites. The Afro-American reporter went on to explain, “When the laughter had subsided, Mr. Stoddard, in a manner of mixed humility and courage, claimed that he could not see the joke. This brought more gales of laughter.” The Forum’s publishers thought they had a potential gold mine in further Du Bois/Stoddard debates, but as Du Bois grimly predicted, Stoddard turned down their offer.

In 1935 Du Bois published what was quite possibly his most important book since The Souls of Black Folk: Black Reconstruction in America, his attempt to use his considerable skills as an historian and a sociologist to demolish the myth that the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877 had brought to power a lot of corrupt Black officials who were manipulated by white “scalawags” for their own nefarious ends. It was the ruling history of the era and Du Bois, who’d lived through and worked on the NAACP’s campaign against D. W. Griffith’s racist 1915 masterpiece The Birth of a Nation – a film which had used Griffith’s considerable talents as a movie director to dramatize the racist view of Reconstruction – was determined to reverse it once and for all. Alas, his view of Reconstruction wasn’t taken seriously until the 1960’s, when white historians like Erle McKitrick and Eric Foner (the latter of whom was interviewed for this film) adopted it. Though Du Bois – much to the discontent of fellow NAACP officials, most of whom had been white Quakers – urged African-Americans to support and participate in the U.S.’s involvement in both world wars, after the end of World War II he became strongly pacifist. Part of his change had come from his growing disillusionment with capitalism and his belief that socialism offered humanity the way forward. Part of it was influenced by the new woman in his life, author, composer, and journalist Shirley Graham, whom he’d started dating when he and Nina were separated and whom he married after Nina’s death in 1950. Graham was an active Communist and encouraged Du Bois to join the party. Part of it was also due to a bizarre prosecution Du Bois was subjected to by the U.S. government, which indicted him for having signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal and chaired the Peace Information Center (PIC), which was formed to lobby for the document. The government charged that the PIC was an unregistered lobbying organization for the Soviet Union, but Du Bois and his attorney, Left-wing former Republican New York Congressmember Vito Marcantonio, got the judge to dismiss the case.

In 1945 Du Bois had gone to Manchester, England for the fifth and final Pan-African Congress, where he'd met Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first President of Ghana after the country achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1957. With the American political climate growing more hostile to Du Bois’s views, Nkrumah essentially offered him asylum in Ghana, and Du Bois accepted. He renounced his American citizenship and became a Ghanaian national (ironically Ghana and the neighboring Gold Coast had been the principal sources for Black slaves kidnapped and sent to America during the African slave trade), where he lived until he died at age 95 on August 27, 1963: the day before the National March on Washington. When his death was announced from the stage at the March on Washington, there was an audible sigh of sorrow from the massive crowd. Du Bois made more than his fair share of political mistakes: he supported Woodrow Wilson for President in 1912 (alienating most Black voters of the time; not many Blacks voted at all, but the few that did were usually Republicans at a time when the Republican party still acted like the “party of Lincoln”), then was shocked when the Virginia-born Wilson instituted outright segregation in federal employment. It’s also creepy, to say the least, to see the photos in this documentary showing Du Bois hobnobbing with such vicious Communist dictators as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao. But in general he was an admirable figure and he remains one of my personal heroes. I give PBS a lot of credit for showing this documentary now instead of waiting for next February to time it during so-called “Black History Month.” It’s also a radical statement at a time when Southern states, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s final evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, are hastening to redraw their Congressional and state legislative maps to drive the few remaining African-American representatives in those states out of power once and for all. The Voting Rights Act was often referred to as “the Second Reconstruction,” and while it took the white Southern establishment 61 years to destroy the Second Reconstruction when it only took them 12 to end the first one, the likely result of the schemes by Southern legislatures and the U.S. and Virginia Supreme Courts will be to keep the House of Representatives safely in Republican hands after the 2026 midterm elections despite the growing unpopularity of their and President Trump’s policies. Activism like Du Bois’s has never been needed since his time as much as it is now.

Pennies from Heaven (Hera Productions, SLM Production Group, MGM, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 18) Turner Classic Movies showed an intriguing film producer David Begelman, director Herbert Ross, writer Dennis Potter and stars Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters made at MGM in 1981: Pennies from Heaven, based on a BBC miniseries Potter had written in 1978. MGM hired Potter to do the adaptation himself but he was resentful at the sheer number of rewrites he was put through, and likewise the original stars of the miniseries, Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell, weren’t happy they were bypassed in favor of Martin and Peters. The film’s conceit is that Martin plays Arthur Parker, a salesman of sheet music of popular songs of the day (1934, in Chicago, where the setting was moved from Potter’s real-life home town, Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England), who lives in a fantasy life expressed in the lyrics of the songs he sells. Arthur is unhappily married to Joan Parker (Jessica Harper), but on one of his song-selling trips he meets the woman of his dreams, Eileen (Bernadette Peters), which is expressed with a sudden cut-in of Bing Crosby’s recording of “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” from 1933. That’s the strategy used throughout the movie, with songs of the period – sometimes in unchanged auditions of the original recordings, sometimes the originals with new parts overdubbed (the musical directors were Marvin Hamlisch and Billy May, the latter of whom had impeccable big-band era credentials, including a stint as arranger with Glenn Miller) ¬– cut into the action. The film was a box-office flop in 1981, grossing just $9 million on a $22 million production budget. Steve Martin explained it: “I'm disappointed that it didn't open as a blockbuster and I don't know what's to blame, other than it's me and not a comedy. … Everything I had done until that time had been wildly successful, so that the commercial failure of the film caught me by surprise. I still think artistically it's a very good film. I've rarely seen a role that showed that kind of vulnerability in a man. It's a special film to me.”

It generated mixed reviews from major critics, with Pauline Kael of The New Yorker and Gary Arnold of The Washington Post raving about it, while Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader wrote, “Ironic, alienating musicals have been tried before, but never with such lofty contempt for the form. [The film] drips with a sense of anger and betrayal that seems wildly out of scale to its cause – the discovery (less than original) that musicals don't reproduce social reality.” It’s hardly an original social commentary that the fantasies of the world sold in popular culture, especially popular songs, bear little or nothing in common with reality, but it’s quite well done here even though the device seems obviously the stuff of fiction rather than real life. Throughout the film I was whipsawed, sometimes loving the movie for the skill with which the old records are mimed by Martin (who’d never danced professionally before, but he learned how for this film and became quite good) and Peters (an accomplished musical performer on stage in shows like Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, Sunday in the Park with George), and sometimes at least mildly annoyed by the whole conceit of the concept. Once Arthur becomes infatuated with Eileen, he tracks her down with all the intensity of either an actual bloodhound or a police officer nicknamed after one. He discovers that she works as a schoolteacher in a socially conservative small town, and she lives with a man who’s supposedly her brother but comes off more as her father. One night Albert comes to see her and accidentally lets slip a mention of his wife, but does a quick save by claiming she’s dead and he’s a widower. Naturally he adds to his lie that he’s never been interested in another woman since until he met her, and ultimately he manages to get it on with her even though her “brother” is in the next room. Unfortunately, it turns into one of those “infallible pregnancies at single contacts” the late David O. Selznick used to ridicule, and the moment he notices that she’s “with child,” the head of the school board, Mr. Warner (John McMartin), fires her.

Meanwhile Arthur has met a street singer (Vernel Bagneris) who plays accordion and sings hymns like “Rock of Ages” and “The Old Rugged Cross” (a song which confused me as a child because I couldn’t understand why anyone would cover a cross with carpeting) and a blind woman (Eliska Krupka), while Eileen, with no way to raise a child, arranges for an illegal abortion. She ends up owing $200 for the procedure to Tom (Christopher Walken), a slimeball who persuades her to become a prostitute as the quickest way to earn the money she “owes” him. Ultimately the accordion-playing street singer rapes and murders the blind woman, and Arthur is suspected of the crime. Meanwhile, though Joan correctly suspects that Arthur is having an affair, she agrees to put up the money she inherited from her father to fund Arthur’s start-up of a record store, since he’s reasoned that people no longer play instruments and now get their home music from records. Alas, he’s just a bit too early in the Depression for his business model to work; the record store fails and, in one of the film’s most bizarre scenes, he and Eileen let themselves into the store at night and smash all the records. Ultimately the police arrest Arthur for the blind girl’s murder and he stands at a gallows about to be executed. He recites the words to the surprisingly dark verse of “Pennies from Heaven” as he’s about to be hanged – but just then Eileen re-enters the scene and Arthur announces that with all of that, the film is going to have a happy ending after all. The Wikipedia page on the film says that’s supposed to be yet another dream sequence, though with my own desire for a happy ending I was hoping it meant that the authorities had found evidence that Arthur was innocent after all and he was going to be exonerated.

If there’s one thing Pennies from Heaven does right, it’s expressing the ironic contrast between how sex (and sexuality) were portrayed in the early-1930’s pop songs (at least the white ones; the Black ones were often a lot more honest about sex and its real-life consequences, both good and bad!) and the reality. We hate to see Eileen’s moral degeneration and degradation at the hands of both Arthur and Tom, and yet we also understand it’s the ironic consequence of a life lived too much in a dream world conditioned by pop culture. I have mixed feelings about Pennies from Heaven, and I was especially struck by the sequence towards the end in which Arthur and Eileen go to a movie theatre that’s showing the 1936 musical Follow the Fleet. During the big Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers number at the end, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” Arthur and Eileen walk on to the theatre’s stage (a lot of movie theatres had stages then, relics of the time when they had presented vaudeville acts between showings of the films) and join the dance. There’s also a chorus line of male dancers tapping their canes in rhythm, which didn’t exist in the original film. This reminded me of a film Steve Martin made three years later, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, a film noir spoof directed and co-written by Carl Reiner which undercut clips from classic gangster movies and noirs featuring such legendary stars as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Alan Ladd. Fred Astaire, who was still alive when this film was made and had tried unsuccessfully to block the use of his old footage in it, said, “I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don't realize that the '30’s were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the '80’s – it was just froth; it makes you cry, it's so distasteful.” (Astaire’s widow, Robyn Smith, lobbied for changes in the copyright laws to allow a celebrity to copyright his or her “likeness” and thereby prevent reuses of it in this manner.) I found much of Pennies from Heaven dazzling and much of it dismaying, though it’s revealing that Astaire called the 1930’s “a very innocent age” when you would think he, having lived through them, would have known better.

High and Low, a.k.a. Tengoku to jigoku (Akira Kurosawa Productions, Toho Studios, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 17) my husband Charles and I watched a Criterion Collection Blu-Ray disc of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 detective thriller High and Low. As I’ve mentioned before, Kurosawa got stereotyped as “the samurai director,” probably because his 1954 film The Seven Samurai was the movie that made his international reputation (though the multiple-point-of-view drama Rashomon had begun the process four years earlier), but at least half of his movies, including this one, took place in 20th Century Japan. I’d bought this Blu-Ray after Charles and I had missed Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showing of it on Turner Classic Movies a few months ago. I first heard of this film in 1975, when I bought William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film partly because it had the most complete chapter on the Sherlock Holmes movies published to that time. Everson wrote about High and Low at the end of a chapter called “The Oriental Detectives” even though he acknowledged that it was a far deeper and richer movie than the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and Mr. Wong films he was otherwise profiling. But it wasn’t until the late 1990’s, when Charles and I were watching old movies I was literally recording by the yard onto VHS tapes, that I finally got a chance to see it. High and Low actually began as an American story, King’s Ransom, one of the 87th Precinct mystery novels written by Evan Hunter (true name: Salvatore Albert Lombino) in his “Ed McBain” identity. Like the other 87th Precinct novels, King’s Ransom, published in 1959, is set in a thinly disguised New York City; like the real one, it has five boroughs, but Manhattan is called “Isola” because it’s on an island. Brooklyn is called “Calm’s Point,” Queens “Majesta,” The Bronx “Riverhead,” and Staten Island “Bethtown.” High and Low was made in 1963 after Kurosawa’s employers, Toho Studios, bought the rights in 1961 for $5,000. Kurosawa and three co-writers, Hideo Oguni, Ryûzô Kikushima, and Eijirô Hisaita, transposed the story of King’s Ransom to Japan but kept the basic conflict: a Japanese shoe-company executive, Kingo Gondô (Toshiro Mifune), is about to stage a coup at his employer, National Shoes (the English name is actually used), to drive out both the company’s founder (a stick-in-the-mud conservative who doesn’t believe in updating the company’s products to be more fashionable) and the younger members of the board of directors (who want to reduce the quality of the company’s products in order to cut costs and create planned obsolescence).

He’s amassed 50 million yen to buy a controlling interest in the company and is about to send his assistant Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) out of town to complete the transaction, when suddenly he receives a phone call claiming that his son Jun (Toshio Egi) has been kidnapped, and the ransom is 30 million yen. Just then Jun turns up alive, well, and free after he’d been out playing with Shinichi Aoki (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of Gondô’s chauffeur (Yutaka Sada). It turns out that the kidnappers grabbed Shinichi by mistake, partly because the two boys had switched clothes, but are still holding out for the full 30 million yen ransom. Having mortgaged himself to the hilt to cover the cost of his leveraged buyout, Gondô will be financially ruined if he pays the ransom, but his wife Reiko (Kyôko Kagawa) insists that he has a moral duty to pay it, and ultimately he does so. The kidnappers give detailed instructions as to just how the money is supposed to be packaged and delivered, and the first hour of High and Low is set almost entirely in Gondô’s living room in a series of increasingly anxious phone calls between Gondô, his wife, and his staff. (When we first saw the movie Charles was surprised that Reiko was dressed in traditional Japanese garb, while the men were all in Western business suits.) The kidnappers have given Gondô an elaborate set of instructions on how to pass the ransom to them via a cross-country train before they return the boy. Shinichi is returned an hour into this 143-minute film, and the rest of it deals with the attempts of the Japanese police on the case – chief detectives Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) and “Bos’n” Taguchi (Kenjirô Ishiyama); detectives Arai (Isao Kimura) and Nakao (Takeshi Katô); and the chief of the investigation section (Takashi Shimura) – to find the kidnappers and recover as much of the ransom money as they can. Their efforts are complicated by Aoki, who borrows Gondô’s Mercedes car and drives his son Shinichi along the route on which the kidnappers took him to see if anything jogs his memory as to where he was held. Through a series of sound clues, including a trolley whose noise could be heard in the background of some of the recorded phone calls between the kidnappers and Gondô, the police finally trace the kidnappers to a house nearby Gondô’s hilltop villa. But when the cops raid the house, they find the two accomplice kidnappers, a drug-addicted couple, both dead of overdoses of pharmacologically near-pure heroin. (I couldn’t help but remember this was how Janis Joplin died: she had been off the drug for a few weeks making her last album, Pearl, when the night before she was scheduled to record her final vocal she decided to celebrate by having another shot of heroin. Alas, she got an unusually pure sample and it killed her.)

Ultimately the police find out the identity of the main kidnapper: a medical intern named Ginjirô Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who masterminded the whole scheme out of status envy: his little apartment had a bird’s-eye view of Gondô’s villa and he decided to get his class-based revenge on the man by kidnapping his child. The cops lure Takeuchi out of hiding by releasing a false story to the Japanese media that the two drug addicts are still alive, and Takeuchi descends into a Lower Depths-like underworld of Yokohama’s drug scene to pick up a woman in the final stages of addiction and test his latest dose of pharmacologically pure heroin on her. Arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death, Takeuchi refuses to see a prison chaplain and instead demands that Gondô be brought to him so he can tell him personally just why his son was targeted. High and Low is a fascinating film even though it changes tone at the one-hour mark; before that it’s a moral tale and after that it’s the kind of police procedural one expects from an Ed McBain adaptation. William K. Everson acknowledged the American roots of this story and said the film “is not markedly Japanese in theme or action, other than for the value it places on personal honor and integrity.” But he wrote something about the film that doesn’t at all match what I saw in it: “Toshiro Mifune’s ordinary, confused little businessman is a superbly realistic portrait, the bravura style of his samurai roles completely suppressed.” What I saw in Mifune’s performance was exactly the kind of relentless overacting he did in his samurai parts, albeit it’s understandable because the kidnapping happens at a time when he’s bet everything on a big business deal and he loses it all. (There are two later scenes in the film that carry an implicit critique of capitalism. In one, the executives of National Shoes, realizing what a public-relations nightmare they’ve created for themselves by firing Gondô at the height of sympathetic media coverage of him, offer to rehire him for a job but one with no actual responsibilities; and he angrily turns them down. In another, it turns out that even though everything in his home is being auctioned off, he's landed on his feet: the police recovered most of the ransom money and he’s got a job with a smaller shoe company he intends to build up as a rival to National.)

There are also some odd bits about the physical environment, particularly the cars used in the film. Though Japan was still set up on the British system, in which the car’s steering wheel is on the right-hand side and you drive on the left, a number of foreign cars appear in the film, mostly American Chevrolets and (Gondô’s car) a German Mercedes, with their steering wheels on the left. But the only Japanese vehicles seen in the film are Toyotas, which made me wonder if Toho and Toyota had a contract that only Toyota cars would be used in Toho films. (Contracts like that were quite common in the U.S. at the time, especially for TV series.) It’s an interesting look at what Japanese cars looked like just before they started exporting them to the U.S. High and Low is a quite remarkable film, showing that Kurosawa’s genius extended to modern stories as well as tales of Japan’s historic past, and though some of the disjunctures jar (particularly the grim portrayal of the drug underworld towards the end) and the cops aren’t as strongly etched as individual characters the way they are in McBain’s books, all in all it’s a great movie that, as Everson said, “should be given the highest priority rating by any detective devotee whom the film has so far eluded.”