Remembering Philip Caputo, who wrote an unflinching Vietnam War memoir

that was built as a major meeting on Trade and AI being overshadowed by the war in Iran,

“a close ally and trade partner of China. What's happening with tariffs and how is it affecting”

consumers? On the MPR Politics podcast, listen on the MPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Frishair, I'm David Beanhooley. One of the most unflinching and acclaimed memoirs of the

Vietnam War was about a young lieutenant, one of the first Americans to fight in the war,

leading a marine platoon through the jungle. A rumor of war was written by Philip Caputo, who died last week at the age of 84. In reviewing the book in 1977, John Gregory Dunne described it as, quote, "heart-breaking, terrifying, and enraging. It belongs to the literature of men at war," unquote. The book became a bestseller and was adapted into a TV many series. After the war, Caputo became a journalist and was part of the Chicago Tribune Pulitzer Prize-winning

team that uncovered violations of voting procedures in a March 1972 primary. While a foreign

correspondent in Lebanon during their civil war, he was captured by Palestinian militants

and held for a week. Later, in another incident, he was shot multiple times by a different group of militants in Beirut. He returned to the states and during convalescence for his injuries, he wrote a rumor of war. Caputo went on to write two other memoirs, ten novels, two short-story collections, and four works of nonfiction. His love of adventure is detailed in an obituary on his website, which reads, quote, "Caputo caught a Leviathan-sized Marlon off Cuba's shores,

hunted big game in Africa, ruffed it in Australia's outback, cast flylines in the world's oceans and streams from Alaska to New England, and read books as voraciously as he wrote them." We're going to listen to Terry's 2005 interview with Philip Caputo. At the time, he had written the novel Acts of Faith set in war-torn Sudan about aid workers and missionaries there. You've been in war zones as a Marine and as a journalist. Can you talk a little bit about the difference

“between being there as a fighter and being there as somebody just covering the fighting?”

Well, probably the major difference is that the war correspondent can get out of there almost whenever he chooses or she chooses. The soldier is stuck there, is under orders, and there's no return ticket. There's no going back to the hotel in another day or two or three. The soldier has to confront that situation, constantly under orders, often against his or her own will, and also the journalist has some kind of picture of what's going on, a big picture,

what's happening. Quite often, if you're an enlisted soldier or even a junior officer, saying on the level of a lieutenant or a captain, all you know about what's going on is what's going on directly in front of you, and this can often give you a certain sense or feeling of powerlessness, no control over your fate or your destiny, that say somebody like the war correspondent can maintain that sense, although it may be an illusion, even on the

war correspondent's part. Did you respect war correspondence when you were fighting in Vietnam, or did you see them as like guys with pens and cameras who were on-lookers? I think I was agnostic about them. I didn't, I didn't particularly dislike them.

“I always remember feeling that I think there were probably in four operations I was on,”

that there were journalists along, either TV or print journalists. I could never figure out why

they were there. It seemed just peculiar to me. It seemed very odd, and sometimes I got a little annoyed with them because I would be, especially if they were with the unit that I was with or that I was in command of, in this case, was a rifle. I would feel somewhat responsible for that, and for their safety, and that would be a distraction to me. But in general, you might say I could have taken them or left them. As we were saying, your new novel ex-a-faith, which is about aid workers and

missionaries in Sudan, is in part about how idealistic motives can become really changed once

fighting and Vietnam, a rumor of war. War has always attracted to young men who know nothing about it,

but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy's challenge to ask what you can do for your country and by the missionary idealism, he had awakened in us. I guess I'm wondering if fighting in Vietnam made you skeptical of idealism? Oh yes, it did. I'll just freely admit that and like a lot of people, my age, I was indelibly marked by that experience and by that era. Yes, I'm profoundly skeptical of idealism, profoundly skeptical about government pronouncements,

profoundly skeptical about the honesty and integrity of our elected officials,

profoundly skeptical about what the general's and military leaders tell us is happening as opposed

to what may really be happening. And I would not want to speak for the entire baby boom generation,

“I forgot how many millions of people that is. But I think a significant number of people in that”

age group think that way and as a result of what happened in Vietnam and in the 60s. And I can't, there's no sense in my trying to pretend somehow that didn't happen to me because it did. You know, it's interesting, you managed to, as you've pointed out in your writing, you managed to get through your tour of duty in Vietnam without any wounds, but then as a journalist, covering Beirut, you were shot several times in one episode. What happened to you?

Well, it's, it's one of those proverbial long stories that I will endeavor to make short. I was covering Lebanese civil war. I was the Chicago Tribunal's Middle East Correspondent based in Beirut. I was filing a story to the paper when the building was in came under heavy machine gun fire. I then exited the building ran into some Muslim militiamen from some strange street militia that was active in Beirut at that time. They tried to take my press card away from me.

The press card was very precious to us as that without it, you could get killed fairly easily.

“And I remember I grabbed it from one of the, one of these guys, it was trying to take it from me.”

And I put it back in my wallet and they said, "Oh, you know, get out of here, go." And as as I was walking away, they started to open fire at me. Open fire on me. And hit me in the, in the ankle, in my left ankle, hit me in the left leg. I got hit superficially in the head, the back, the shoulders, but just by, let's say, superficial, sharp no wounds. And fortunately, I was, these were Muslim militiamen.

And I was right near a street controlled by Christians because that was a sectarian war. And, or at least in part, a sectarian war. And although I was down, because of the wounds in my legs, I couldn't walk, I was able to crawl. And I crawled onto this Christian controlled street. And probably I just owe my life to that because I think, had they not been afraid to pursue me, they would have. And that would have been the end of me.

You're a writer. You use your imagination all the time. And I'm sure, during the war in Vietnam,

“you must have imagined what would have been like to be shot or injured there.”

How did actually getting shot compared to what you'd always imagined it would feel like?

Well, I suppose I used to wonder, like anybody who's been in a will-it hurt, even if it is an instantly fatal wound, like say, one to the brain. I remember I used to think sometimes in Vietnam, especially if I'd seen comrades who were who were killed. If they felt somehow in that last flashing instant of their life, some enormous amount of pain was compressed. Well, as I discovered, is that you actually don't feel

a thing. The impact is so stunning from a high caliber, high, I mean, a high velocity bullet

or three hours after I was shot. By then, were you in a medical setting?

Yeah, I was in a hospital in that. You did some of your recovery, back at your parents' house, the house you grew up in. And you said that you wrote, you wrote some of a rumor of war. You're Vietnam memoir in the bedroom that you grew up in. And when I read that, I thought, wow, that's so weird because, I mean, a lot of people I know feel or used to feel that when they went back to the bedroom that they grew up in, after they were an adult,

they feel like a child again. You see that same furniture, stuff that's still on the wall,

your parents are there. And somehow, you know, you're kind of a kid again. But what was a

like for you to be in that kind of setting at writing this, I mean, this really complicated memoir

“of war? Well, I think considering that I was, I was then confined either to a wheelchair or to”

crutches that I was almost naturally in a child-like situation. I mean, I had my wife and two kids with me. So we were all living in the same house. It was almost like one of those old immigrant families. And it was so intensely boring, you know, to be, to be confined to a wheelchair in a rather ordinary suburb of Chicago, that is a matter of fact, oddly enough writing that book

gave me some focus of purpose in life. And was also partly an antidote to this intense boredom.

I mean, I think I would have either been perhaps reading some of the time, but probably most of the time I would have been sitting in that wheelchair or a chair with my legs up and cast, watching TV. Some of your new novel Acts of Faith is about extremism. And, you know, again, it's set in the civil war and Sudan and the government in cartoon is an extremist Islamist government. You've had firsthand experience with extremists when you were covering Lebanon, you were

“captured for a week. Who captured you and what did they do to you?”

I was captured by a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization that was called the PDFLP. They captured me because they thought that I was a CIA agent, which is rather frequent accusation made against journalists, particularly American journalists, in the Middle East and in elsewhere, but particularly in the Middle East. So what did they do to you in the week that you were held hostage? Well, I wasn't held hostage. They weren't holding me.

Captive. Captive. Yeah. They interrogated me. Over and over and over again, often with questions that were ludicrous, I was subjected to mild physical and at times severe psychological torture. You know, things like having my hands tied behind my back and then my ankles, my legs bent back so my ankles were then tied to my hands.

“It was you bent like a bow and then a guy sticks an AK-47 in your temple and says, "You must now”

answer these questions truthfully." You know, no kidding. And then, or these stuffed me in a hole in the ground, that was where rats were crawling around and things like that for 24 hours with no food, no water, no light hardly any air. That sort of thing, all of which they were trying to break me now convinced that I was a CIA agent at any moment. I would suddenly, you know, like a person in the courtroom, melodrama, a leap up and scream, I did it, I did it. But, of course, I didn't

since I wasn't one. So, what were some of the things that went through your mind about what you should tell them? I mean, you told them the truth that you weren't a CIA agent, but you did risk getting killed during this week. I'm sure that that was a real possibility. So, did you think of like lying and making stuff up to give them? Yeah, yeah, sure did. I mean, there were a couple times I actually thought about telling them what I figured they wanted to hear. Because you get

10, 12, 14 hours of grilling every single day for in the indefinite future and that you'll be

driven crazy. To which was added, the extra stress is the Palestinian camp that were keeping me in was under fire from the Lebanese Air Force and the Lebanese Army. It was being bombed and sheld at the same time. So, while I'm answering these questions, every now and then the interrogation be interrupted by a 250-pound bomb going off in the next block or something like that. So, yeah, I was tempted at times to just lie to them. And in fact, after I was released, a CIA agent

from the American embassy called me in to his office and wanted to know if I had done just that.

And if I might have started to throw out names of people I knew in the embassy just to give my captors names and say, yeah, these guys are CIA agents too. So, that was, you know, one of the one of the things I did think of, but I decided that it would be a bad idea. You know, people talk about wars as a crucible that will test you and shape you, probably being in a hole in the ground held captive is a crucible too. Do you feel like you

were tested and learned things about yourself and even about like your threshold of pain

“when you were held captive for that week and in Lebanon?”

Oh, certainly. When you've had experiences like that and then and then you encounter the more or less ordinary stresses of life, even what one could consider say extreme stresses. I don't know, like say you're broke or you can't make the mortgage payment or whatever that, you know, that's nothing to sneeze at, nothing to laugh at. But when you've been through something like that, in the midst of a more ordinary crisis, you will stop and you'll say, oh my god, I got through that.

This is absolutely nothing compared to that and I'll get through this easy enough. So, so what are, if this isn't new personal, what are some of the things you feel you learned about yourself in the extreme and dangerous situations you were in, you know,

“as a journalist, as a Marine, as a captive? Well, I think, you know, let's say on the flattering side.”

On the flattering side, I certainly learned that I was tougher than I thought, not in the sense of, you know, just thumping macho, tough guy. But I meant that I could endure and keep my head under extreme stress, better than I would have thought. On the unflattering side, I know in Vietnam and it's described fully in a rumor of war and it would take me way too long to go into a full description of it. But when I was in Vietnam,

I had discovered that I had a capacity to be violent and dark in my actions in a way that totally shocked me. And I didn't think that that sort of thing was in me. And, you know, I've got this

main character here in the novel, in an acts of faith, Douglas Brathway, about, who never,

who does have a dark force within him, but he denies that it exists. And his partner fits Hugh Martin later says of him that those who deny the dark angel in their natures will become prey to it. And they won't recognize that dark force when it summons you when it knocks at the door

“and summons you to do something that is really reprehensible. And I think that arises out of”

a discovery that I made about myself when I was in Vietnam. Since the century of Vietnam, a memoir, a rumor of war was such an important book about the war. I'm just wondering what you made of the whole debate about John Kerry's service in Vietnam during the election and how divided the country still seemed to be about the meaning of that war and the justness of that war. The Vietnam war and the 1960s will not be over until I'll predict, let's say, 240.

were aroused during that era and by that war will continue to be fought by that particular

“generation. Again, until they no longer have any effects on the daily and political life of the country.”

Philip Caputo, thank you very much for talking with us. Well, thank you, Terry. Thanks. Good to be here. Journalist Philip Caputo spoke to Terry Gross in 2005. He wrote the Vietnam War memoir, a rumor of war, which became part of the canon of wartime literature. He died last week at the age of 84. Coming up, we marked the hundredth birthday of Sir David Attenborough,

and listened to a portion of our 1985 interview with him. I'm David B. and Koolie,

and this is Fresh Air. This week on NPR's Newsmakers Maria Carino Machado, the Venezuelan

opposition leader gave President Trump her Nobel Prize, but he has questioned her leadership and openly supported her rivals. We are the government elect, not the opposition. We won an election. Venezuela's Machado walking a tight rope as she fights to return home. This week on NPR's Newsmakers, listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. and Koolie. Sir David Attenborough, the globally famous host, narrator, and creator of Nature Films,

marked his 100th birthday last week. His celebrated and popular natural history programs, since he began hosting and producing them for the BBC in the 1950s, have included planet earth and the blue planet series, the life of birds and life on earth, which traveled the globe to trace the history of evolution. London's natural history museum noted the occasion of Attenborough's 100th birthday by naming a new genus and species of

parasitic wasp after him. PBS did it by presenting a new special with Attenborough's host, allowing him to look back on what he considered one of his finest achievements, the series life on earth. Today, we're noting the occasion by listening back to his 1985 interview with Terry Gross, where she asked him about making his life on earth and other nature documentary series. When you're a cameraman looking for animals to display birds of display, it's feathers or whatever.

Are you sitting there with the camera, waiting and waiting, having a poise, but it'll be turned on. Well, of course it's the sort of the classic thing for the natural history of camera man, the same modestly well, I'm afraid we have waited nine months and 27 that or whatever,

“I don't know, to get that shot. In point of fact, if the truth is to be told,”

the better camera man you are and the better naturalist you are, the less time you have to wait. If you really know enough, you know, well, I mean it's like turning up in England and having to get cookers in December. I mean, you know, they don't occur. Let's have a cookers go cook, it's spring and say you turn up in spring. If you really know, you know which week to turn up. And similarly, if you decide that you really want to have what you would say,

a monkey, the alpha male of a troop displaying at a certain time, you'll find out the man who knows about that particular species and perhaps has been working with them for a year. And he will say, oh, what if that's what you want? I can take you, you want to meet Fred,

who is the alpha male of group three, and Fred always turns up in the morning about half past five

with the troop on that log there just by the river saying, and he always sees Willie from the other side of the river who is very fed up and they're great rivals and he always displays and you go down there and then you get the half and half a four-fredged dew, you set up the camera Fred turns up and he does it. And that and so you go away and he said, fine, I've got the shot I wanted neither in a day, but that is a measure of not in this instance, in that instance, your success. It's the measure of the

skill of the scientific observer who has spent his life studying that troop. And that's the fact, the fact of the matter so that actually boasting how patient you were and how long it took you to get the shot is a kind of confession of inadequacy. Have any of your camera people ever gotten hurt or attacked by one of the animals who they'd come to shoot? No, none of my friends, thank goodness, have ever had to, I mean, we've all had to

“sort of mild occasions to climb a tree rather fast than one would think, but are you good at that?”

I've no idea of that, I've got all I know is that when the rhinoceros charges, you find yourself proffoot up a tree that has no branches beneath you and you can't imagine how you got there. But actually again, that again is a sort of the wrong kind of boast.

it charges. You should be able to read the way it moves it to ears, the way it shakes it's

heads and the way the wind is going and so on. To know that that is, that's as close as you want to get, and it's not my job or any of our jobs, in order to demonstrate to be brave, our job is to get the pictures and you don't actually get pictures by signing an elephant to charge you and pound your camera to little bits of cog wheels into the dust. Just curious how close can you get to an elephant before it charges? You can get depends on the wind.

We're on the wind? Yeah, I don't mean the elephants wind. What does the wind have to do with that?

“Well, because of your smell. Oh. I mean if the wind suddenly, what you do, if you want to get”

plants to elephants, which isn't a particular ambition of mine that I spent a certain amount of time placed to them, you would get one of your silk stockings or nine on stockings and you put talcum powder in it, face powder and you hold it in a little bag and you continually bob it up and down, so that you can see from the way that's very fine talcum powder is drifting, which way, this is less than a wind. This is just the faintest breath of air. As long as the talcum powder

keeps coming towards you, which is how you should have been approaching the elephant in the

first place, that's okay. You'll smell the elephant. He's not smelling you, but if that talcum

powder starts to move away from you, then you can bet your bottom dollar that the elephant is going to smell you quite soon, and this is the time you want to retreat. So the elephant's not really paying attention to seeing this. He doesn't like it doesn't like human, the smell of human beings. It's eyesight's not all that good. It has very small eyes, and of course, one on the other side of it's head, as it were, so it's viewing from the side all the time and you're, you know,

it's so it is smell and sound, which particularly get it upset. You've been making naturalist movies for over 30 years. Film technology has changed a lot during that time. What you're able to show us different because of how the technology has changed. It's changed beyond recognition. The first films I made back in 1952 in Africa, we had a clockwork camera. I mean, you had to wind it up.

“And it only ran for about, I think, 40 seconds or something. That was the longest shot you could take.”

There was no way in which you could actually record sound at the same time, synchronously. The lenses were small, focal length so that you could really get any decent close-ups. Without that is getting much closer than you would wish to be. The film stocks were extremely slow, as said you couldn't actually film unless the light was very bright. You couldn't film in the jungle, for example. Colorfully, it's a good film color, certainly. It was just not enough light.

Now, of course, you have cameras with marvellous lenses. Very sensitive stocks, very fast lenses, very long focus lenses, so that you can do with the cameras or kinds of things that you couldn't do before. You can get resolution, definition of your picture, much better than it was. But also, there are many other sort of things you can do recently. I mean, in the last, well, for life on Earth, for example, we wanted to show a mole running down its tunnel. Nobody ever shown a mole running

down its tunnel. Perhaps nobody ever wanted to show a mole running down its tunnel. But we decided that we did. And so we went to the local hospital and bought borrowed them fiber optics. You know, it's they know that they used to put down people's throats and look inside their stomach, saw entire their lungs. And we used that fiber optic device, put it in a mole's tunnel. Sex and violence is such a big issue in television programming. How much of sex,

parentheses, mating or violence parentheses, one animal killing another for its food. Do you think it's proper to show for a documentary series on television? Well, the the curious thing, the curious thing is that is that if you show one sequence of copulation. In May last, I mean, in terms of actual technical, when it starts when it finishes, no more than about, say, perhaps let us say for sake of argument, a minute and a half,

people will be convinced afterwards that the program showed nothing else. I mean, they'll say that program, I mean, why you went on and on and on and on about that sequence, we can't possibly understand it was really awful. And that of course is because the images, these images are so

powerful that hit us subliminally and psychologically, so perfectly that we are not right off balance

“by them. As you say, I used to be a film director, I used to be a director of programs. And I remember”

very well, we have a fairly liberal view about those sort of scenes that you can do. But on the other hand, we had a financial program, which was devoted to doing an item about blood stock and horses and the value in terms of economic of what Thurobid stock was and so on. And I had an

in the background, there was a stallion servicing a man. Now, I don't know how familiar you are with stallion servicing men, but I can tell you it's a fairly spectacular proceeding. And I was, I was as man as anything, as the network director, that the irresponsibility of doing that, because actually it was totally irrelevant. I mean, of course, he thought it was quite the producer thought's quite entertaining, because it was marginally peripherally appropriate. But it was not centrally

appropriate. And it was not about the economics. And the result, but the image was so powerful that

nobody could possibly listen to about the economics, while this extraordinary drama was going on behind. Now, that seems to me irresponsible and totally indefensible. But if you're doing a program about the nature of display, or the techniques that the scorpion had, it being very anti-c organism, and how, in fact, the evolution of sexual behaviors developed amongst the monks, that group of

“invertebrate animals, then it seems to be totally popular that you should do it. Of course,”

you can, you can be the serious about it. Just as you can be the serious and obscene about violence, and you can use shots of lions tearing the entrails from some poor will-to-beast. I mean, it happens, you didn't organize it. There it is. But is it, is it, is it, is it what the pentamms about? I mean, is it necessary for to be an accurate truth? If you actually sanitize it,

so that you never put any of that in, that's just as bad, because that gives a totally misleading

idea. So what, what the world nature is like. David Attenborough, speaking to Terry Gross in 1985, more after a break, this is fresh air. Since the Supreme Court weakened the voting rights act of 1965, southern states are redistricting. Tennessee was the first state to make it happen, the Republican Supermajority there broke up the state's only black majority district. Two years ago, we embedded with the Tennessee legislature to understand what one party power looks like.

Listen to Supermajority from MPR's embedded season 19. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's 1985 interview with David Attenborough. Last week,

“he celebrated his 100th birthday. Did you walk her up in the city?”

I, in a town, yeah, what it was a city, yes. But one that I could get to the country fed easily on a bicycle. Yeah, because I was kind of wondering how you became as comfortable with different physical environments, because I think a lot of people who grew up in the city adapt less easily to exotic locations and climates. I'm not sure that's true, actually. I think a lot of us who grew up in cities developed a great hunger for these kind of places.

A sufficient hunger to kind of quail the uncomfortableness of involvement going there. I grew up. I certainly spend a lot of time at the countryside looking for fossils or hedgehogs or whatever, but I was certainly a city boy. When did you decide that you weren't going to live the academic life and write textbooks, but instead you're going to write popular books and make movies

“that a popular audience could appreciate? Well, when I was an undergraduate, a standing zoology,”

it sounds amazing now to say this, but it is true, and this was in Cambridge in 1944, '45. The kind of zoology that we learned was a zoology, which was laboratory-based. Most of the animals you dealt with were dead, and you were cutting them up, to learn about their anatomy. Or if you were studying live animals, behaving as it were, then there were rats running through maces or frogs jumping in front of a checkered board or something. What you didn't do was

to go out and look at exciting animals, like elephants or lions in Africa. That was not zoology, that was either a big game hunting or natural history or something, but it certainly wasn't science, because you couldn't, it was kind of thought that science involved manipulating in an experimental way, the animals you were studying. But unbeknownst to me at that time, the great pioneers of animal behavioral studies, Conrad Lawrence, for example, were actually working on this behavioral

science, so that we now call thisology. But I was then called out, and I went to the Navy, and when I came out of the Navy, it's still seen there. I was still cutting up dog fish and watching mice and maces, and I thought, "Well, this is enough for me." And I went into publishing and then got into the BBC and persuaded them to let me make animal films. Did they reach an audience right

away? Yes. Yes, the animal films have always had a huge audience in Britain at any rate,

things more beautiful than a butterfly or a hummingbird, and that there's a few things more dramatic than a party of warrior ants invading termites. There are a few things more extraordinary than

some of the breeding techniques of amphibian and so on, and there's always had a huge audience.

Do you think it's the beauty of it? No, I think it's all those things, the beauty, the drama, the fascination, the unexpectedness, the uninhibitedness, the truth in a curious way. I mean animals don't lie to suit the cameras, it's what they do is what they do. They may lie to one another, in fact, they do, but they don't lie to the camera. Do you ever find yourself doing the equivalent of only looking to photograph pretty people, you know, like looking to photograph animals who are

especially photogenic or landscapes that are especially dramatic or beautiful? That thing thanks is one of the reasons why I determined to do those two series life and other living planet, because there's a great temptation, as you say, to do the pretty ones all the time. I know perfectly well how you can get a very good pair of an enormously popular pair. If you want an enormously popular animal program, it's not difficult. You've made just put a chimpanzee in it.

It's equivalent of having an infant. That's right. If you make it want to make an unpopular program, you put a snake in it. If you're on the other hand, you say, I wish to survey the animal

“kingdom. You have to do programs about snakes and chimpanzees. And so, you have to do programs”

entirely about insects, which are not all that pleasant. Remember, starting life on earth, because I said we've got to start at the very beginning and go from the beginning of life all the

way through. The first program was going to be almost entirely about algae and a single cell

organism, as you see. I was trying to sell this to television executive director, make sure they get some money, a decent budget for this, and he said it's very fair. The first program was of great importance. That's what the audience is going to judge it on. So, what's your first program going to be, and I told him it was going to about this, and he said, how the hell are you saying? I'm going to get 10,000 people grabbed by the throat, by green slime, he said,

which indeed is a question. Making programs about green slime is not as easy as making about chimpanzees,

“but if you're going to be comprehensive and responsible, you should try and do so.”

Did you keep that as the first show? Yes. And did it work? Did you get it done? Yes, of course. Is there a desired response you'd like viewers to have to your programs? Well, if I'm totally honest, I have to say that the reason I make these kind of programs is because I find the subject matter fascinating. And therefore, find a very enjoyable. There's nothing I enjoy more than watching animals doing things. And I would hope that other people would enjoy

them. That's the primary thing. Now, of course, if you think that the wildlife and all some plants are enjoyable and important, and somebody says they are in danger, then you have a sort of obligation to make sure that you can do what you can to help them and protect them. And so I am delighted if it's subsidiary purpose or subsidiary effect of these films is that people also say not only

“is this wonderful marvellous look at, but it is valuable, it is threatened, and therefore you must”

do something to make sure that it's not destroyed, then I'm delighted. Sir David Attenborough, speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. Last week, he celebrated his 100th birthday. His new TV special, Life on Earth, Attenborough's greatest adventure, is available to stream at pbs.org and the pbs app. Coming up, critic at large John Powers reviews the new film The Wizard of the Cremlin. This is fresh air. NPR's newest podcast is where you can find NPR's biggest interviews.

I'm Steve Nskit. The program is called NewsMakers. We talk with some of the most powerful and influential people at this moment to put real questions to them and push for real answers. Follow NewsMakers on the NPR app or any podcast player or you can watch on NPR's YouTube channel. This is fresh air. The new movie The Wizard of the Cremlin is said in Russia in the years from the fall of communism in the early 1990s to the period just before the invasion

of Ukraine. It starts Paul Dayno as a one-time artist who becomes the media consultant to Vladimir Putin. He's played by Jude Law. Our critic at large John Powers says that even though

the movie doesn't always work dramatically, you'll leave knowing a lot more about how Putin

came to be a dictator. Back in olden times, the movies usually waited until political leaders

From Oliver Stone's W, which hit theaters when George W Bush was still in office,

“to Ali Abbasis the apprentice, which came out when Donald Trump was seeking his second term.”

Filmmakers now calmly fictionalize stories about those still in power. The latest to take a bow is Vladimir Putin. Played by Jude Law, surely Vladimir would be flattered. He's the dark star at the center of the wizard of the Cremlin, and exceedingly interesting if sometimes frustrating new film. Based on a novel by Juliano da Empoli, it's been adapted for the screen by two top drawer talents, director Olivia Asyas, and co-writer Emmanuel Carrer. Blending made-up characters

and real life big shots, they offer a bouncy history of how Russia went from a Soviet dictatorship

to a new kind of zirism. The wizard of the title isn't actually Putin, but his media adviser Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dayno with plump cheeks that look as her medically polished

“as Teflon. During an interview with a Yale professor, that's Jeffrey Wright. The now-retired”

Baranov looks back on his career. It begins during the fall of communism in the Gorbachev era, and continues into the lawless 90s, when Mafia-style capitalism impoverished millions, but turned some schemers into billionaire oligarchs. In that time, Baranov goes from selling electronics to becoming an avant-garde theater director who falls in love with a cynical actress. That's Alicia Vikander. When she dumps him for an oil oligarch, Baranov realizes that the

arts don't matter in the new anything goes Russia. He decides that he wants to be at the heart of his times, so he goes into TV, creating trashy reality shows, and becoming a prodigy of Boris Barazovsky, a real-life oligarch, who owns the country's biggest channel. Barazovsky is looking for a sturdy, malleability corrupt successor to the Russian Federation's fading president, Drunken Boris Yeltsin. He settles on a bolding, taciturn, slightly non-descript,

KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. Although Putin's at first reluctant, Baranov persuades him to run

for office by arguing that Russians have always needed, indeed craved authority from the top.

Now there's an idea that Putin can get behind. He quickly turns on the clever Barazovsky, who thought he could control his creation, always a mistake. And Baranov becomes Putin's media guru until 2014, dreaming up things like Russia's use of the internet to destabilize the West by flooding social media with extremist ideas. Early on, Baranov, who always speaks in an eerie hush, tries to convince the smurking Putin that pursuing more in Chechnya is a losing political

strategy. I'm sorry, when I would think twice before getting involved in that mess. He's past few years. Chechnya has killed more political careers here in Moscow than enemies on the battlefield. None of them have put enough energy into the issue. Those politicians on the wall that they're not speak its name. A humane war, like the Americans do. I'm talking about something else. I'm not interested in winning the Nobel Peace Prize. What interests me is restoring integrity

to the Russian Federation. I won't comment on geopolitics. It's not my field of expertise.

“What I will say, however, is that it's political suicide. I think you're mistaken.”

I think you've been at Western's persuadier than an electoral campaign has to be. Two teams of economists discussing PowerPoint presentations. In Russia, power, something else entirely. The Wizard of the Kremlin contains so much sharp dialogue that it was its story was more dramatic. While individual scenes brim with life, I say us really knows how to evoke a society on the move. The action as a whole feels rushed, episodic, and a tad abstract. For instance,

the Conders characters less of full-fledged woman than an alluring symbol of Russia's divided soul. Yet despite all its flaws, the movies were seeing just for laws portrayal of Putin, which isn't merely juicy but revelatory. In his composed posture, ironic smile, and flashes of anger, we sense what makes this man tick. His caniness, brutality, rough humor, paranoia,

Watching laws puttin in action, I got a clear sense of why this man, whom Baranov calls the Tsar,

jails or murders anyone he finds threatening, and why he feels righteous about invading Ukraine. In contrast, the wizard himself remains elusive. Based on a real-life figure named Vladislav Srikoff, Baranov is opaque, perhaps even to himself. Some viewers are annoyed by this,

“and by Danos stylized deadpan. What is he thinking? But the wizard's inner life isn't what matters.”

It's his deeds. He's one of those brainy, morally vacant political strategists you find

all over the world. As he sits in his country house talking, you wonder whether Baranov ever believed in the dictatorship he was helping to create, or whether he just enjoyed seeing his ideas triumph in the real world, like staging a successful play. In the end, the wizard of the Kremlin is

“less about exposing Putin's authoritarian nature than about capturing an emblematic figure of our age.”

Baranov is a man who's excited by serving male-level and power. Even knowing it will probably

destroy him. John Powers reviewed the wizard of the Kremlin now in theaters. On Monday's show, growing up underground, the son of two American Revolutionaries, Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayers were leaders of the Weather Underground, the radical group that

“planted bombs and collaborated with the Black Panthers to protest racism and the war in Vietnam.”

Their son, Zade Ayers Dorn, has a new memoir. Hope you can join us. Today is Roberta Shorak. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced in edited by Philis Meyers and Marie Baldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, say a challenger, Susan Yacundee, Anna Balman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler.

Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David B. Inc. This week, on Consider This, a stunning shift at the Department of Justice, since President Trump took office public corruption investigations have plummeted nearly 90%. A long-term concerns I'd argue are it diminishes faith and federal prosecutions in the rule of law. We unpack what it means for the DOJ and how our government operates on Consider This.

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