1,921 words
Seven Days in May (1964)
Starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, & Martin Balsam
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Screenplay by Rod Serling
It is really easy to look back on the sensitive “Have you no decency, sir?” liberals of the early 1960s and dismiss their concerns. After all, those well-dressed, well-groomed Democrats from America’s northeastern establishment are an easy target. Many of their heroes, like Alger Hiss, really were Communist spies. The “civil rights” movement they so virtuously supported ended up a disaster. They were all in for Kennedy’s Vietnam policy in the early 1960s, but a decade later they’d dodged service in Southeast Asia and were in tenured positions writing books about the folly of it all.
And yet it is a well-known proverb that a broken clock is right twice a day. One solid metapolitical work from the decent liberals of the early ‘60s is Seven Days in May. The movie was produced with a great deal of cooperation from the Kennedy administration. The opening scene was actually filmed outside the White House and several other scenes inside it. It is based on a 1962 techno-thriller novel of the same name.
The Kennedy administration was so keen on getting the book filmed because they convinced themselves that they needed to embark on a crusade against a “Right-wing” military coup. No coup ever came, of course, and it would be easy to attribute their fear to the usual penchant of “civil rights” believers to misread data, but I’ve come to conclude that Kennedy did identify a genuine potential threat. All incoming political administrations need to watch this film, for the threat is now worse than in the early 1960s. And since Seven Days in May became a golden oldie that nobody watches, the Pentagon has grown into an out-of-control monster.
American military drama, 1950-1963
To explain JFK’s concerns, we need to go back to November 3, 1950. On that day, the Chinese intervened in the Korean War and the United Nations force — mostly made up of Americans and South Koreans, but there were others — tumbled back in disarray from their positions near the Yalu River. The mad bug out was only a part of the problem, though. One of others was General Douglas MacArthur, and President Truman fired him because of it.
MacArthur’s firing had been a long time in coming. He’d effectively become the American emperor of Japan since 1945. His already extraordinary ego had grown to gigantic size. His headquarters staff was a crowd of sycophants who knocked off for cocktails around four in the afternoon every day. Truman and MacArthur held a tense meeting at Wake Island in which MacArthur refused to salute the President and otherwise behaved as though he was himself a head of state.
President Eisenhower, the former Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord, had fewer problems with his senior military leaders, but in his farewell address he warned of a new threat he called the Military-Industrial Complex. He stated:
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
JFK had two problem military men. The first was USAF General Curtis LeMay. He was an idol of the American Right and was openly critical of Kennedy following the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion. The second was Major General Edwin “Ted” Walker. Walker was fired from his post by Kennedy after his pro-Blue anti-Communist metapolitical campaign became a hot news item. It was claimed that Walker’s information officer, Major Archibald Roberts, had distributed material from the John Birch Society, which scared the bejeezus out of the anti-anti-Communists who made up part of Kennedy’s political base. (Kennedy himself was highly anti-Communist, though.) Walker ended up resigning his commission and ran for office as a Right-wing Democrat.
The rightness or wrongness of Kennedy and his so-called problem generals is irrelevant here, however. The important thing is that Kennedy felt politically threatened by them.
The film’s plot
The film’s fictional President, Jordan Lyman, is excellently played by Frederic March. Lyman, who has a look of gravitas and wisdom, is how Kennedy’s supporters believed him to be (even though I’ve come to conclude that Kennedy was not the political genius that he is reputed to have been in the mainstream narrative).
Seven Days in May is tightly scripted, with outstanding cinematography. It is filmed in black and white, which in the early 1960s was a signal from Hollywood that the movie was serious and for adults. It stars Burt Lancaster as General James Mattoon Scott, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Opposite Lancaster is Kirk Douglas as Colonel Jiggs Casey. President Lyman has two supporters, White House Chief of Staff Paul Girard (Martin Balsam) and Senator Ray Clark of Georgia (Edmond O’Brian).
The story is said to be set in May 1970, although the square and neat fashion styles belie the fact that it is in fact 1962, given the bell bottoms and shaggy hair that were commonplace by then. The plot skips over the Congressional midterms of that year, but the 1972 election is mentioned.
It begins with a riot between supporters of an arms reduction treaty and its opponents outside the White House. In the White House, Girard frets over President Lyman’s sinking poll numbers. The public is angry and worried about the treaty. This anger carries over into the US Senate. There, Senator Prentice (Whit Bissell), who wears the same style of eyeglasses that Senator Barry Goldwater wore, argues with Senator Clark over the treaty’s merits.

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Senator Prentice discusses the treaty with Colonel Casey at a cocktail party. We learn that the military establishment dislikes the treaty but that Colonel Casey is an apolitical military professional who supports the US Constitution. At this party we meet Eleanor Holbrook (Ava Gardner), a Washington socialite who is sexually involved with both General Scott and Colonel Casey.
Colonel Casey starts getting wind of curious goings-on involving a planned war alert that is set to take place with the President relocated to a secure bunker where he will be isolated, including from his staff and the press. The alert is just seven days away. He also learns that a secret military base has been set up near El Paso, Texas where a new unit, ECOMCON, has been deployed. Casey realizes that ECOMCON stands for “Emergency Communications Control” and is a unit made up of Signal Corps men. As part of the alert, they will deploy from the base to several large cities and secure a telecommunications hub in Utah.
The story continues to unfold with some cloak-and-dagger escapades, and eventually Senator Clark is detained at the secret base but escapes with the aid of a friendly officer. Meanwhile, Chief of Staff Girard meets with an Admiral in Gibraltar who admits there is a plot to pull off a military coup during the alert. Girard is killed in a plane crash on his way back with a signed confession, but not before hiding it in his metal cigarette holder.
President Lyman and General Scott eventually have a confrontation at the White House. The dialogue is well-done. Scott believes that the treaty will weaken the United States, while Lyman believes that it will make the US more secure by reducing tensions with its adversaries. Strangely, the President doesn’t fire General Scott outright, and instead asks for his resignation. Scott refuses.
Lyman is about to confront Scott with some incriminating letters he had written to Eleanor Holbrook and which were discovered by Colonel Casey, but decides otherwise, thus avoiding a dirty political trick. The confession Girard had secured in his cigarette case is recovered from the crash, thus making it possible for President Lyman to go on television with his evidence of the coup. The Chiefs of Staff start to resign and General Scott departs, stunned.
Seven Days in November 2020?
The stolen election of 2020 was very much like the coup described in Seven Days in May, with a few differences. The Biden coup was executed by means of election fraud with cooperation from the mainstream media. The media in turn blacked out Trump’s statements and he was eventually banned from Twitter. The military colluded in this by using lies and pointlessly deploying in one place while failing to deploy where they needed to be.
The military was a problem even prior to the 2020 election, however. After Trump came to office, many of the corrupt political elite he overthrew, such as Madeleine Albright, effectively called for a coup from the outset. I believe that a coup did eventually come. During the Trump years, the Pentagon lied about its troops in Syria to the President, thus embroiling Americans in a war they didn’t wish to wage. They held unnecessary war games in South Korea, making diplomacy with North Korea more difficult. The Pentagon also failed to protect ordinary Americans during the sub-Saharan/white mattoid George Floyd riots.
The military also colluded with the Speaker of the House to undermine the President’s constitutional authority. General Milley treacherously communicated with the Chinese to undermine America’s position there even though his troops are currently being deployed in increasing numbers to the First Island Chain in the Indo-Pacific region — to counter China.
And today, they are failing to protect the US border.
The US Department of Defense: America’s foremost problem
Colin Powell set the existing climate for a military beyond civilian control during the “gays in the military” controversy of the 1990s. It has only become worse since. General Wesley Clark – who claims to be Jewish — gave orders to attack the Russians at the end of the Kosovo War in 1999, an action which would have started a terrible war. (He was quietly removed afterwards.) Obama likewise had problems with the Defense Department during his tenure.
There is never a time or place when the armed forces aren’t a threat to its own government. Lucius Cornelius Sulla took over Rome because he was the commander of a force of armed men. Historically, this threat has commonly been averted by having two armies. In India during the Raj, the British authorities employed the British Army as well as the British Indian Army. The former was made up of British soldiers equipped with the most advanced weaponry. The latter was made up of Indians and they were issued with more modest weapons and had fewer supports, such as heavy artillery. Likewise, in Saudi Arabia there is the Saudi Army and the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG). The Saudi Army accepts anyone into its ranks, including non-Saudi mercenaries. SANG, conversely, is only made up of Saudis from those tribes that are related and loyal to the Saudi royal family.
Whether or not America needs two armies is hard to say, but undoubtedly, the Defense Department is as much a threat to America as anything else. A national discussion on reforming it is necessary.
The decent liberals of the Kennedy Era were ground up by the ensuing Vietnam War, Congoid rioting, and other social disruptions, but they were right in warning America about the military acting on its own. They thought that the American military would revolt as a result of not being issued enough weapons, but it seems that instead the Pentagon has become an actor in its own right, more loyal to itself and the illicit 1964 Civil Rights Act than anything else.
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8 comments
Interesting take on that. It seems their instincts weren’t too far off the mark. JFK was indeed in danger, but it wasn’t from rightist generals.
This movie, released in my birth year, is an old favorite of mine, as an artifact of the time and its politics. Nice review (and though I love the work of Beau A., I’m not absolutely sure JFK did not fall to hard-core anti-communists in the Pentagon / Deep State. )
You wrote: “The story is said to be set in May 1970, although the square and neat fashion styles belie the fact that it is in fact 1962, given the bell bottoms and shaggy hair that were commonplace by then. The plot skips over the Congressional midterms of that year, but the 1972 election is mentioned.”
I agree with you that it was set in 1964 (or perhaps in an ‘alternate 1962 or 1963’?) But, last time I checked, if you set a movie six years from the present, you’re not obligated to guess – correctly or incorrectly – at fashion changes that will occur half a dozen years hence, and I would imagine it’d be both difficult and distracting to do so.
I can’t say with absolute (or even near) certainty to what happened to JFK. However, if one goes by the Howard Hunt deathbed confession on Rolling Stone, then it was mostly a LBJ / CIA operation. It seems not to have been about ideology; Cord Meyer had some very personal reasons for all that, though I forget if the article discussed that angle. It could be that there were other players and motives, but all that gets very speculative. As far as I can tell, the military appears not to have been involved.
In interesting agreement with the Trump Coup is the wretched hand-wringing over disrespect over President Jurassic lately. As Matt Taibbi, who gets so much wrong, gets right here:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-lets-go-brandon-freakout-goes
Is it really possible that these people don’t get they’re being trolled? Part of the joke of “Let’s Go Brandon,” of course, is that you couldn’t go five minutes during the last administration without hearing someone in pearls or a bowtie screaming “Fuck Trump!” I don’t remember Rangappa pumping out “Osama de Niro” tweets after this celebrated Tony Awards appearance
Rangappa and Kayyem — real Mayflower names.
I never thought the military brass would have this current cultural Marxist mindset and go behind the president’s back. Past generals and admirals in the joint chiefs of staff and the Pentagon have disliked and disagreed with a sitting president, however I don’t believe any evidence exists that they have stooped to this level. Westmoreland didn’t criticize President Johnson until both had retired. On top of that, the current brass is open about it and they haven’t received any repocusions. I’ve known several former military members, officers, enlisted, retirees, and combat veterans. None of them expressed any type of leftist views. This failure in Afghanistan reveals some of the quality of the military leadership.
A much better movie exploring the assassination of JFK was “Executive Action,” (1974). The conversation between Robert Ryan, and Burt Lancaster is particularly important, because Ryan states that the purpose of entering the Vietnam conflict was to reduce world population to around 750 million by the year 2000. Obviously, they failed! Does anyone know what Lancaster’s political leanings were?
Good Article.
However, generals are not monolithic. We see them as alien tumors because few of us have any military experience whatsoever ─ but this was not always the case. At one time good citizenship and soldiering went together, and this was especially important for instilling leadership.
If anybody has to answer for the debacle in Korea it has to be President Truman himself, not Gen. MacArthur, who understood that there was no substitute for victory.
And Diplomacy is not a substitute for political failure. If I had to pick between Generals MacArthur and Marshall, I would have to side with the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy who found the foreign policy of the latter grievously wanting, especially where Communism was concerned.
President Kennedy favored “Young Turks” like General Maxwell Taylor and his idea that Green Bereted Special Forces could cheaply make a safe “Insurgent War” work in Vietnam, where proxy war had almost failed to contain Communism in Korea.
The Kennedys and the new brand of Defense Intellectuals like Bobby Strange McNamara hated old school WWII generals like Curtis LeMay, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force who retired in 1965. Gen. LeMay was one of the so-called Bomber Mafia who had his faults, like opposing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles because he did not like the idea of fighting annihilation wars with robot bombs.
LeMay had great faith in the initiative of soldiers to accomplish mission goals against grim odds, which was parodied by Kubrick in the 1964 dark comedy Dr. Strangelove when the Air Force chief played by George C. Scott praises the cowboy B-52 crew getting to their target, only to realize that since the mission itself was actually a mistake they have thereby doomed them all.
The Texan Gen. Bernard Schriever rightfully won the Air Force’s ICBM turf war, and President Johnson’s Lone Star patronage continued Kennedy’s laudable peacetime goal of landing a man on the moon and bringing him home safety by the end of the decade that began with Army missiles developed by Wernher von Braun, whose agency had been directly prohibited from launching a rocket into orbit before the Soviets had done so with Sputnik in case it might lead to an arms race. Kennedy campaigned for President in 1960 on the fiction of a Missile Gap with the Soviets.
Before we go down the rabbit hole of assassination conspiracy-theory, we should not forget that it was LeMay’s “bomb them into the Stone Age” Air Force who discovered that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba in time for Kennedy’s “Whiz Kids” to act on that information.
Furthermore, nobody but old Iron Ass himself rolled their eyes more at the McNamarian notion that a superpower like the United States could drop more ordnance on Indochinese jungle trails than was used in all of World War II and still lose.
At the 1978 Airpower symposium at Maxwell AFB, the retired General LeMay frankly admitted that had he been put on trial at the end of WWII by a victorious enemy as was done at Nuremberg, he would have been branded a War Criminal. To win wars, sometime soldiers have to do hard things.
I am old enough to have seen a lot of corporate management fads come and go, and my Dad is a retired 1960s aerospace and nuclear engineer who analyzed problems such as the Space Shuttle explosion and the Three Mile Island meltdown. As a student of history myself and someone who happens to be inclined towards modern technocracy, it seems to me that War is not like running a corporation like Ford Motors with a panel of bean-counting Harvard intellectuals. “Analytics” is flawed without good strategic insight, not something that the brilliant Mr. McNamara ─ who hated professional soldiers like Gen. LeMay ─ was particularly endowed with.
🙂
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