By Emily Taylor-Mortorff
Daily Bruin Contributor
Mistakes and lessons learned from the Vietnam War can shed light
on the current situation in Afghanistan, Jack Valenti, the former
chief of staff to President Lyndon B. Johnson, said during his
visit to UCLA Tuesday.
As one of only two special assistants ever to live in the White
House, Valenti sat in on every meeting President Johnson had
regarding Vietnam from Nov. 22, 1963 to Valenti’s resignation
in June 1966.
“Vietnam was a terrible lesson for us,” he said.
Valenti, who is the chair and chief executive officer of the
Motion Picture Association of America, said he sympathizes with
President Bush and the challenges he will face in the coming
months.
“I don’t think this is going to be an easy
war,” Valenti said.
Americans should not fight a war halfway across the world
without full support of the American people and its allies, he
said.
The war in Vietnam was different from any other modern war due
to a lack of censorship of the material being shown to the American
public, Valenti said, adding that this is not the case today.
Several people at Tuesday’s lecture said the problem is
that Americans do not have an accurate sense of the cultures and
religions of the people they are fighting, not that the American
message is not being communicated across seas.
Even in times of war and during an economic slump, Valenti said,
there is still a high demand for American films in foreign
countries.
Nathan Gardels, a Los Angeles Times syndicated writer, asked
Valenti if he felt the images portrayed by American media foster
hostility in foreign countries like Afghanistan.
“MTV has gone where the CIA could never penetrate,”
Gardels said.
It is not Hollywood images fueling the war, but a slew of other,
more deep-seeded issues, Valenti said in response.
Valenti and just over 45 film industry heavyweights met Sunday
with President Bush’s political advisor Karl Rove at the
Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills to discuss Hollywood’s
involvement in the war on terrorism.
Though details of the meeting are mostly unknown, the Los
Angeles Times likened it to a White House intelligence briefing,
with an elaborate PowerPoint presentation regarding the status of
the war. During the meeting, Rove asked for ideas and support from
the movie executives, union representatives and other meeting
attendees.
Valenti said the one thing he would not let “on the
table” was the issue of movie content, adding that no one but
the filmmakers should decide what movies to make. He said he was
committed to ensuring the Muslim community be protected against
popular misunderstanding and unfair media portrayal.
The media has the power to influence the public in many ways,
Valenti said. If the public were to see the type of gruesome images
which frequented television screens during the Vietnam War, he
said, they might not be as supportive of the war initiative.
Though the new style of war seems to be “get in, bomb the
hell out them, and get out,” Valenti said, there is nothing
that can be done to stop young American soldiers from dying.
“That’s what soldiers do ““ they die,” he
said.
Shannon Flaherty, a public policy graduate student, asked
Valenti if Americans should try to apologize and be more humble in
the messages they send overseas.
Instead of “God bless America,” she said, why not
say “God bless the world?”
If one word should be eradicated from wartime vocabulary,
Valenti said in response, it is benevolence.
“It’s not a useful word when you are at war,”
he said.
Valenti, who in 1952 co-founded Weekly & Valenti, an
advertising and political consulting agency, said he fell into the
political arena by chance.
His agency was in charge of the press during President John F.
Kennedy’s ill-fated visit to Texas in 1963. Valenti was in
the fifth car of the motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 when
Kennedy was shot and killed.
Hours later, Valenti was on Air Force One on his way back to
Washington, having been hired as the first special assistant to the
new president, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Valenti resigned his White House position to become the third
leader of the MPAA on June 1, 1966.