“Truth” and Other Lies
3rd October 2015
The film Truth premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. Starring Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, the film retells the Rathergate scandal based on Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty. I must be one of the few people in the United States actually to have read the book.
Mapes is the hero of her memoir and the hero of the film. In Mapes’s telling, she is not the perpetrator of a scandalous hoax. Rather, she is a liberal martyr to the truth. If she’s a martyr at all, she’s a martyr a la Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. In other words, she’s guilty as hell but she’s not confessing, ever, and now she has the best of Hollywood to lend her aid and comfort. The left does not give up promoting them, as we can see also in Kevin Williamson’s timely NR column “Codename: LIBERAL.”