On the eve of the premiere of the new Paramount Pictures movie, Rules of Engagement, the film’s creator, executive producer, and co-writer talked recently at his office overlooking the Iwo Jima Memorial in northern Virginia with Naval Institute editor Fred L. Schultz. The self-described iconoclast discusses the machinations of Hollywood and its prevailing attitudes toward the military, his service as Assistant Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy, the gap between civilian and military cultures, and his opinions about the current condition of military leadership.
Proceedings : Obviously, the subject of rules of engagement plays heavily on the readers of this magazine. How did the new film, Rules of Engagement, come about?
Webb: I conceived the idea in 1989, when Scott Rudin began producing after having been president of production at 20th-Century Fox. He had read Bob Timberg’s article in Esquire, which was the seminal article for his book, The Nightingale’s Song. We had a discussion that boiled down to the notion of military loyalty. Timberg’s article had struck him, when it mentioned that, although I did not particularly like Oliver North, if I’d been working in the White House at the time of the Iran-Contra activities, I would not have let him do what he did. This led to a discussion of Marine Corps loyalty, as opposed to what you see in the civilian world. I made a comment that basically was: "In the Marine Corps, loyalty means you will die for somebody even if you don’t like them." He said, "You know, there’s a movie in that."
The whole issue of the rules of engagement weighed heavily on my mind: first, from having fought in Vietnam; second, from having represented a so-called "war criminal" for six years, which was written about some time ago for the Naval Institute Press [Gary Solis, Son Thang, 1997]; third, from having been a journalist in Beirut when the Marines were there, with unbelievably ridiculous rules of engagement; and fourth, from having been Secretary of the Navy during the Persian Gulf incidents of 1987 and 1988.
The theme has run deep over the past 40 years, and I thought we should show the American people what the modern military has to deal with on a daily basis, when it is placed in politically complex environments. So I came up with an idea, using a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) having to rescue an embassy under siege, because the government of that country, as a protest against something the Americans had done, pulls away its police protection. The MEU commander must make a decision to fire into a crowd after some of his Marines are killed. He then becomes, on one hand, something of a hero. But on the other hand, he is court-martialed for murder. The loyalty then plays in when he sees he’s in trouble, and a lot of people are trying to take advantage of him for political reasons. He sees that the one person he really trusts to defend him is a Marine whose life he saved in Vietnam and who was shot up badly and became a Marine Corps lawyer.
Proceedings: Does the movie resolve anything about rules of engagement?
Webb: As originally written, this film would have been harder on the viewer. You’ll still be debating, when you walk out of the theater, whether what the MEU commander did was right. The thing I’m proudest of, in terms of what has survived through the filmmaking process, is the kind of rhetoric that you’re going to hear. I refer especially to one speech, delivered by Samuel L. Jackson: "No matter what happens here, do you realize I will never command anything again? And do you know what that means?" The average civilian in this country has no comprehension of what command is. Halfway through this film, the viewer knows that, whichever way it goes for this guy, he has lost the most precious thing to him, professionally—the right to command troops. That, to me, is emotionally satisfying. World War II is easy in Hollywood. There has never before been a film that expressly addresses the modern American military and the issues it faces.
Proceedings: Why do you think the public is so ignorant about what a combat commander has to go through?
Webb: The level of ignorance is extremely high. A big part of that is because Hollywood has become, in many ways, the articulator of our culture—to ourselves and to the world. Right now, 60 percent of the money Hollywood makes is in international sales. If you look at the films that have been done about the U.S. military—anything after World War II—they are simplistic on these issues, and they are not positive. You see a repetitive theme, either about the corruption of U.S. military leaders or the depiction that Americans just shoot things up, without restrictions.
The conversations I’ve had with the people in Los Angeles responsible for marketing this film have been quite informative. They had no comprehension that we had any restrictions on us, even in a place like Vietnam. Where does the average American get his information? From the movies.
Many people have asked me over the past ten years what the hell I’m doing, working with Hollywood. I don’t think I’m going to do this solely or forever, because most of the things you hear about Hollywood are true. It’s a very difficult place on philosophical issues and also because of the competitive nature of the beast. The Writers’ Guild typically registers about 34,000 screenplays a year, and they make 260 feature films. The process of getting your product through that system in some ways depends on quality, but in a lot of ways it depends on relationships and political content. So people who have more traditional views have a very tough time there. What has survived in this film, I think, is going to be good for the country and will be satisfying for people who care about the military.
Proceedings: Take us through your on-and-off relationship with this project.
Webb: For nine years, I was the sole writer and co-producer with Scott Rudin, who did Angela’s Ashes, Sister Act, The Firm, and Sleepy Hollow. He’s one of the dominant producers in Hollywood, and he’s very content-oriented. When Billy Friedkin became the director, Scott was doing Angela’s Ashes and Sleepy Hollow in England. So Friedkin brought on Dick Zanuck, the son of Darryl Zanuck, to produce. At that point, with Scott off in England, they formed their own ideas. They brought in another writer and, without my direct involvement, came up with some changes to the story. Some of them were things that I may not have done myself, but that’s Hollywood.
I found two scenes deeply objectionable, and I communicated that to them. Without going into detail, one scene involved the Marine Corps in Vietnam, the other involved the Vietnamese community in the United States. Those two constituencies, for lack of a better term, are more important to me than making a movie. I could just see people saying, "Webb went to Hollywood and sold out. He’s turning his back on the people he says he cares about."
So it was sort of like "SecNav, round two." [Webb resigned as Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration.] I took my name off my own film. Luckily, over the course of the next year, as they shot the film and edited it, either they had second thoughts about what I had said, or they decided on their own. It doesn’t matter; they realized that those two scenes would have been extremely bad for the film. So they edited both of them down to the point that they were acceptable. I went to a screening, and I agreed to come back on as executive producer, with a "story by" credit. In the process, I lost my screenwriting credit.
Proceedings: Based on what we’ve heard, that is extraordinary in the movie business. Maybe they did realize that they were going to alienate the Marine Corps, a major portion of the potential audience.
Webb: Probably the most unfortunate occurrence in the shooting of the film was that Dale Dye was technical adviser. In my view, he should have been more loyal to the Marine Corps and backed me on what I said. This was my movie, and he never even called me to talk about the fact he was on the project. It was very clear to me where his loyalties were. If there’s anybody I’m really disappointed in, it’s not the Billy Friedkins and the Dick Zanucks of the world. What do they know about the military? It’s people like Dale Dye, who should have known that he did not have the experience to make the judgment that he made, which cost us an entire year of wrangling. Most people in Hollywood think that Dale Dye was an infantry Marine. He was not.
Proceedings: How serious is the apparent gap between the civilian and military cultures?
Webb: To start, it depends on how you comprehend or perceive the problem. Tom Ricks’s book, Making the Corps, is representative, I think, of many people who have not served in the military, who have gone to elite schools, and who are part of the ruling veneer in this country. Their worry is that the military is becoming more dangerous as a separate entity. And the military is beginning to view itself, through its leadership, as a separate entity.
In my view, the danger is the other way around. And it’s been that way for 30 years. But it’s become more markedly so during this particular administration. The elites of this country have been separating themselves from the obligations of serving and have less and less comprehension of the military. As a result, they have more of a cavalier view of how the military should be used. They have very little personal or emotional connection to military service.
I started seeing this 20 years ago, when I was a committee counsel in the Congress. Typically, members of Congress had some military service; the staffers typically did not. When things really got bad, and we started Indian Ocean commitments around 1979, it may as well have been the Mexican Navy out there when it came to explaining what was going on to the staffers. By the way, the same is true in the media. The typical reporter 20 years ago didn’t have military service, but his or her editor did. Now, most members of Congress and most editors lack military service. Where do they go to get that understanding? That’s part of the problem.
The other part of the problem is that senior military leaders have been unable to perceive this change as it relates to their responsibility for articulating how the military operates. They’re still ten years behind, with most of them believing that it is somehow a political act to confront the political process when the political process needs to be confronted. As little as 10 or 15 years ago, the uniformed people could back off a bit, because the room in a typical congressional hearing was inundated with people who understood the basics. The military leaders didn’t need to state them. They need to state them now. And when these statements come from people outside the process, they do not have the same impact as they do when they come from people in uniform. The Marine Corps has done very well. The other services have not.
The danger, to me, is real, and it comes from a veneer that’s been defined by academic background and class. We have moved from issues of race to issues of class in this country, very subtly. And people are only now beginning to comprehend it.
With studies like the Triangle Study of the so-called military elites, people had better be paying close attention to the exact words being used and how the military is being defined from the outside. To coin the phrase "military elites" is a pretty dangerous thing, a contradiction in terms. You’re not born to be an admiral, even though some believe they were. More than any other institution in this country, the military is basically a socialist meritocracy. You work your way up; you are evaluated on intangibles; and you’re rewarded not with pay but with things like command. And when they start characterizing a military elite, and then carefully carve it away, the next step is going to be to carve the leaders away from their own troops. Just watch.
Watch out for these civilian-designed attitudinal surveys that go straight to the troops. The intellectual elites in this country want to say that the military elites don’t understand their own troops; their troops have evolved as society has evolved, and these intellectuals know what’s best for the military. That’s what’s going to happen.
Proceedings: Might that be a root problem in regard to recruiting and retention?
Webb: I would argue that the problem—from the evidence of the Marine Corps and from being out and talking to the people who really care, who want to lead—is not that the leadership is too traditional. It has become too obedient to the political process to the point that it will not define the military culture to the political leadership.
[Commandant of the Marine Corps General] Bob Barrow saved the Marine Corps. He was the guy, back in 1979, during the Carter administration, who really drove the stake into the ground and said, "This is what the Marine Corps is. If you don’t like it, fire me. If you don’t like what I’m saying, fire me." Barrow wasn’t the first guy to say it, but this was a defining moment for the Marine Corps. And the Marines have said, basically, "We know who we are; we know what our traditions are; we know how to lead; we know how to fight; and we’re going to take care of our people."
When members of the other services see the leadership at the top cut into the political process, that’s when you get the sort of confusion that I see. Maybe there are people who write for Proceedings who have different views, but to me that seems to be the difference between the Marine Corps and the other services. And it does affect recruiting and retention.
Proceedings: You’ve been a vocal critic of military leadership, and you were especially tough in your 1996 speech at the Naval Institute’s Annual Meeting. I’m sure you remember that. Has anything changed since then?
Webb: Yes, I remember. Let’s back up to that speech. The biggest problem at the time was the cascading effect of the Navy’s leadership’s failure to defend its culture after the Tailhook incident. In 1992, I wrote a piece for the New York Times, basically saying that the problem wasn’t the Navy’s culture. The problem was the admirals who were standing there saying we have a flaw in the culture, or who were allowing the civilian process to say that we had a corrupt culture.
If that were true, if the Navy’s culture was permanently flawed and that was what caused Tailhook, then every one of those guys should have resigned. And if the culture wasn’t structurally flawed, if this was an isolated incident that happened on one part of a hotel, where some people got out of hand, then they should have spoken up, and the whole thing might have taken a different turn. You tell me that what happened in a mosh pit at a Woodstock celebration last summer was less notorious than what happened at Tailhook? That was much more notorious. There were actual rapes in the mosh pit at Woodstock ’99. But where were the media?
Obviously, there was something else going on at Tailhook. Some agenda leftists were seizing the event to break the Navy culture. And the admirals stood silent, when the civilian leaders were saying that the culture was broken. The admirals created that culture. They were a part of it. If they didn’t agree with what the civilians were saying, they should have spoken up.
This wasn’t something that I got up every day and made a speech about. When we reached the point where promotions that already had been approved through the sacrosanct promotion process were then required to have a second look by a group of Senate staffers, then something was inalienably wrong with the Navy’s leadership.
I brought my 14-year-old son with me to that Naval Institute conference. When I got there, I told him, "I do not want to make this speech; I don’t know how people are going to react to it. But it has to be said." And this became quite an education for him over the next several months.
When you ask whether things have changed since that speech, I think that the tragedy of Admiral [Jeremy M.] Boorda’s suicide, the visibility of what happened to [Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral] Stan Arthur, and the things that were written about them caused a sort of second look at what was being done to the Navy. I think that gave the Navy some breathing room for a number of reasons. But I think—or would have hoped—that with that breathing room, there would have been a lot more aggressive argument from the top leadership of the Navy regarding force structure and other important issues.
I don’t see how you can have a United States Navy with 300 ships—no matter how efficient each one of those ships might be—and still perform what needs to be done on behalf of the nation’s security, especially if we are going to be the nation that we say we are. Again, it’s a question of having the uniformed leadership at the top understanding that it’s different now; it’s different than it was ten years ago, and they need to be saying it. Some of them are, but most of them aren’t.
Proceedings: What would you say your biggest accomplishment was in your public service?
Webb: It’s hard to say. I was a committee counsel for four years in the Congress, and that was a time when veterans’ issues were extremely visible. I think probably the most important thing that I did was to create the legislation that countered the Carter discharge program.
After President [Jimmy] Carter had given amnesty to all the draft evaders, he turned around and created a program that would have upgraded hundreds of thousands of discharges of people who were deserters, attitude cases, etc. I worked day and night for six months on that. And we eventually brought what we called "historical standards" to any of those discharges. We could not stop the Carter administration from upgrading the discharges, but we could stop people from getting veterans’ benefits, unless they met historical standards. That was very important to preserving the dignity of the people who had served. It was unbelievably emotional and contentious. We were right, in my view. It’s hard to look at a guy who lost his arm, telling you, "I went to Vietnam. My cousin deserted. And now they’re going to give my cousin veterans’ benefits." He said, "I never felt any bitterness toward my cousin, except that they’re going to treat him the same way they treat me." Those were the distinctions that we were having to deal with. I could write a book on how a bill becomes a law just based on that piece of legislation.
I think the most important thing I was involved with in the Pentagon, when I was ASD [Assistant Secretary of Defense] for three years, was the creation of the Reserve Affairs Staff. We had all seven guard-reserve components, all four active services, plus political and career civilians all on one staff. And making that work—where we became central to resourcing mobilization, manpower flow, and medical care—was a tremendous leadership experience.
My goal as Secretary of the Navy was to reinvigorate the admiralty and give it more responsibility. I think we did that in a number of different ways. And toward the end, even though I fell on my sword, I made some speeches that still resonate about the United States as a Pacific nation and why we are a maritime nation; not in the sense of having to ram four aircraft carriers up through the Kola Peninsula, but why we need this force structure in the day-to-day operational environment in which we exist. By having fought that issue, and refusing to back down on it, I can still talk about it with some veracity.
Proceedings: Did you know you were "falling on your sword" at the time?
Webb: No. We almost had it done. I’ve been criticized for being intransigent, because I resigned. But you don’t survive four years in Congress, putting 20 bills a year through the House floor, by being intransigent. When I was ASD, over three years on the Defense Resources Board, we lost only one issue.
We argued the issue over which I resigned for three months. I had written a paper in 1984, laying out exactly how I believed the force structure of all the services should change, moving into the 21st century. And I was the first guy in the [President Ronald] Reagan administration to argue that we should reduce our ground and tactical-air presence in NATO. So this wasn’t just more bucks for everybody; it was a plan for how to reconfigure the U.S. military. As I said, for three months we negotiated how to meet this $11 billion decrement that we had been given, without dropping force structure.
[Secretary of Defense Frank] Carlucci basically came in and said, "I want everybody to give up force structure." To him, it was, "when times are good, everybody gets more; when times are bad, everybody gives something up." My view was that if we could survive the decrement and keep force structure intact for one year, people would understand that the Navy, in the current environment, is different from the other services. That was the gamble. And we were so close.
Proceedings: What was your biggest regret during your public service?
Webb: Having resigned as Secretary of the Navy. That’s it.
Proceedings: Why did you decide to leave public service and go into literature and filmmaking?
Webb: From the time I left the Marine Corps, I’ve done both. I have an unwitting career. Actually, I wrote my first book after my first year in law school. It was a small book on Micronesia and American strategic interests in the Pacific.
So I just became fascinated with writing and started Fields of Fire. From that point forward, I’d write for a while and then do something in government for a while. When I resigned as Secretary of the Navy in 1988, I was asked by the Republican National Committee to run against [Senator] Chuck Robb (D-VA). They offered me $400,000 start-up money. Part of me was saying, "If I run for the Senate, people are going to forget what I just did. They’re going to think I resigned just so I could make more noise and run for the Senate."
Then I also sat down and thought that if I were to go into government at any level beyond where I’d been, I should be financially secure. I also thought that I should have all of my curiosities basically taken care of. You’re a prisoner when you’re in government at that level. Even when I was SecNav, I was locked up in some of the best hotels in the world. You could travel all the way to the Philippines, but you couldn’t go see anything. I’m lucky enough now that I can get people to pay me to go places I want to go and see things I want to see.
And then there’s the side of me that loves to make stories. As I said, particularly on the film side, if you really care about the cultural issues, the place where our culture is being articulated is Los Angeles. I’ve been in and out of there for ten years. I’m not saying I’m going to do it for the rest of my life. And at some point, I might go back into government. I haven’t decided.
Proceedings: Do you have the same type of relationship with the filming of Fields of Fire as you had with Rules of Engagement?
Webb: Having learned how Hollywood operates and feeling how important the Vietnam story is, especially because it’s never been done right, I decided to do Fields of Fire outside the studio system. It’s harder. But if you sell a story or a novel into the studio system, into what they call "development," they own it; they own it creatively, they own every one of those characters, and they can do anything they want. All they have to do is pay you out.
With Fields of Fire, the only reason to go through this drill was to try to get it right. It’s a much harder way, but it’s going to be much more satisfying in the end. It took me an entire year to get the rights to shoot this in Vietnam, right in the An Hoa Basin, where I was. We got the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] to play themselves. And the Marine Corps is going to help us. The problem is that there are very few people in Hollywood, on the development or on the money side, who connect emotionally with a positive view of Vietnam service. It’s taken me a lot longer than I ever thought it would, but we’re very close. I think we’re going to get it done this year.
Proceedings: What advice would you give to young people who are contemplating a military career?
Webb: First of all, I think you’ve got to make that decision for yourself. My son just turned 18 and is very interested in going into the Marine Corps. I’m really proud of him for that. But, at the same time, if he were doing it purely because somebody else wanted him to, then he would be in the wrong place.
That aside, I really wish we had more of a citizen soldiery. I wish we had more people in the country going through the military, because it’s the greatest experience in the world in terms of helping you understand the cultural makeup of the country and how you can work together. Whether you’re in for 3 years or for 30, you take that back to your community, and you have a totally different understanding of this country by having served. There’s no greater thing a young person can do than to be responsible for other people in the military environment. It helps you learn who you are, how to make decisions, and how to lead.
Whether someone going in should remain for a career is a big leadership question. I wouldn’t even put that on a young person. I’d put that on the admirals and the generals. We get so many good people in the U.S. military, and we always have, with a few small blips here and there. Even in bad times there are some really great people coming in the military. And the question always has been whether they are inspired, whether the leadership and the nation will convince them that what they’re doing is important. Napoleon said that there are no bad regiments; there are only bad colonels.
