The Civics 101 team delves into the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, a political satire and thriller that is more than relevant in today’s political climate.
Note: this episode contains spoilers for the film.
Transcript
Archive: Raymond Shaw, please.
Hannah McCarthy: Hi, I'm Hannah McCarthy. This is Civics 101. This is the first in what will be a semi-regular series wherein our team takes a look at our favorite movies and shows about the US government or perhaps other governments as well. Space governments, for example, and finds the Civics 101 of it all within them.
Archive: There will be no covering up, sir. No covering up.
Hannah McCarthy: And today we are going to talk about a movie that I very much love, and I am definitely going to spoil it for people who have not seen it. So if you have not seen the 1962 Manchurian Candidate, I recommend waiting to listen to this episode until you have watched it, and I do recommend watching it. It is rated PG 13 by the way, if that is relevant to you. And I am joined today by three lovely coworkers and friends who have seen this movie first Nick Capodice.
Nick Capodice: Hello, Hannah. I'm very glad to be talking about this movie.
Hannah McCarthy: Me too. Christina Phillips.
Christina Phillips: Hi, Hannah. I'm very happy to be talking about the Cold War.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, lovely. And Rebecca Lavoie.
Rebecca Lavoie: I can't be more excited to talk about a movie and the strange accents therein than I am to talk about this movie. Yeah. And the strange accents therein.
Hannah McCarthy: And so before we start the brainwashed fever dream, that is the true history behind what is happening in this movie. I just want to know, without actually touching on the plot, did you all like it? I will start with the two people who had not seen it prior to what? This past weekend, right? Yes. Rebecca. Did you like it?
Rebecca Lavoie: Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury. What's not to like? Hannah McCarthy.
Hannah McCarthy: I couldn't agree.
Rebecca Lavoie: More. I did, I did.
Hannah McCarthy: Christina. How'd you feel about it?
Christina Phillips: I liked it, I found it very funny, and I was like, I'm not sure if that's me or if that's current context, but I was delighted. I thought it was great.
Hannah McCarthy: And Nick, how do you feel about The Manchurian Candidate?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, well, I saw this movie when I was too young the first time, and I watched it maybe ten times since then. I am in love with this movie. One actor in particular, and the most recent watching it, was just like the first watching in the last four years. It's still hits home, it's still slaps. It's still relevant to everything going on today.
Hannah McCarthy: Very good. So The Manchurian Candidate, it is based on the book of the same name written by Richard Condon. It stars Frank Sinatra, as we said, and Angela Lansbury, among others.
Nick Capodice: Yes, it includes Janet Leigh and Laurence Harvey.
Hannah McCarthy: With the more actor names you say, the more likely people are to tune out.
Nick Capodice: And do you really think people hearing the name John Mcgiver in this movie is gonna make people tune out? I gotta say, everybody, John Mcgiver is very special. He's the, uh, salesman at Tiffany's in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Yeah, he's a he's a wonderful character.
Christina Phillips: Which character is he in this?
Rebecca Lavoie: He's Senator Jordan.
Archive: I think of John. Iceland were a paid Soviet agent. He could not do more to harm this country than he's doing now.
Christina Phillips: Okay, Senator Jordan.
Rebecca Lavoie: Got it. He's Angela Lansbury's nemesis.
Nick Capodice: I will block you.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.
Hannah McCarthy: Pictured, there's a scene where you see his face just in front of a giant golden bald eagle. So we know what we're supposed to think about him. A lot of, like, imagery that tells you exactly what to feel in this movie.
Nick Capodice: And a quick public service announcement to anyone out there, please, in my opinion, do not bother with the 2004 version of this film.
Hannah McCarthy: It is Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, both of whom are incredibly talented people, so you might want to bother with it. Nick and I love the 1962 one. That is the one we recommend. Guess who did not love the 1962 The Manchurian Candidate? Any guesses?
Rebecca Lavoie: Any of the Kennedys?
Christina Phillips: With McCarthy still alive.
Hannah McCarthy: Mccarthy was not still alive. Audiences in 1962.
Christina Phillips: Oh.
Hannah McCarthy: So this movie was kind of a flop. United artists, the production company that produced this movie, pretty much pulled it out of most mainstream theaters two years into its run.
Rebecca Lavoie: Just like It's a Wonderful Life, right? Like which was also a flop, really.
Archive: I'm gonna build airfields. I'm gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high. I'm gonna build bridges a mile long. Where are you going? To throw a rock.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, that was a flop. The only reason it's popular. Because it accidentally fell in the public domain. So every TV station snagged it. And, like, let's play it at Christmas.
Hannah McCarthy: Like, um, Wizard of Oz. Like it was a total flop.
Archive: I thought you said she was dead.
Archive: That was her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. This is the Wicked Witch of the West.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. But what I really want to start with is the term Manchurian Candidate. It is a term that has come to mean someone who's harmful or disloyal to their nation or their party because they are under the control of another nation or party. But the term does come from this book. And then this movie. So I just want to ask you all, what is Manchuria?
Christina Phillips: I believe Manchuria is an important location during the Chinese Revolution. Right.
Nick Capodice: I thought it was northern China near Mongolia, northeastern China.
Hannah McCarthy: That is true. And it is significant. Often throughout history, there is a long and rich, complex history of what is called Manchuria. By the way, a very controversial name for a contested place. That name comes from colonizers, right? Not from the Chinese who lived there. I'm not going to get into this whole history of Manchuria because it is. There's a lot, and I recommend people look into it on their own. What I need you to know about it today is that it was very important during the Korean War, the Chinese People's Liberation Army had an important base in what is called Manchuria. Yes, Communist China fought in the Korean War, as did covertly the Soviet Union, as did United Nations member states, including the United States. Does anybody know why all of these nations and states were involved in the Korean War?
Christina Phillips: Christina I guess I'll start with the United States. So this is post World War Two, and this was during the rise of the Truman era of containment, which is part of the Truman Doctrine, which is essentially this idea that there was encroaching communism. And the United States adopted a policy of preventing the spread of communism in other countries. There's also this massive decolonization happening. So the United States gets involved because they see this threat of communism entering South Korea.
Hannah McCarthy: You're right. But what happens way before that? Why is there a North Korea and a South Korea?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, I mean, it was Korea. And then like a chunk of it broke off specifically around World War two.
Hannah McCarthy: Yes. What happened was Japan had annexed and colonized Korea. So 1910 to 1945, Japan is occupying Korea after Japan's surrender. The United States and the Soviet Union allies really in name only. They have to transition this nation into its independence, right? So what do they decide to do with this country? They decide to split it up along the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union is going to manage the northern part of the nation, and the United States is going to manage the southern part of the nation. And the idea is this is temporary. Eventually, this military government occupation is going to just step away and leave it to Korea to figure out. However, there's an important, as you were talking about, Christina, ideological difference between these two occupying forces. Right. The northern occupiers believe in communism. Communism. And these southern occupiers believe in democracy, anti-communism, capitalism. Right. So basically, what ends up happening and I'm going to grossly oversimplify this because we are talking about a movie and not world history necessarily, although it's all kind of the same thing. You know, tensions are building up, building up, building up. Communist, anti-communist. Eventually North Korea invaded South Korea. And we are not going to declare a war, of course, because we just came out of a war. However, the United Nations authorizes police action, and the United States is permitted to get involved in this war, which was a proxy war, really, between anti-communists and communists as well as North Korea and South Korea. And this is all around the same time that we are really entering the Cold War, which was what, Rebecca? What was the Cold War?
Rebecca Lavoie: You mean the nuclear standoff between the two most powerful nations on Earth, the Cold War, where we were all afraid we were going to blow each other up. That thing.
Hannah McCarthy: That thing? Yeah.
Archive: If you're on the playground, run for shelter. If you're in the schoolyard, get into the building. Move quickly, but in good order.
Rebecca Lavoie: We should mention that this movie is not perfect. It's a little bit problematic. And there are no actual Koreans playing Koreans in this film.
Nick Capodice: I'm glad you brought that up, Rebecca. In particular, the Korean spy at the very beginning. I have no idea where this man is really from new Jersey.
Rebecca Lavoie: That's where he's.
Nick Capodice: From. He's from new Jersey.
Rebecca Lavoie: And Frank Silva, who plays the allegedly Korean man who ends up coming to New York, is Italian. So, yeah, we should just throw that out there. This is a thing that we know about this film.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm very glad you brought that up, Rebecca, because I would argue that The Manchurian Candidate is not just set during the Cold War. It is a two hour tribute to Cold War paranoia and fear. It is both a critique and a product of the panic that still gripped the United States when it was released in 1962. It is not historical fiction, but there is a lot of historical truth within it. I think the movie itself is a reflection of extremism and racism and sentiments about certain elements during the Cold War, because we were still in it, and setting this movie during the Korean War kind of sets this all up, right? We're not fighting the communists, but we are fighting the communists. And the United States was partially responsible for the Korean War because of that division at the 38th parallel. That's where we find ourselves at the very beginning of The Manchurian Candidate. American troops patrolling somewhere in Korea. And what, Christina happens to those troops?
Christina Phillips: They're betrayed by their scout.
Rebecca Lavoie: Their Italian scout.
Nick Capodice: The Italian.
Rebecca Lavoie: Scout.
Christina Phillips: The Italian. Yes, they're betrayed by the Italian scout.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah.
Christina Phillips: But, yeah. So they're basically. They're a staff sergeant. They establish that he is not very popular, and then they get captured by, we assume Russians, I assume, or Soviets.
Hannah McCarthy: But let me just ask you, Christina and Rebecca, having watched this, we already sort of touched on it. Did you know right off the bat who they were being captured by? Was it immediately clear to you?
Rebecca Lavoie: No, no, it's not clear, a because the actors are not played by people of any distinct ethnicity other than Americans, and because the setting of their brainwashing sessions is this like hotel lobby with a surgical theater audience around it. And the audience. That's the fake garden club audience that they're doing these demonstrations for all look, American. And I want to say, look, American. I mean, they speak English like Americans, and they're dressed like Americans from that time. So it's a little bit hazy.
Archive: Many years ago, when I was traveling about the country, I noticed magnificent hydrangeas on the hills.
Nick Capodice: I said before that, like, there's one scene that stands out to me. I think every character who was kidnaped, having a memory of that brainwashing that happened to them, is one of my favorite things in cinematic history. Like, I'm nuts about it because depending on who is having the memory, everybody who is in the scene is are portrayed by completely different people. So when there is a black actor who is remembering being brainwashed, he is a group of older black women talking at a garden club. And when it's a British guy, he's like remembering white British people talking. But when you see the real scene, those are people that look like they're from around the world. Like there's a guy with a thick sort of Hungarian accent. There are people from all over who are at this brainwashing demonstration when they're kidnaped in Korea. Even when I was a kid, and even until like the last time I saw that movie, it was like, well, who's doing who's actually kidnaping these people? No, I'm in the exact same boat.
Rebecca Lavoie: That's who. Them. Them. The big.
Hannah McCarthy: Scary they.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah. The body snatchers. Just like an invasion of the body snatchers. It's just them. Them. Them, them.
Hannah McCarthy: Rebecca. Exactly.
Archive: It's got no detail, no character. It's unformed.
Archive: All of a sudden, they're growing like parasites. Is it contagious? People are being duplicated.
Archive: How do you know my name?
Hannah McCarthy: Fear of capture was a very deep one. Of course, it's a deep one in any war. But in particular, during the Korean War, American soldiers captured by North Korean and Chinese soldiers could expect absolutely horrifying conditions, which, again, I am not saying is unique to the Korean War, but we do know this about the Korean War. According to the Korean War Legacy Foundation, 43% of American prisoners of war died in captivity during the Korean War, which is a huge number. Those who survived, for the most part, returned home traumatized if they returned home at all. But in this movie, they do return home, and what is waiting for them when they return home? Nick.
Nick Capodice: Uh, Raymond Shaw Raymond Shaw is a returning to a hero's welcome when he comes back from whatever happened over there. Uh, there's balloons and there's a parade. And Angela Lansbury and her husband, Senator Tom Iceland, are there. Excited to bring John.
Hannah McCarthy: Medal of honor.
Nick Capodice: Medal. Congressional medal of honor. That's right.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, does Raymond like his mom?
Nick Capodice: Does Raymond Shaw like his mother? No, no. Raymond Shaw hates his mother, portrayed by Angela Lansbury and hates her politics as well as her.
Archive: What is it, mother?
Archive: A sort of a greeting is that at 330 in the morning.
Archive: It's a 2:45. And what do you want?
Archive: I want to talk to you, Raymond.
Archive: About what?
Archive: I want to talk to you about that communist.
Archive: Shut up with that mother. Shut up!
Hannah McCarthy: And we, the audience, are also meant to probably not like Senator Iceland and Mrs. Iceland. Right? Also, I don't think it's an accident that it's spelled I e l I n, but pronounced Iceland. Right? Cold. Not good.
Nick Capodice: Cold war.
Hannah McCarthy: So I would say it's pretty obvious that Senator Jon Iceland is a proxy, if you will, is a pretty obvious knockoff and critique of a certain real American historical figure. Who might that be?
Christina Phillips: Oh, I would guess maybe Senator Joseph McCarthy perhaps.
Hannah McCarthy: That is exactly right. Long before I understood what Joseph McCarthy had gotten up to, I used to say like, hi, my name is Hannah McCarthy. No relation, assuming people would know exactly what I meant. But like, I didn't know what I meant. Um, Rebecca, why might I have enough wherewithal without even knowing who the guy was to say no relation to Senator Joseph McCarthy. What did I mean?
Rebecca Lavoie: Because McCarthyism, which is like the expression that was born sort of like Manchurian Candidate after his era, just became a placeholder set of words for oppression of thought. And so you didn't want to be associated with that, I'm guessing. Hannah McCarthy.
Hannah McCarthy: That's right. I like us all to think all we want.
Christina Phillips: So the Korean War was 1950 to 1953, correct? And McCarthy was really in his heyday throughout the 1950s. And then this movie comes out in 1962. The movie was probably being made as he was still alive. His legacy is very much present, right?
Nick Capodice: James Gregory does a pretty good impression of, I believe, of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy.
Archive: I am United States Senator John Yerkes, Iceland, and I have here a list of the names of 207 persons who are known by the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist Party. What?
Hannah McCarthy: So just to clarify, you know, we talked about the fact that Senator Joseph McCarthy was sort of a thought police kind of guy. Specifically, he was fueling the flames of anti-Communist sentiment to an outrageous degree in the United States. He made accusations left and right, mostly left, that people were communists. They were card carrying communists. And he assured us that they were here on U.S. soil. They were infiltrating everything, including the government. And, Nick, I just want to ask you, what is one real simple, easy to remember number of communists in the State Department?
Nick Capodice: That's a really good joke. So for those of you who haven't seen the movie, Senator Iceland keeps putting out fake numbers about how many communists there are in the State Department. He's like 147. And he says to Angela Lansbury, can't you pick one simple, easy number? It shows him banging on a Heinz ketchup bottle and he says 57. There are no fewer than 57 because everybody loved Heinz, 57 at the time.
Rebecca Lavoie: One thing that I think is worth mentioning, though, is the reason she gives him for the varying numbers to be advantageous are that now everyone is talking about how many communists there are in the State Department, and not whether there are communists there.
Hannah McCarthy: That was the exact same tactic used by Senator Joseph McCarthy. That is why they have John Iceland doing that.
Christina Phillips: I think this is also the moment we realize that he is essentially everything he's saying is coming from the mind of Angela Lansbury, like he is sort of a puppet of her greater aims. So I thought that was fascinating like that. That conversation is so funny where he's just like squirting the ketchup and she's sitting there like, just do what I say.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, yeah. Because, like, communists are scary, but nothing's more terrifying than an older woman with power, right? That's the scary. I mean, like, that's.
Rebecca Lavoie: Very feminist, very ahead of.
Hannah McCarthy: Its time. Yeah, yeah. So, John, Iceland is supposed to be Joseph McCarthy. He's portrayed as a total buffoon, right? He's the puppet of his commander wife. That wife is going to use paranoia, false accusations, and the absolutely drama thirsty media to get her husband to the vice presidency, basically. Right. Just put propaganda out there and rely on the lie so that people are talking about the lie as though the lie is simply the case. And then let's try to understand what's going on around this lie. And then in terms of how he's actually portrayed, he drinks to excess, right? His home is scattered with images of Abraham Lincoln. He in fact, dresses as Abraham Lincoln during a costume party. This, I think, is an unambiguous eye roll at Joseph McCarthy. By 1962, when this movie came out, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy had more than fallen from grace. He had been exposed. Mccarthyism had been exposed for what it was it a largely baseless hunt for an invisible threat in our own nation, for the disloyal turncoats planted on our precious soil. Mccarthy had died three years prior to this movie coming out, some say from complications related to alcoholism.
Hannah McCarthy: He was one of the few senators to have ever been censured by the Senate. Really? Big deal. And seven years before this movie came out was when McCarthy made the first public claim about communists in the government. It was during a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He brandished a piece of paper and claimed to have a list of the communists infesting the State Department. And when he gave this speech, it was Lincoln Day, and he referenced Abraham Lincoln in this speech as a way to sort of link himself to Lincoln and enhance his own Own credibility in his Communist hunt. Linking that to Lincoln's legacy of unity. So I just think there are so many ways in which Frankenheimer, the director of this movie, is hammering it home. Like Iceland is Joseph McCarthy, and he's a buffoon, and we need to throw him away. And America pretty much had at the point that this movie had come out. And speaking of women's clubs, Christina, I think you know where I am going with this.
Christina Phillips: Hydrangeas.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, hydrangeas. That's right. And we are going to get to that after a quick break. We are back. We are taking a civics look at the fictional 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate and its real world foundations. And before that break, we were just about to get into a major driving force in this Cold War era film, something that we have already talked about quite a bit in this conversation. Brainwashing. Just a reminder spoilers abound in this episode. Okay, so Nick, I know this is one of your favorite scenes. You've talked about this quite a bit. We're talking about a garden club. What is the deal with the garden club when I say that, what is that referencing in The Manchurian Candidate?
Nick Capodice: Well, this is a scene when, uh, all of the captured soldiers are remembering a demonstration of how they have been brainwashed at the time of the demonstration to sort of the, quote unquote, axis of evil, all the evil people sitting in a room just waiting to see how these men, these American soldiers, have been brainwashed, they've all been hypnotized, and specifically, they've been hypnotized to believe they're at a presentation of a ladies garden club about how to keep and grow hydrangeas.
Archive: Another modern discovery, which we owe to the hydrangea, concerns the influence of air drainage upon plant climate.
Nick Capodice: Oh, and they're also smoking, uh, yak poop instead of cigarettes. They've been hypnotized to believe it tastes good.
Hannah McCarthy: Let me just ask. The group, is brainwashing real?
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. Anybody who's watched a documentary about cults knows that brainwashing is real.
Archive: Tyndall gave us the tools to brainwash ourselves, literally wash out our humanness from our brains.
Hannah McCarthy: I want to acknowledge, like, first and foremost, brainwashing has become a term that we all use to mean something. So like to Rebecca's point, we use it to mean coercive conditioning tactics, often involving manipulation, deceit, and various trauma in order to change someone's perception of the world, alter their behavior away from what they might have done prior to your conditioning them right. Brainwashing is a term that many psychologists are wary of, and they're like, maybe let's not use the term brainwashing when what we mean is the thing that we think of that a cult might do to an individual, which is coerce abuse condition. And I think that that is in part because of the origins of the public use of the term, especially in the United States, which I'm about to get into because they talk about conditioning in The Manchurian Candidate. Right. There was this like, call it a moral panic, if you will. It was just a panic. There was a panic about brainwashing in the United States. I have a whole thing about this, Nick, with hypnosis, because you and I talked about this earlier. And generally, psychologists will say that hypnosis is a voluntary state that someone essentially in, in some way or another is agreeing to hypnosis itself, and that the implications of brainwashing are that it is not voluntary. Right? It is entirely, entirely against somebody's will. And so also for all those listeners who are like, this fool hasn't heard of MKUltra. I have like, you know, there are a lot of reasons. Yes. No, I have. Trust me, I have. The term brainwashing rolls off of the American tongue. It's a term I have no idea when I first heard it, but I have probably used it many, many times in my life. And we impart have an individual named Edward Hunter to thank for that. Has anyone here ever heard of Edward Hunter?
Nick Capodice: If I'm not mistaken, I thought he wrote the book Budwing or Mr. Budwing.
Hannah McCarthy: That's Evan Hunter. Um, he is a writer. He is a writer. However, Edward Hunter was a journalist, maybe, who ended up working with the United States Army and the Office of Strategic Services, which you can basically think of as the CIA. It was the CIA prior to the CIA. Some scholars think that the whole journalist thing was just a front, and that he was just an OSS agent, a CIA agent. Not everyone agrees on that. However. In 1959, Hunter testified before a Senate subcommittee, and this is what he had to say about this thing that he was calling brainwashing. And Nick, there is some outdated and inflammatory language in this quote. I just want to flag that for our listeners. But can I have you read what Edward Hunter said to the Senate?
Nick Capodice: Absolutely. Okay. So our Mr. Hunter said this thing called brainwashing could, quote, change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet, a human robot, without the atrocity being visible from the outside. The aim is to create a mechanism in flesh and blood, with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body. What that amounts to is the search for a slave race that, unlike the slaves of olden times, can be trusted never to revolt, always amenable to orders like an insect to its instincts.
Hannah McCarthy: Wow.
Nick Capodice: End quote. Wow.
Rebecca Lavoie: This is so funny. Have any of you watched the show The Americans?
Hannah McCarthy: A little bit.
Christina Phillips: A little.
Rebecca Lavoie: Bit. Okay. It is, in my opinion, the best show in in my lifetime in the history of television. And it's about a couple who are from the Soviet Union who have been sent over. They weren't really a couple. They were put together as Soviet spies in the United States. And this is based on a real program that existed where they would train young Soviet people to be American and send them here.
Archive: This work can be too much for people.
Archive: They tell us what to do and we do it. That's how it works.
Archive: Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are not Russian spies. What happened? It's hard.
Rebecca Lavoie: It's such a wonderful show because I remember growing up and hearing that communists were brainwashed. Right? And the show shows the perspective of somebody who grew up in the Soviet Union who thinks Americans are brainwashed by capitalism. So it's just a very interesting, like, Cold War kind of thing that I certainly remember people talking about when I was growing up.
Hannah McCarthy: No, it's very much a thing. Part of the propaganda war between communism and anti-communism or communism and capitalism or communism and democracy was this notion, especially in the United States, of American exceptionalism. And it was very important that we talked about the fear of communism and the threat of communism, and what communists could do to us without allowing for the possibility that the American individual was corruptible. And I think this is very important. And forgive me if I say this again later, because it's important that Americans are safe and secure in their democratic ideals. Right? That is powerful. That is our important propaganda tool. So what what do we need to ensure that we're afraid of communism? We rally support. Opposed to communism, there has to be some sort of almost mystical tool that can hack into your mind. That is not the same thing as social influence. It's very important that we cannot be socially influenced into communism, but we can be brainwashed with something, can pierce our perfect American skulls and get in there. And that's what we're fighting against.
Nick Capodice: Part of the reason I love this movie is the whole movie is instances of people unwittingly demonstrating their lack of understanding or feel fealty or patriotism towards the United States. You know, you've got this blatantly horrible character of the senator who's based on Joe McCarthy, who is, you know, making lies and false accusations and the constant portrayal of a drunk Abraham Lincoln. Like, these are all we are lying to ourselves. It doesn't it doesn't need to be some creepy person in a helicopter who brainwashes us. We're doing it already. That's why I like it.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, so getting back to Hunter and also like, by the way, that quote you just read, Nick, like, sound like a movie you just watched. Like that's what supposedly is happening to these men when they return, right? They have been hacked.
Nick Capodice: Hannah. Ah. Did you say that this is like the first instance of the use of the term brainwashed.
Hannah McCarthy: So Hunter reportedly claimed that he was the first person to ever say this term out loud in American English. Okay. He claimed that it came from a Chinese word meaning wash brain. Now, there's a notion in Chinese philosophy about wash heart or wash brain that has to do with getting toward enlightenment. And this term is actually about like a combination of Western and Eastern philosophies and like, you know, improving oneself. It has nothing to do with the government hacking into your mind. Right. He was just pulling this term also seems highly unlikely that he was the first person to use this term. There are documents that indicate that the OSS was already using the term brainwashing in internal communications prior to Hunter getting up there and saying this. And a lot of scholars believe that Edward Hunter was just a Super effective propagandist employed by the OSS to put ideas out there into the American mind. It doesn't really matter if this is purely propaganda. It doesn't really matter that Edward Hunter is making these outrageous claims or introducing this word that doesn't make a lot of sense, and that the Chinese probably weren't using the way that he was using it, because we were super afraid of communism. And this was a really an excuse that made a lot of sense to us. Right? Like, this is how bad things can happen. And also J. Edgar Hoover had earlier published a book talking about the quote unquote, communist thought control machine. So this was in the air also, Rebecca, by the way, just for our listeners, who's J. Edgar Hoover?
Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, he was the director of the FBI. And he, like, had files on all sorts of Americans. And he was, by all accounts, not a great guy.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. That's the I've.
Nick Capodice: Heard a lot of understatements in my day. Hoover being not a great guy. It's kind of up there.
Christina Phillips: I do think it is interesting worth acknowledging here that the use of saying that this is a Chinese word and that we have translated, have translated this from a Chinese word. There's a great deal of racism and this threat of invasion that is happening in this moment like that is like a very important context to that. And the idea that there is an infiltration within the United States of some foreign, scary nonwhite mind control, I think is like sort of wrapped around all of this.
Rebecca Lavoie: Right. I do think, though, that the Soviet Union became the I mean, granted, it was a huge, powerful country, but I also think they became sort of the symbol of the communist threat because to white Americans, they looked like them. And there had to be something wrong with people who believed in a philosophy that was anti-capitalist. There must be something wrong. They must have been programed. They must have been coerced or something. Because why would anybody not want to be like us?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. And I think that's a really an important point, this idea that like communism equals bad, full stop, no conversations about it. We are not going to even think about it. Just bad evil.
Rebecca Lavoie: And if people want to learn more about communism, we do have an episode on communism and fascism.
Nick Capodice: I believe it's socialism, communism, fascism.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. And that's one you should definitely listen to in the civics 101 catalog.
Hannah McCarthy: Absolutely. All right, so getting back to brainwashing, getting back to The Manchurian Candidate. So I mentioned American prisoners of war in Korea. I told you that many of those who survived POW camps returned home traumatized, but that not all of them did return home. And I'm not talking about those who died in captivity. Okay, so something unimaginable to the Cold War American mind happened during the Korean War, captured American soldiers started confessing falsely, according to the US government, to war crimes. So they told their captors they had poisoned Korean civilians with anthrax and plague. This absolutely horrified Americans back home. Even more horrifying, POWs also started petitioning the US government to end the war. Unimaginable, right? That can't be done. Yes! Gasp! And then finally, when the war came to an end and the surviving POWs were told they could go home, an American delegation comes to Korea and and is going to get those soldiers back home. 21 of them chose not to go back home. Any theories as to why?
Rebecca Lavoie: I mean, what did they say at the time? I mean, I have theories as to why that or, you know, kind of contemporary, but like, what do they say at the time?
Hannah McCarthy: At the time, it had to be brainwashing, right? It had to be. There's only one reason. Over time, these soldiers who did return home were evaluated by psychologists who were saying, these are not sleeper agents, these are not people who have been quote unquote brainwashed. This idea that they have basically been turned into puppets by Communist China, these are people who have been horribly traumatized. That is the explanation. And that is a very complex state to be within. That can mean that someone behaves in a way that you do not expect them to behave. But it was protracted. It was so much abuse over a very long period of time. But again, brainwashing worked better for us, propaganda wise, right? By the way, we were trying to invent brainwashing in the United States. We were trying to do this. We wanted it. Mkultra, the super illegal super secret OSS, and then CIA human experimentation program that did many terrible things to many people, was trying to invent mind control. They used a lot of tactics, including, you know, dosing people without their consent and interrogations and abuse. And they treated Americans differently than they treated other people who they experimented on. Of course, you know, if someone without your knowledge gives you like 20 times the quote unquote recommended dose of LSD and then interrogates you for four hours, something might happen to you, you know? Right. That wasn't the only thing that came out of MKUltra, although we did not invent mind control the way that we wanted to. Anyone have any ideas of what we started to figure out during the MKUltra program?
Christina Phillips: Torture.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Enhanced interrogation. And. Yeah, yeah. A lot of scholars agree that it was in the MKUltra program, that we figured out that abuse can maybe get us something that we want, even though a lot of people say torture does not actually work.
Nick Capodice: There are so many movies in the 70s with this sort of brainwashing thing. Yeah, I love it in those movies. It's a trope that it just like scares me to my absolute core. So when I see it, it means an awful lot to me. And I think it's cool and terrifying, you know?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Well, and again, for those listeners who are like, it is real. I'm not saying that torment toward coercion and control isn't real. I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying that experimenting on people and lying to people and all of that doesn't then change them. I'm just saying, if we think about the origins of the term brainwashing, I think it's important to note that brainwashing was a a more magical, impossible thing than the actual tactics used that the United States itself then started adopting toward manipulating people. Getting back to The Manchurian Candidate. You know, the story of soldiers who were successfully brainwashed by communists in a matter of days. Men who were it not for brainwashing, could never have betrayed their country. Because that's impossible. One man in particular, who is referred to as a quote unquote mechanism, a quote unquote weapon who can be triggered to murder even those he loves with a single phrase and a pack of cards.
Archive: Raymond Moylan to pass the time by playing a little solitaire.
Hannah McCarthy: This is something that in Cold War America was not beyond the realm of possibility. It was pretty reasonable, especially given what we've been told about brainwashing, given all of the anti-communist propaganda that we were consuming in the United States. The communists were and are real, and espionage and torture that was happening, and both sides were trying to create mind control. That's all true. So a movie wherein this, in fact, is the explanation for what happens to captured soldiers is totally on brand and totally believable. It makes a lot of sense. So do you remember that I told you that audiences in 1962 did not love this movie?
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.
Hannah McCarthy: So we don't know why exactly. It did not make Bank basically when it was released. Right? It just it was not widely loved. There were some positive reviews, some negative reviews, but it was just generally what you would call a flop. You know, it also, it is a movie about politics and propaganda and influence and showing the United States in a state of panic to a United States that was still in a state of panic. I think it's not dissimilar from, for example. You know, maybe not all of us want to watch a movie about pandemics during a pandemic. That kind of thing. Right. And some of us do. But, you know, some of us, maybe not so much. I could have had something to do with that. That is me speculating. It was banned in certain communist controlled Eastern European countries because of its depiction of communists. It depicts the assassination of a political figure. Yes. So United Artists, the company that produced it, was worried that the movie might inspire a real life copycat. And Frank Sinatra reportedly asked his buddy, President John F Kennedy, for approval before the movie was released. They were, you know, real life friends. And apparently Kennedy was like, yeah, I love this movie. This is great.
Rebecca Lavoie: Wow. But John F Kennedy was, as far as we know, more than three years younger than his mother. Right? Like the actor who plays Raymond Shaw and Angela Lansbury, real life were three years apart.
Hannah McCarthy: That's baffling to me.
Hannah McCarthy: Wow.
Rebecca Lavoie: Frank Sinatra is great in this movie. I just want to defend Old Blue Eyes for a second. He is so good in this movie. He has top billing in the movie, which is funny. I'm sure that was because of the contractual studio system. Or maybe somebody had a horse head left in their bed or whatever. He is super duper good in this, even though it has all the weird tropes of like, there's like some 30s movie tropes in it, like him meeting the lady on the train and then instantly falling in love kind of situation.
Archive: Are you married?
Archive: No.
Archive: You know.
Rebecca Lavoie: Frank Sinatra's great. I stand by it. Stand by it.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. I love him so much in this movie. He's so humble and he is a wreck. He's a disaster.
Archive: We're busting up the joint. We're tearing out all the wires. We're busting it up so good. All the Queen's horses and all the Queen's men. Will never put old Raymond back together again. You don't work anymore. That's an order.
Christina Phillips: I do think it's funny. I was taking like stray notes in this and so many times I was like, is this not a conflict of interest? Also like, it seems like he is the only person and they're just like, yeah, you can try that. You can try that. Frank Sinatra's character, I don't know, it was such a strange like depiction of what existed as like, intelligence in those days because it's almost absent bureaucracy that it's very much like, I don't know, why don't you try this? And like, we have this little group and we're bringing in the FBI and the CIA like it. Just if you imagine the way those things look now, it's so bureaucratic.
Nick Capodice: I love that, like, the top intelligence agency in the world is just just a bunch of guys sitting around smoking, coming up with ideas.
Christina Phillips: Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: A year after The Manchurian Candidate premiered, President John F Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, a man named John Logan wrote a book called Oswald's Trigger Films, and he concluded that Oswald, who by the way, had lived in the Soviet Union for three years and was married to a Russian woman. I'm just saying had almost definitely seen The Manchurian Candidate. Robert Condon, the guy who wrote the book The Manchurian Candidate, got a call from a reporter as soon as JFK was assassinated asking if he felt responsible for the assassination. And Condon was like, no. And Condon's reasoning was, why would any assassin imitate that guy in that movie, someone who's controlled by communist handlers? Why would any American want to be that right? I read an article that was interesting that was like, perhaps we shouldn't be asking whether or not Oswald was inspired by The Manchurian Candidate, but whether or not Oswald's handlers were inspired by The Manchurian Candidate.
Rebecca Lavoie: So interesting. That's really interesting. I really want the sequel, which is the Angela Lansbury character backstory. Like, how did she become compromised? Right?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. And again, this is spoilery enough, but like, the spoiler about Angela Lansbury is, of course, that she was working for the communists. So she's going to try to facilitate a communist takeover of the United States. But then really, what she's going to do is be the one in charge.
Rebecca Lavoie: Power. Power. It's all about power.
Nick Capodice: That's what I love, too, is that power is the ultimate enemy in this movie, and this notion of a character who will do anything against their country, against America, of all places, just to get power. That is an interesting message, specifically one for the paranoia loving audiences of the 60s and 70s.
Hannah McCarthy: Or of 2025.
Nick Capodice: Or of 2025. Yeah.
Christina Phillips: On that note, I think it is worth pointing out that the end of the Korean War, it was not successful. So the United States is coming back from a war that ended in armistice. We are sort of walking back with our tails between our legs, because general MacArthur had this mission of not just containing, but overthrowing communism in Korea and was ultimately unsuccessful. And so the idea that it's kind of a whiplash from World War two, which birthed this idea that we are a superpower, our next big conflict is one in which we failed essentially, to do anything more than reestablish a not so great system that we had created and then was not working with this 38th parallel and Russia implementing communism in US and implementing anti-communism like the United States is not exactly a super confident and super successful in this moment.
Hannah McCarthy: And I think it's also this like, how could we, the great preservers of democracy worldwide, not be having an incredible success in this new era where our former allies are all of a sudden having a completely different idea than our idea. I find this to be sort of chilling little factoid. John Frankenheimer, the director of this movie, was close friends with Robert F Kennedy, and he was the person who drove him to the Ambassador Hotel on the night he was assassinated.
Rebecca Lavoie: Wow.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm not saying there's any link at all. I'm just saying. World. Small world. World. Very, very strange. In 1972, Frank Sinatra bought the rights to this film. And then he pulled it from circulation in 74. And then it was rereleased to much acclaim in 1987 and 88. Nearly the end of the Cold War. Take that as you will. So here are my final thoughts on this movie, The Manchurian Candidate. I told you that I thought of it as a time capsule. It's like Cold War paranoia bottled up for our viewing pleasure. It is also clearly a fairly scathing liberal critique of McCarthyism, extremism, scapegoating the American political system broadly. In the end, it turns out that anti-communist propaganda is itself communist propaganda that widely broadcast lies are themselves brainwashing. Quote unquote. That power can be handed to whomever yells loudly enough at the most television cameras. And it also tells us that we shouldn't trust the one woman in the movie who controls men instead of doting on them, which I find pretty interesting because the other women don't. They love and Angela Lansbury is out for herself. But I think that the absolutism of the communists in this movie, the way they are portrayed, the way they are cast, the utter lack of humanity and machine like operations and way of thinking. That, to me, smacks of propaganda. Even if the movie is satire, which it is, I think it can be both satire and a bit of propaganda itself. The communists are barely people, right? They are archetypes. Meanwhile, Frank Sinatra, Nick, as you pointed out, is very much a person, right? He's sweating. He's shaking. He he can't hold literally hold his glass. Right. Doesn't he drop his glass at some point? Like he is such a fallible person. He is also a red blooded American because despite having been brainwashed, Frank Sinatra figures it out, wiggles out of it, and then he has to go to Laurence Harvey, who plays Raymond Shaw. Raymond Shaw is not a super likable character, even though everyone's brainwashed to say that he's great.
Archive: Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
Hannah McCarthy: To me, this is just me. I feel like we're meant to feel like he's not the red blooded American who can avoid communist control.
Rebecca Lavoie: Is that why he has a British accent? Is that why they cast a guy with a British accent in this role?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Why does he? I feel like I watched it with Nick and I asked you the same question. Like, why is he British?
Archive: I was like, there's some backstory.
Nick Capodice: Maybe Angela Lansbury's former husband was British and she.
Nick Capodice: Didn't say much in there. You just. Yeah, she just made something up. She's like, what's that word?
Nick Capodice: Mid-atlantic.
Rebecca Lavoie: In Star Wars, all of the Empire people were British. And, you know, everyone in the rebellion was American. Like, yeah, yeah, it's pretty wild.
Nick Capodice: I have an answer to it, Hannah. I know why. When he was a child, Angela Lansbury spoke like Mrs. Potts.
Speaker8: I'll be bubbling. I'll be brewing.
Hannah McCarthy: Taylor's all the time. I really think that this movie is both a very effective and often funny exploitation of the era in which it was made, and also very much a product of the era in which it was made.
Christina Phillips: If you go into this movie having no idea what communism is, you come out of this movie with no greater understanding of what communism is.
Nick Capodice: That's a great point.
Hannah McCarthy: That does it for this episode. Thank you all for listening. Thank you to Rebecca Lavoie, our executive producer. Thank you to Christina Phillips, our senior producer. Thank you to Nick Capodice, my co-host. Music in this episode is from Epidemic Sound. You can find everything we have ever made, including our episode on communism, fascism and propaganda at our website, civics101podcast.org. Civics 101 is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Rebecca Lavoie: Or is it?
Speaker24: Or is it? I showed up five minutes late, I don't know.
Rebecca Lavoie: Do you want to hear something related to this that I find hysterical? On General Hospital, there's a long going storyline that one of the Quartermaine kids who was heretofore unknown to the Quartermaines because he was like a secret twin that got spirited away or whatever, had been programed by Helena Cassadine to be an assassin, and the trigger to turn him on is a Queen of hearts.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh that's great.
Rebecca Lavoie: And now that character in the show, Drew Quartermaine, is a US senator.
Christina Phillips: Mhm.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh.
Rebecca Lavoie: Take that.
Hannah McCarthy: That's so good.