Robert Redford’s 9/11 Morality Play

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Front Page Magazine:

Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” is ostensibly about the Abraham Lincoln assassination trial. But many critics, including critical Washington Post reviewers, have discerned it’s actually about America’s supposedly unconstitutional overreaction to 9-11. Focusing on convicted assassination conspirator Mary Surratt, the first woman the U.S. Government ever hanged, the film portrays her as the mostly innocent victim of an over zealous War Secretary.

Actor Kevin Klein, ostensibly portraying the movie’s villain, War Secretary Edwin Stanton, but is excellent at actually playing a bearded version of a hyper-decisive Donald Rumsfeld. In Redford’s version of history, a Rumsfeldesque Stanton strong-arms a military tribunal, naturally headed by an actor who portrayed a corrupt, rapist judge on Law and Order, into wrongly convicting and executing Mrs. Surratt. At the start, the film shows a birds eye view of Civil War-era Washington, with the U.S. Capitol oddly next to and parallel to the White House. Anyone who has visited or even flown over the nation’s capital will be perplexed. But the cartoonish distortion metaphorically illustrates Redford’s larger mischaracterization of important American history to justify his political case against post-9-11 America.

Most historians, including Surratt’s latest biographer, agree that she was guilty of conspiracy. But Redford’s agenda requires transforming her into a semi-heroine who stoically endures martyrdom. And just as the Left often de-emphasizes the horror of 9-11 so as to emphasize their real concern, i.e. warrantless taps, renditions, Guantanamo, enhanced interrogations, and Abu Ghraib, so Redford deemphasizes the crime of Lincoln’s assassination so as to spotlight Mrs. Surratt’s plight.

Perhaps the context of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln could have been better set with a brief few extra scenes in the movie. One would have showed Booth anxiously listening to Lincoln’s famous speech by candle light from a White House window after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, when the President suggested voting rights for some southern blacks. Booth reportedly responded: “That means n–ger citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through!” Previously involved in Confederate espionage and plots to kidnap Lincoln, Booth suddenly shifted into an assassination plot. Lincoln was murdered directly because of his exertions on behalf of oppressed black Americans. Another scene might have shown the hundreds of blacks who gathered in the rain outside the White House after Lincoln’s death, weeping and mourning, realizing their greatest champion had fallen on their behalf.