Flash Points USA - America At War - Jean Folkerts
Flash Points USA - America At War - Jean Folkerts
Flash Points USA America At War - Jean Folkerts Interview (raw footage from interview with Jean Folkerts, a Professor of Media History at GWU, George Washington University) 01.26.00 Jean Folkerts says "It's very difficult to mount a war, it is very difficult to sustain a war and that is the fact that it is so public. If you go back to WWII, we were bombing Tokyo and children and women and men and everyone was dying, it was just not that reported. There's more strength in some ways when the public doesn't know what's happening in terms of sustainability, that doesn't mean that it should be that way or it's right or wrong, it's just that it's more sustainable, and we could argue that it is also harder to maintain private negotiation among countries because everything is so public today." Folkerts mentions that the whole attitude of the media towards war had changed after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, that the press felt that it had been betrayed. 01.28.44 Folkerts says that "If the atrocities in the prison in Baghdad were not public, if we did not know about them, they would not be having a negative impact on our understanding of the war, it's having a negative impact. Now, that's not to say that those should not be made public, but it makes it more difficult for a commander in chief to sustain public support of a war." 01.29.44 Jean Folkerts says "I think you can't be a great President without something to remember you by. So you have a president who operates in a time in which there is no war, then something else significant has to happen through which you are remembered. So if you don't have a great war, you need a great cause or a great historical event or a great personality, something that carries you into the minds of the generations that follow you." Continues "In very few circumstances does war really carry you in the positive hearts and minds of the people who follow you. It does in FDR's case, because of the known atrocities of Hitler and the feeling of had we not gone to war the landscape of the world might be very different today."