Seven Days in May imagines a four-star general nearly toppling an American president. It gets filed with the era’s paranoid thrillers, but its threat is not the Cold War’s usual one. There are no communist infiltrators, no Manchurian brainwashing. The danger is a hyper-nationalist militarist in uniform convinced the elected government is selling the country out. We recorded in mid-November, at the height of the ICE crackdowns and a moment when the most radical Trumpists seemed to be laying groundwork for some kind of martial law. Returning guest Paul Adlerstein, the historian at Colorado College, helps us sit with the film without forcing it to predict our present. (Things have since stalled out short of the midterms. We hope.)
That makes the film almost a photographic negative of our moment. In 1964, the generals were imagined as the war-hungry ones and the civilians did the moderating, the world of Truman against MacArthur and Kennedy against Curtis LeMay. Burt Lancaster’s Scott, modeled on LeMay and the right-wing general Edwin Walker whom Kennedy eased out of the Army, is the hawk the Constitution has to survive. Today the polarity is reversed. The risk is not a general seizing the state but a far-right civilian leadership, a Trump and a Hegseth, trying to capture a relatively professional officer corps. We work through the theories of civil-military relations this raises, and what the preferable move for the brass or enlisted would even be.
The film’s quiet heart is President Lyman’s late speech, where he insists the real enemy is not Scott but an age. The nuclear age, in which no one feels they have any agency anymore. That sends us to Dwight Macdonald and the Politics circle, who spent the 1940s on this nexus of total war, mass death, and lost agency, and to Simone Weil on force. We close on a strange fact: John F. Kennedy himself wanted this movie made.
Seven Days In May is available to stream for free on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may
Further Reading/Listening
Paul Adlerstein’s faculty page (Colorado College)
No Globalization Without Representation by Paul Adlerstein
Bang-Bang’s Under Fire episode w/ Paul (also scored by Jerry Goldsmith)
“The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See”
“The Responsibility of Peoples” by Dwight Macdonald
The Root Is Man by Dwight Macdonald
“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” by Simone Weil
Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle by Gregory D. Sumner
Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen (not a friend of the pod)
Teaser from the Episode
Seven Days in May Trailer
