Steven Spielberg was never much of a radical. While Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now and even George Lucas attacked the Vietnam war with Star Wars, the nervy new Hollywood hotshot was more interested in moviemaking’s toys than its politics. In Peter Biskind’s bestselling book of Tinseltown gossip, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the actor Kit Carson remembers running into Spielberg at a party when the tumult of an eventful 1968 presidential campaign was at fever pitch. “Everybody was up,” Carson remembered. “The revolution was about to happen.” All the young director wanted to talk about was how to get a shot while throwing a camera off a roof.
In the end, it took him 40 years to produce his own broadside against the US foreign policy of his youth. In uncharacteristically political style, he spent most of it drawing parallels to the then current resident of the White House.
