America Guarded By A Nest of WASPS

Rating: 5/10 (31 December 2006)

I came away from The Good Shepherd terribly disappointed. A really talented cast was very wasted in this fictional retelling of over 20 years of American espionage.
The USA got into the spy game on a permanent basis real late. We had intelligence services during all of our Wars up to World War II. It was deemed something to be handled by the military up until then. Our attitude was best summed up by Henry L. Stimson who said that line about 'gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail.'
Stimson served in the cabinet of three American presidents and the last one, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a different view of espionage. Knowing that the USA would be entering World War II sooner or later he felt the need for this country to have an espionage agency, the equal and superior of what our friends and foes had. The man he selected was World War I hero and Congressional Medal of Honor winner, William J. Donovan. In previous films he's been portrayed by George Brent in The Fighting 69th and Joseph Crehan in O.S.S. That is General Sullivan who director Robert DeNiro portrays.
Donovan by all accounts did an outstanding job in organizing the Office of Strategic Services. But for some reason the OSS was disbanded after World War II. Bill Donovan ran afoul of Roosevelt's successor Harry S. Truman and there's lots of speculation what caused the rift. Truman's memoirs are silent on the issue.
Anyway from 1945 until 1947 when the Central Intelligence Agency was born, we had no espionage agency. Those were critical years and this country played a whole lot of catch up. Donovan aka Sullivan had nothing to do with the CIA, in fact was frozen out of the agency. A whole lot of his people joined it though, including our fictional protagonist Edward Wilson as played by Matt Damon. This is the most glaring factual error of The Good Shepherd.
Matt Damon is our WASP type protagonist who joins the OSS after graduation from Yale. He's a member of Skull and Bones, the elite fraternity of Yale and the OSS and CIA did in fact try to recruit among America's WASP first families on the theory that they had the most to lose if the country went down the toilet. Not true however that it was exclusively a WASP preserve.
The personal story is the best part. The demands of his job put an unbelievable strain on his marriage, one by the way that resulted from a pregnancy during a one night stand with Angelina Jolie.
Look for a good performance by William Hurt as Philip Allen aka Allen Dulles. The Dulles family God only knows has been accused of a lot of things, many of them true. No one ever accused them of being thieves however, the failure of the Bay of Pigs was enough reason for John F. Kennedy to demand Allen Dulles's resignation not some Swiss bank accounts.
In contrast to Hurt look also for a small role from Joe Pesci as the Italian Mafia guy who's lost big bucks when Castro took over the hotels and casinos. As I write this, a whole lot of American companies are ready to move back into Havana once Fidel Castro no longer fogs a mirror. Only it won't be the Joe Pescis who will lead them.
I don't know if anyone remembers, but shortly after 9/11 the U.S. government issued a clarion call for those who were gifted in Farsi, Arabic and all kinds of exotic languages. Just because the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union went out of business, didn't mean a happy ending. Our biggest intelligence failure was a basic one, the failure to perceive a new threat. We were still turning out experts in Russian and Chinese from our universities including the elite Ivy League ones like Yale. Only now are we turning out the experts needed for a new challenge. Again, playing catch up.
Matt Damon's self contained performance and a talented cast in support are reasons to see The Good Shepherd. Don't take a short cut and write any term papers based on this film.