Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

      Movies not only entertain, they instruct. Films influence our interpretation of a new event's significance and suggest our appropriate responses. In other words, films help to create the "slots" into which we mentally place new events, each slot calling for a different response. For instance, members of the Bush Administration were shocked by the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and quickly had to determine the attacks' significance and plan an appropriate response. Should the United States have interpreted the attack as an outrageous crime whose perpetrators must be found and prosecuted to the limits of the law or as an act of war that merited a military rather than a legal response? Was the attack more like the terrorist bombing of the federal  building in Oklahoma City or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? 
     Former President Clinton had interpreted the earlier 1993 attack on the World Trade Center as a horrendous crime, not an act of war.¹ There are indications that Secretary of State Colin Powell was, at first, also thinking "crime" rather than "war" after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.² Attending a conference of foreign ministers in Peru when he heard of the attacks, Powell told the assembled diplomats, "you can be sure that America will deal with this tragedy in a way that brings those responsible to justice."³ But, President Bush immediately interpreted the attack as an act of war.⁴ He later told reporter Bob Woodward that his first reaction  was that "[t]hey had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment  that we were going to war."⁵ This essay examines how images drawn from films might have influenced this "slotting" decision. 
     Just as there are "law" movies like To Kill A Mockingbird⁶ that suggest that the disciplined logic of law provides the best template for dealing with  social conflict, there are also "lawless" films that imply that law is 

incapable of handling certain problems and, therefore, suggest violence is  society's necessary recourse. This article will examine four such "lawless" films: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Godfather Parts I and II, and Dirty Harry.⁷ I argue that these films present a negative view of the  law, identifying it with weakness, femininity, corruption, and cold impersonality. The weakness of the law requires reliance on the efficacy of violence. And, since life imitates art just as art imitates life, perhaps this same preference for lawless violence influenced political decisions like the American response to 9/11. 

     John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a movie that is more popular with professors than mainstream audiences.⁸ When The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was originally released, the title song proved more popular than the film itself. It is easy to see why. Although it stars John Wayne, this is no "Monument Valley" John Ford Western. The film is shot almost entirely on sound sets and presents a rather unheroic picture of the Old and the New West. But it is also easy to see why commentators on the social function of law find the film so instructive since it presents important issues about the relation of law to violence as neatly as a good lecture. 
     The film revolves around the differing fates of five characters who meet in  the mythical town of Shinbone during that golden age before civilization (mostly the railroad) turned the desert into a garden. Each of the five characters incarnates a value. The first is Liberty Valance himself, played by Lee Marvin with bravura menace. Valance represents dishonorable, lawless violence. He believes in the right of the powerful to rule the weak and the superiority of the gun over the law. The second character is the cowardly town marshall Link Appleyard (Andy Devine). Appleyard is more interested in filling his ample stomach rather than enforcing the rule of law in Shinbone. Appleyard symbolizes the fragility of legal institutions in the Old West where justice comes out of the barrel of a gun, not out of the pages of a law book. The third is young attorney Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) who was brutally beaten by Valance when he attempted to intervene during Valance's robbery of a stage coach to protect a woman passenger. Stoddard is the representative of the new 

legal order that will eventually replace Valance and the violent  society he represents. The fourth is a small ranch owner, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who represents honorable lawless violence. Ironically, Doniphon is  responsible for the victory of Stoddard's law over Valance's violence. Wayne portrays Doniphon as a natural aristocrat who craves peace and domesticity, but realizes that sometimes the Liberty Valances of this world can only be  stopped by righteous violence. The fifth character is the young marriageable Hallie (Vera Miles) who begins the movie as Doniphon's reluctant sweetheart and ends it as Stoddard's depressed wife. Hallie represents the drive towards "civilization": churches, schools, gardens, and other amenities we identify with a feminine culture. 
     Doniphon rescues Stoddard after his beating by Valance and brings him to the local eatery where Hallie lives with her parents. The family adopts Stoddard who vows to bring Valance to justice by means of the law, not the gun. Hallie  eventually chooses the lawyer Stoddard over the rancher Doniphon as a proper mate. She intuitively sees Stoddard, the lawyer, as the future of the West. At first, Stoddard refuses the traditional resort to violence, preferring to prosecute Valance rather than killhim. But eventually, Stoddard is forced to admit the gun is still the only reliable source of justice in Shinbone and  finally faces Valance in a main street gun duel. To everyone's surprise, Stoddard beats Valance, shooting him dead. His notoriety as the man who shot Liberty Valance catapults him into a successful political career, capped with  his election to the United States Senate. Only he and Tom Doniphon know that it was actually Doniphon who (at the request of Hallie) killed Valance with a  rifle shot from a concealed location in order to save Hallie's beloved from certain death. 
     The film's framing story focuses on the return of the famous Senator Stoddard and his wife Hallie to Shinbone years later for the burial of the now forgotten Tom Doniphon, a man who was displaced just as surely as Liberty Valance by the civilization Stoddard brought to Shinbone. The Shinbone that Stoddard returns to, however, is in many ways a less attractive place than its raucous predecessor. The railroad has arrived and there are plenty of churches, but there is no warm communal feeling that marked the frontier cow town. Somehow "progress" seems to have let Shinbone down. 
     How does the film represent law? First, we see its weakness not only in the  cowardice of Luke Appleyard, but also in the manner Stewart portrays the lawyer, Stoddard. Stoddard is usually supine before the upright presence of gunmen Valance and Doniphon. Not only was Stoddard beaten senseless by Valance during the robbery, but he would have been killed by Valance in the gunfight had it not been for Doniphon's covert intervention. 

The movie portrays law as not just weak, but as feminine as well. Lawman Appleyard has a squeaky  voice and Stoddard's voice tends to break like a teenager's. Stoddard is also  called dismissive nicknames ("Dude" from Valance and "Pilgrim" from Doniphon)  and he spends a lot of screen time washing dishes; he even appears for the  gunfight wearing an apron. 
     Stoddard also represents the victory of civilization. Hallie chooses him  over Doniphon not because he loves her more (she's always Tom's girl to  Stoddard until the rancher renounces his suit), but because she is seduced by  the hope of a more "civilized" life. Doniphon brings her a cactus rose, but Stoddard teaches her to read and preaches about the values of law and democracy. Even though Stoddard's democracy is more repressive (no smoking, drinking, or bad grammar in Stoddard's Shinbone), she chooses it over Doniphon's small ranch. Nevertheless, the eventual triumph of Stoddard's law is not the product of his idealistic words, but of Doniphon's righteous  violence. The clear message is that law is created from violence.⁹ This is true not only in a physical sense (it was Donipon who ambushed Valance), but more importantly, in a symbolic sense because it was Stoddard's unearned fame as the man who shot Liberty Valance rather than his espousal of legal  principles that led to his success as a politician. 
     Yet by the end of the film, Hallie appears to doubt her choice. The civilization that progresshas brought to Shinbone proves to be as much of a burden as a blessing. No one even remembers Valance, Doniphon, or Appleyard. Instead of the warm, welcoming, young town Stoddard found when he came to Shinbone, we now find a social alienation and crass commercialism that permits the undertaker to sell the boots from Doniphon's corpse. Cold impersonality has replaced the warm, communal feeling. Hallie looks back fondly on the days  of Doniphon's cactus rose. 
     The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance shows that the rule of law is born of violence. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather gives us a different slant; law is always too weak to subdue violence.¹⁰ It is as if Liberty Valance had won after all. The movie's opening scene takes place in the darkly lit den  where Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) receives various supplicants. The first is an Italian-American undertaker whose daughter has been beaten by two  young toughs. A New York court gave the young men suspended sentences; now the undertaker comes to the Godfather in search of justice. Once proper obeisance  is shown, the Don agrees to use his thugs to even the score. The second  visitor is a baker whose future son-in-law is 

about to be deported; he asks the Don to use his political connections to save the boy and the marriage. The Don tells his own lawyer Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) to have a  non-Italian politician on the family payroll to fix it. So much for the rule of law. The next petitioner is one of the Don's godchildren, a Sinatra-like crooner who wants help in getting a starring role in an upcoming Hollywood  movie. The Don dispatches Hagen to visit the film's director to make him an offer he can't refuse. When the director refuses Hagen's elaborately polite request for a favor, he arranges to have the director's prize race horse killed and the severed head placed in the director's bed. That is a negotiation tactic seldom taught in law school, but it works. The crooner gets the part. 
     The movie takes place in a universe completely without effective legal sanctions. There are a myriad of extra-legal executions, but not one successful prosecution. The one character clearly identified with the law is a New York police captain named McCluskey, a brutal sadist on the payroll of  another mafia family. McCluskey not only cooperates in a conspiracy to murder  the Don, but also acts as a private bodyguard to his mafia boss. Comparing  McCluskey to Luke Appleyard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we find that  while McCluskey is more brutal and corrupt than Appleyard, he is no more effective in stopping extra-legal violence. The Don's son, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) guns him down half-way through the movie. 
     If law is no more than a business expense to mafia chieftains like Vito and Michael Corleone, what forces do motivate and constrain their behavior in this lawless society? One potential force is "greed." All of the main characters are fond of repeating the mantra "it's only business" to explain their adventures in murder and mayhem. David Papke has pointed out that one of Coppola's intended themes in the Godfather trilogy was to show that the mafia  is just a microcosm of American capitalism.¹¹ The "greed" hypothesis for motivation, however, is rarely persuasive. Certainly it does not explain the actions of the Don's emotional son Sonny (James Caan) who is quick to take  revenge on any perceived disrespect to the family's honor. Although, it is  Sonny's lack of self-discipline that leads to his own bloody end, "greed" does not adequately explain the actions of Sonny's more phlegmatic younger brother, Michael. Michael believes in business, but this does not explain the murder of his sister's husband in The Godfather or his own brother Fredo in The Godfather II. Payback, not profit, is the dominant motive in each case. 

If the motivating force is not "business" or "greed," maybe the motivating force is "family." When the mafia dons are not talking "business,"  they are extolling the virtues of family. Every one of Vito and Michael  Corleone's violent actions are explicitly justified by the need to protect  family. Ultimately, this explanation is no more convincing than the "greed" hypothesis. We simply cannot take Michael seriously as a protector of family values when we recite his deeds: the murder of his wife's husband, the murder  of his own brother, and the cruel isolation of his children from their mother. 
     All these actions are not fueled by loyalty to family, but by the demands of honor. Coppola has created a hierarchal world where powerful men demand obedience from the weak. If the necessary respect is to be maintained, all affronts to one's honor must be avenged, and avenge them Michael does. The  brother-in-law, the brother, and the wife all shared one fault; they had disrespected Michael or the family in one way or another, and each is made to pay. 
     At the end of The Godfather II Michael is alone; only his sister Connie, who has been reduced to the role of nanny to his motherless children, and his stepbrother Tom Hagen, who Michael takes care to humiliate, remain. Tom (who is a lawyer) asks him at the end of the movie whether he has to "wipe everyone out." Michael replies, "I don't feel I have to wipe everyone out, just my enemies,"¹² meaning anyone who challenges his patriarchal authority. That leaves Michael alone with only his honor to console him. 
     How do the portrayals of law and lawlessness in The Godfather compare and contrast with those in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? Similar to Liberty Valance, the "law" that exists in The Godfather is weak and corrupt. The parallels in the portrayal of lawlessness are more instructive. Lawlessness is even more deadly in The Godfather than in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Valance would have been no match for the cunning Michael Corleone. There is also little doubt that in both films violence is the province of men. Certain  male values are essential to success: physical courage, cunning, and self-discipline. As the Don instructs Michael, "[w]omen and children can be careless, but not men." In contrast to Liberty Valance where the "feminine" values of law and civilization eventually win the day, women are just dynasty breeders in The Godfather. 
     Despite the similarities between the two movies there are some differences.  In Liberty Valance, lawlessness is hot and personal; Valance loves to blow  people away. Whereas in The Godfather, Michael's manner 

is cold and corporate; that is his advantage over people like his brother Sonny. But if his style is cold, his violence is still quite personal. Michael feels that personal affronts are necessary to avenge. None of this impersonality is ascribed to the rule of law. 
     Liberty Valance tells the story of the rule of law's violent birth. The Godfather is a case study in the failure of the mature rule of law; the Corleones have established their own private violent government ordered by the demands of patriarchal honor. Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, on the other hand,  gives us a third view of the law/lawlessness relationship. In this movie lawlessness has infected the rule of law itself, blurring the distinction between legal and lawless violence. 
     Dirty Harry tells the story of how maverick police detective Harry Callahan  (Clint Eastwood) saves the Bay Area from a violent sociopathic serial killer called Scorpio.¹³ Harry makes it clear that he is engaged in a "dirty  war" with incarnate evil that justifies any effective method to rid the Bay Area of this criminal. Cruising through the red light district, he comments to his partner, "I'd like to put a net over the whole bunch of them."¹⁴ He finally captures the perpetrator with a gun and elicits a confession from him  by means of torture. Harry feels he's done a good day's work, but his view is  not shared by the film's representative of the rule of law, District Attorney William T. Rothko (Josef Summer). Rothko is not cowardly like Link Appleyard in Liberty Valance or corrupt like Captain McCluskey inThe Godfather. Yet, he  is just as ineffective as either of the other two legal icons. Rothko is a  captive of the rule of law, so constricted by procedural requirements that he  has no time or energy to protect honest citizens. Callahan is called to the District Attorney's office after the killer's arrest expecting an expression of gratitude. Instead, Rothko informs him that the suspect will be set free because Callahan has not followed the U.S. Supreme Court's technical rules for arresting alleged wrongdoers. Rothko pompously reminds Callahan that "the defendant has rights." The audience instinctively feels he is not talking about rights, but rules that must slavishly be followed irrespective of  context. Callahan replies that he is more interested in the rights of the women the defendant has already killed and the others he will kill when  released. Rothko is unmoved; Callahan has not obeyed the law, to which Harry replies "[t]hen the law is crazy."¹⁵ The audience is likely to agree. 
     Law as represented by Rothko is perceived as ineffective and impersonal, a tired bureaucracy that has given up on its mission to secure 

justice.  Harry Callahan in contrast is both hot and deadly effective in his pursuit of  justice as the killer discovers at the end of the film; he is the epitome of macho. Women in the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were the guardians of  civilized values. And, in The Godfather they at least were revered as wives and mothers, but they don't appear in Dirty Harry except as victims. 
     Unlike Rothko, Harry takes evil personally. It is a fight to the death. He knows that criminal suspects are scum and he can only hope that they will "make his day" by provoking his deadly wrath. Once you know that your adversary is not only guilty, but evil, then the procedural obstacles for convicting criminals seem "crazy." To Harry, Scorpio deserves not to be  prosecuted, but exterminated. There is no room for doubt or remorse in Harry Callahan's mind. He knows that when the law is too rule-bound to obtain  justice, it is natural that society call on the legal vigilante to get the job done. What Harry does not realize is that a legal vigilante is more dangerous  than a criminal because there is no legal check on his violence. A lawless  state has more capacity for violence than a hundred Don Corleones. II. Movies and Their Effect on Society 
     The fact that there are movies that portray the law as weak and corrupt does not prove that these films have any "slotting" effect on public policy decisions like those of President Bush after 9/11.¹⁶ To approach this  larger question, we first have to determine exactly how images in popular culture interact with society. Richard Slotkin's analysis is pertinent:  "[Reciprocity characterizes the functional relation between cultural constructions and 'material' experience . . . our myth/ideological systems  shape our apprehension and provide the terms for our response to reality and in the event-in the process of actual use-are themselves revised and transformed."¹⁷ In simpler language, these images drawn from popular culture both inform our perceptions of new events and help shape our list of possible responses to them. This is what I call the slotting function of popular culture. Slotting can work in two ways as demonstrated in the official response to the attacks on the World Trade Center. President Bush and his counselors might have reached the "war" decision completely independent of the influence of any movie images, but they still decided 

to explain the decision in terms that the public would more easily understand. Or, perhaps President Bush and his entourage's ingestion of movie images over the span of  their lives might have influenced how they perceived and responded to the 9/11 attack. 
     In his classic study of how popular culture both reflects and motivates social action, Slotkin also describes a particular popular mythology that correlates neatly with how President Bush actually made the decision for war.¹⁸ He calls it the "savage war" metaphor.¹⁹ Throughout the twentieth  century, American popular culture has often relied upon the metaphor of a savage war to mediate the tensions between America's democratic ideology and its imperial destiny. The savage war metaphor can be unpacked to show several  related components. First, it always involves a battle to the death between two races, one primitive and one civilized. Usually it is a battle between the "civilized" white settlers and the "primitive" red Indians.²⁰ Secondly, the battle is provoked by an atrocity committed by the primitive race. The  primitives commit a massacre or make captives of civilized innocents, usually  women or children. This savage act demonstrates that the group is beyond the moral pale, evil incarnate, and therefore no attempt at compromise is acceptable. Once begun, the battle is to the death so no quarter can be given.²¹ Thirdly, the primitive race initially has the advantage over its  civilized foe for two related reasons. It retains a ruthless capacity for violence that has been drained out of its civilized foe and also is not  hampered in its tactics by civilized codes of behavior, like law, that impede  effective action.²²
     The tide of battle only turns when the civilized race turns to "the  [man who know[s] Indians."²³ This hero bridges the cultural gap by combining the civilized virtues of his race with the primitive capacity for lawless violence of his foes. The denouement is a victory for the civilized race that  has been spiritually and morally regenerated by its symbolic infusion of primitive energy.²⁴
     It is easy to see, as Slotkin does, Dirty Harry as a 1970's urban variant on the "savage war" theme.²⁵ There is a war between the "good" people of San Francisco and the "evil" Scorpio. The battle begins with Scorpio's 

sadistic kidnapping and killing of young women. District Attorney Rothko represents how the civilized society is unfairly disadvantaged in this war, both because of irrational legal codes of behavior (such as Supreme Court decisions requiring respect for suspect rights) and a morally flabby mindset that refuses to engage the enemy on his own terms. Harry Callahan is clearly "the man who knows Indians." He not only acts to further the civilized goal of protecting the innocent, but he has no qualms about using violent or illegal tactics to achieve success. 
     When I read Bush at War, Bob Woodward's insider account of how President  Bush and his colleagues reacted to the 9/11 attacks, I noted striking parallels between actual events and the "savage war" narrative.²⁶ First,  we have the "atrocity," the massacre of nearly three thousand innocents in the World Trade Center. The lines are drawn between the opposing groups in stark terms, not of race, but of ethnicity and religion. In an early meeting after 9/11 with Congressional leaders, President Bush described the terrorists as follows: "They hate Christianity. They hate Judaism. They hate everything that is not them."²⁷ Secretary of State Powell soon expanded the description of what the terrorists attacked to include civilization itself: "This is not just an attack against America, this is an attack against civilization and an  attack against democracy."²⁸ President Bush topped Secretary of State  Powell when, in a talk at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., he framed the war in simple terms of "good" versus "evil": "But our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."²⁹ The attackers were clearly beyond the moral pale, candidates for extinction, not prosecution. 
     President Bush also spoke of how the former Clinton Administration had shown itself as morally flabby when confronted with earlier terrorist attacks. Consider these comments by President Bush about Clinton's decision to launch a cruise missile in response to the embassy bombings in 1998: The antiseptic notion of launching a cruise missile into some guy's, you know, tent, really is a joke . . . I mean, people viewed that as the impotent  America. . . . a flaccid, you know, kind of technologically competent but not  very tough country that was willing to launch a cruise missile out of a submarine and that'd be it. 

I do believe there is the image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we're almost hedonistic, that we don't have values, and that when struck, we wouldn't fight back.³⁰
     Besides the moral flabbiness, the Bush Administration was also upset about the bureaucratic legal restraints on effective action. CIA director George  Tenet complained that in the pre 9/11 era his agency had been "lawyered to  death."³¹ After the 9/11 attack, Tenet felt that "[there can be no bureaucratic impediments to success. All the rules have changed."³² President Bush agreed: "I had to show the American people the resolve of a  commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win. No yielding.  No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death, that we're after 'em."³³
     In the savage war myth, this is where the "the man who knows Indians"  appears; the bold hero who can give the primitives a dose of their own medicine. CIA Director Tenet seemed ready to play the part. Here is how  Woodward summarizes Tenet's proposal: At the heart of the proposal was a recommendation that the president give  what Tenet labeled 'exceptional authorities' to the CIA to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rest of the world. He wanted a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation. The current process involved  too much time, lawyering, reviews and debate. The CIA needed new, robust authority to operate without restraint. Tenet also wanted encouragement from the president to take risks.³⁴
     Specifically, he wanted the CIA to use the full range of covert instruments, including deadly force. He also wanted to financially support key foreign intelligence services to expand the CIA's reach. Tenet warned President Bush that some of these groups had dreadful human rights records with reputations for using torture to obtain confessions.³⁵ Woodward reports: "Bush said he understood the risks."³⁶ Perhaps CIA operative Cofer Black 

best summarized the new virile attitude: "We're going to kill them. . . . We're  going to put their heads on sticks."³⁷
     Let me add a caveat. To draw parallels between the savage war myth and the American response to 9/11 does not prove there is a causal connection. It might just be coincidence. Also, even if there is a causal connection, that alone does not prove that the 9/11 decision was improper. It may be that the "savage war" myth reflects certain truths that we ignore at our peril. But  then again, the myth might instead just be a story of victimization we tell ourselves to project our own violent tendencies on a dehumanized enemy, thus continuing the violent cycle of attack and reprisal that will end in disaster  for both sides. 
     We can also see parallels between the "lawless" theme in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the foreign policy views of another well-regarded author in the Bush Administration, neoconservative Robert Kagan. In a well-publicized article, Kagan sets out the dilemma facing the United States at the opening of the twenty-first century: On the all-important question of power-the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power-American and European perspectives are  diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of  Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international  laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.³⁸
     We see here an abstract gloss on the basic problem of governance in Shinbone.  We have the idealistic apologists for "laws and rules" (Stoddard and the Europeans) who demean the use of force confronted by the more realistic  pragmatists (Tom Doniphon and the United States) who know that in the long run only violence rules effectively, especially in the face of evil (Liberty Valance and Osama Bin Laden). 
     Kagan does not ridicule the European goal of a state based on the rule of law; he applauds it. He points out that this "paradise" is only possible 

because of the United State's military might, a might that the United States is willing to use outside the rules of international law to eliminate the enemies of law like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. So we are left with a  paradox; in order to defend law, America must occasionally reject it: What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter this paradise itself. It  mans the wall, but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams, and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others.³⁹
     This parallels the tragic fate of Tom Doniphon, the man of honorable violence  who made the new paradise of Shinbone possible, but who is unable to reap the  benefits of his work.⁴⁰ Once again, as in art and in life, the rule of law is born out of the muzzle of a gun. 
     The language of The Godfather echoes the language the Bush Administration employs towards enemies like Osama bin Laden. Recall the scene in The Godfather II where Tom Hayden asks Michael Corleone whether he has to "wipe out everybody;" Michael replies "only my enemies."⁴¹ This sense of  personal vendetta also pervades Bob Woodward's account of the White House reaction to 9/11. Consider this statement by President Bush to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld: "Tell the Afghans to round up al Qaeda. . . . Let's see them, or we'll hit them hard. We're going to hurt them bad so that everyone in the world sees, don't deal with bin Laden."⁴² Or consider President Bush's comments to Woodward about how he dealt with foreign leaders: "These guys were watching my every move. And it's very important for them to come in  this Oval Office, which they do, on a regular basis, and me look them in the eye and say, 'You're either with us or you're against us."'⁴³ Or listen to Woodward indirectly quoting Colin Powell's recollection of one briefing: "Powell, for one, saw that Bush was tired of rhetoric. The president wanted to kill somebody."⁴⁴ Or consider President Bush's famous response to a question 

whether he wanted bin Laden dead, "There's an old poster out  West, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted Dead or Alive."'45
     Perhaps following up on the President's "Dead or Alive" comment, the FBI  prepared for publicity purposes a "22 Most Wanted" List of al Qaeda leaders. Woodward tells us that President Bush went even further; he had a customized list made for his own use: Bush took a classified version for himself that had photos, brief biographies and personality sketches of the 22 men. When he returned to his desk in the Oval Office, he slipped the list of names and faces into a drawer, ready at hand, his own personal scorecard for the war.⁴⁶
     Every time one of the twenty-two was reported killed, President Bush would  "put a big 'X' through the photo."⁴⁷ It's hard to resist the conclusion that when the President prepared his own "death list," he had gone beyond the  bounds of national defense to enter into Michael Corleone's world of masculine honor. 

1. See Janet Cawley, 4 Guilty in Trade Center Blast, CHIC. TRIB., March 5, 1994, at 1A (stating, after the conviction of the four Muslim extremists involved in the attack, that "I think the signal should go out across the world that anyone who seeks to come to this country to practice terrorism will have the full weight of law enforcement authorities against them, and we will  do our best to crack the cases and to bring them to justice, just as they have today"). 

2. BOB WOODWARD, BUSH AT WAR 10 (2002). 

3. Id. 

4. Id. at 15. 

5. Id. 

6. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (Universal Pictures 1962). 

7. DIRTY HARRY (Warner Bros. 1971); THE GODFATHER (Paramount Pictures  1972) [hereinafter Godfather]; THE GODFATHER PART II (Paramount Pictures 1974) [hereinafter GODFATHER PART II]; THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (Paramount Pictures 1962) [hereinafter LIBERTY VALANCE]. 

8. LIBERTY VALANCE, supra note 7. 

9. For an excellent essay discussing the film's ideology and necessity for violence see Cheyney Ryan, Print the Legend: Violence and Recognition in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in LEGAL REELISM: MOVIES AS LEGAL TEXTS 23 (John Denvir ed., 1996). 

10. GODFATHER, supra note 7. 

11. See David Ray Papke, Myth and Meaning: Francis Ford Coppola and Popular Response to the Godfather Trilogy, in LEGAL REELISM: MOVIES AS LEGAL TEXTS 1, 3 (John Denvir ed., 1996) (discussing how American myths help viewers to find meaning in films). 

12. GODFATHER PART II, supra note 7. 

13. DIRTY HARRY, supra note 7. 

14. Id. 

15. Id. 

16. See John Denvir, What Movies Can Teach Law Students, in LAW AND POPULAR CULTURE (Michael Freeman ed.) (forthcoming 2004). 

17. RICHARD SLOTKIN, GUNFIGHTER NATION: THE MYTH OF THE FRONTIER IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA 24 (1992). 

18. Id. 

19. Id. at 11. 

20. Id. at 12. 

21. Id. at 12, 113. 

22. See id. at 94-95 (noting that for a hero in a "savage war" to survive, "taboos and moral prohibitions that limit the use of force within a civil society" must be abandoned). 

23. Id. at 14. 

24. Id. 

25. Id. at 633-34. 

26. WOODWARD, supra note 2. 

27. Id. at 45. 

28. Id. at 65. 

29. Id. at 67. 

30. Id. at 38. 

31. Id. at 7. 

32. Id. at 93. 

33. Id. at 96. 

34. Id. at 76. 

35. Id. at 77. 

36. Id. 

37. Id. at 103. 

38. Robert Kagan, Power and Weakness, 113 POLICY REV. 3 (June 2002), available at http://www.policyreview.org./. 

39. Id. 

40. There is also a clear parallel with another character created by Ford and Wayne, Ethan Edwards of "The Searchers." THE SEARCHERS (Warner Bros. 1956). 

41. GODFATHER PART II, supra note 7. 

42. WOODWARD, supra note 2, at 63. 

43. Id. at 96. 

44. Id. at 53. 

45. Id. at 100. 

46. Id. at 224. 

47. Id. at 316.