War Crimes - TWW S3E6

Original airdate: November 7, 2001

Teleplay by: Aaron Sorkin (49)
Story by: Allison Abner (3)

Directed by: Alex Graves (6)

Synopsis

• A shooting at a church in Texas causes the President to ask Hoynes to travel there and support the administration's gun control stance, a move the Vice President sees as harmful to his future electoral chances. Leo and an old Air Force friend debate whether or not the United States should sign on with the UN war crimes court. Donna's secrecy about a personal item lands her in hot water with the Congressional investigation into the Bartlet campaign. Toby deals with trust issues with junior aides, CJ reconnects with a returning White House reporter, and Sam mulls over eliminating the penny.

"All wars are crimes."

This is a busy episode, and it all takes place during a single rainy October Sunday. Tying most of the storylines together, however, is the theme of the title - people do things outside the bounds of propriety when engaged in an existential struggle. A President sends his Vice President on an errand that could torpedo the VP's future electoral hopes; a White House staffer lies in a deposition during a congressional investigation; a communications chief considers scorched-earth tactics to deal with a press leak before trying a different tack.

Where to start? Let's start where the episode starts - there's been a shooting at a church in Abilene, Texas. A gunman fired at his estranged wife, wounding an innocent bystander. Another churchgoer pulled out his concealed weapon and fired back, striking not the gunman but a 9-year-old girl, who later dies. This leads us to a philosophical tete-a-tete between President Bartlet and Vice President Hoynes that begins with gun control, but runs far afield to strike at the very relationship between the two men.

While the President is preparing the face the press and address the death of the girl, he and Leo agree on sending Hoynes to Texas the next week to carry the administration's message of more restrictions on guns. This is a dangerous subject for the Texan Hoynes; he knows his constituency and voter base for an eventual Presidential run is built with hard-core gun rights advocates, and speaking out counter to those voters' views could cost him.

President: "You're a hero in Texas."

Hoynes: "I was a hero in Texas."

President: "Texans don't like that you have the courage of your convictions?"

Hoynes: "They're not my convictions. They're yours!"

President: "Oh, yeah, I forgot."

The President, though, knows he can get a double benefit by sending Hoynes - he'll get to promote his administration's gun control stance, and also weaken Hoynes as a way of taking revenge for the Vice President's early campaign trip to New Hampshire that led to the revelation of Bartlet's MS (17 People).

This entire face-to-face meeting is golden work by two good actors. We usually think of President Bartlet as a good-hearted, gregarious man who makes the tough decisions when he has to, but doesn't glory in it. Here we see the hardness behind the friendliness. After his relatively easygoing greeting with Hoynes - even offering him a beer! - when the Vice President questions the need of his going to Texas Bartlet's response is a steely-eyed "That's what Vice Presidents do."

The two continue to spar over guns and philosophy through the evening, until they finally come to a grudging realization that they each need the other:

President: "Not easy being my Vice President, is it?"

Hoynes: "No, sir."

President: "I wouldn't think so. (pause) But it's the only way you're gonna get the nomination. You know that, right? If I win."

Hoynes: "Yeah. And the only way you're gonna win, is if I'm on the ticket. You know that, don't you, sir?"

President: "Yeah. (pause, Hoynes starts to leave) You'll go to Texas?"

Hoynes: "I want a seat at the table."

President (pause): "Yeah." 

So Hoynes will take the hit, because the President asked him to, and because he needs the President to succeed now so that Hoynes can win later.

Speaking of Jed's MS troubles, the Congressional investigation into his campaign and the coverup of his health continues. It's Donna's turn to talk to the investigators and give her deposition on this Sunday. It shouldn't be a big deal - the committee is mainly checking on Donna's work gathering the files and paperwork to answer the investigation - but she ends up face to face with Cliff Calley. That's the guy Ainsley set her up with back in Ways And Means, just before he was tasked to join the Oversight Committee and help with the probe into the Bartlet campaign. They had two dates, including one where they spent the night together after they both realized the conflict between the investigator and the West Wing staffer.

And Calley knows something he's probably not supposed to know. When Donna is asked if she keeps a diary, she says no. Calley asks that to be read back, looking directly and meaningfully at Donna.

Donna returns the look, steady and unperturbed.

And we move on. We later discover, when Calley tracks Donna down at her apartment, that he knows she has a diary - he saw it the night he spent at her place. He threatens her with the consequences, with jail time and fines, and pleads with her to correct her testimony. Her response (after asking him, "What would you say? That you thought you saw a diary while you were hunting around for your boxer shorts?"): "You shouldn't be here."

Turns out, yes, she does keep a diary. Where does she go for help? Naturally, to Josh. Even though she thinks he's pissed at her for even seeing Calley, she goes to him to ask for a way out of her dilemma. If Josh wasn't pissed at her before, it appears he is now:

"Ya think?!?"

He does come up with a plan - a surreptitious meeting with Calley, where he'll be given an hour to look through the diary and decide if there's anything requiring additional investigation. That seems to settle things, and even a seriously upset Josh is able to comfort Donna, a little, putting his arm around her as they sit on a bench in the chilly evening air.

(An aside about this screen shot: Janel Moloney, in her several appearances on The West Wing Weekly podcast, has said it was her actor's choice from the very beginning in Pilot to play Donna as deeply, secretly in love with Josh. There's not a lot of textual support for that choice so far - a little bit, I suppose, but mostly subtext - so it's a bold choice, and given the chemistry between Moloney and Bradley Whitford right from the start, a believable one. Just look at Moloney's face here ... is there any doubt this woman is not hopelessly in love?)

The question we have, though, is why did Donna lie in the deposition? Calley had her original answer read back. If she just misspoke or it kind of slipped her mind (like when she clarified the previous question about "photo albums" vs "photographs"), why didn't she correct herself? She continued to lie to Calley outside her apartment (partly, I imagine, in anger at him for snooping around when they spent the night together), then desperately went to Josh to admit the truth. She claimed to think there was nothing incriminating in the diary and therefore it wasn't that big a deal to tell the committee she didn't even keep one. Was it embarrassment about what she had in it? Her writings about Calley? Or her writings about Josh? I like to think it is her diary entries about Josh that she desperately wants to keep a secret, which makes it a huge sacrifice to go to him about the problem and have Josh be the one who gives the diary to Calley. Josh admits he hasn't read it - I think that subtext (Donna has her secret feelings for Josh in that diary, and she really doesn't want him to know about them) is definitely what Aaron Sorkin is trying to illustrate here. And the trust Josh shows in her, by not even looking at the diary himself, really illustrates his chivalry and devotion to her as well.

The obvious connection to our title is the meeting between Leo and Air Force General Alan Adamle. The two are old friends, having served in Vietnam together, and they are wrestling with the topic of whether the US should join the United Nations war crimes court. Leo believes to be on the right side of history, comparing the issue with the Nuremberg or Tokyo war crimes trials after World War II. Adamle points out the conflict with national sovereignty, and who has jurisidiction over American soldiers charged with crimes.

It takes a bombshell to shake Leo's position. Adamle pulls out a file from a mission Leo flew in Vietnam in 1966. Leo had been told it was a military target, a bridge; Adamle reveals it was a civilian target instead, and 11 civilian casualties resulted. John Spencer's reaction is haunting:

"Why did you tell me that?" he asks. Adamle responds, "Because you could be tried and charged with a war crime." The personal connection hits Leo to the core, and while the question remains unsettled, he promises Adamle he'll get time with the President.

CJ is dealing with a new White House reporter - well, not new, just newly returned from overseas. Will Sawyer apparently made an impression with CJ when he was on the beat 2 1/2 years ago, as they show an easy banter in their scenes. Sawyer has a scoop, though - a source has told him Toby said if President Bartlet wins re-election, it will be on Hoynes' coattails.

When CJ goes to Toby, he admits he said it, but in a closed meeting with junior staffers in the context that Hoynes' polling was better than Bartlet's in some Midwestern states. He's more struck by the idea that one of these aides working in the White House would feel like it was okay to give that damaging quote to a reporter. He tells Ginger to call in all the junior staffers and senior assistants, and if they can't make it in two hours (on a Sunday), they don't need to come in Monday morning.

This leads us to one of the most finely crafted pieces of writing in The West Wing. Toby doesn't rant, he doesn't roar, he doesn't attack (the way we saw him respond to a leak in Bad Moon Rising) - he expresses his disappointment, and explains why he's disappointed in a touching, personal speech:

Toby (to aides): "We're a team. From the President and Leo on through, we're a team. We win together, we lose together, we celebrate and we mourn together. And defeats are softened and victories sweetened because we did them together. [...] So, an item will appear in the paper tomorrow, and it'll be embarrassing to me and embarrassing to the President. I'm not gonna have a witch hunt. I'm not gonna huff and puff. I'm not gonna take anyone's head off. I'm simply gonna say this: You're my guys. And I'm yours. And there's nothing I wouldn't do for you."

It's a great moment, a great speech, and Richard Schiff is great in it.

The humorous part of the episode is Sam's befuddlement about and eventual agreement with a proposal to eliminate the penny. A congressional staffer wants the administration's support for such a bill in exchange for helping move the President's plan for education funding out of committee. While the topic is played for laughs, the Legal Tender Modernization Act was a real bill introduced by Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe in 2002. And Sam starts to see some sense behind the whole thing, even trying to talk Josh into coming on board:

Sam: "Two-thirds of the pennies produced in the last 30 years have dropped out of circulation."

Josh: "You've been reading about this?"

Sam: "It's interesting."

Josh: "No, it's not."

Sam: "The Mint gets letters with pennies taped on notebook paper. Letters from citizens who found the pennies on the street and mailed them back to the Treasury to help pay down the debt."

Josh: "It's almost hard to believe that plan hasn't worked." 

This plotline is the only one that can't really be linked to the title, but the rest of this busy episode all has connections to the theme. How far should a President go to get back at his Vice President for misdeeds, whether real or imagined? How much responsibility does a country hold to protect its soldiers and citizens over the interests of the morality of the world at large? How much devotion and loyalty must a person demand in the quest for idealism? What are the boundaries of truth and revelation of secrets, and who decides what's pertinent in a contest between Congress and the White House, between Republicans and Democrats? And what good is the battle between the parties, between the desire for scoops and eyeballs and the search for the truth, what good is all that? Will Sawyer has an usual attitude for a Washington reporter (with a direct Sorkin reference to the Clinton years):

Sawyer: "I don't like being a stenographer. And I don't like writing gossip. I read a column last week where a lady bemoaned the decade of scandal she's had to cover, as if the news was to blame for the quality of journalism. I don't know if there's ever been a more important time to be good at what I do. Can you imagine how much I don't give a damn about what Toby said to a staffer?"

Tales Of Interest!

- We can pinpoint the setting of this episode exactly, to Sunday, October 21, 2001. Why? Because all the NFL games mentioned during the day (Oakland-Dallas, Tennessee-Detroit, New Orleans-Atlanta, Kansas City-Arizona, Chicago-Cincinnati) were actually scheduled for October 21. Interestingly, though, in reality the Oakland-Dallas game, which had been scheduled for the Oakland Coliseum on that Sunday, ended up being moved to October 7 in order to avoid a conflict with a potential Oakland A's American League Championship Series game on the 21st (which did not happen since the A's lost to the New York Yankees in the American League Division Series). Naturally, at the time Sorkin and Allison Abner were writing the script, they would have had no way of knowing that football game was going to be moved up two weeks.

- We see a football game in progress on a television in the press briefing room - it's literally the very first thing in the episode. Later, when Charlie and Sam are discussing their bets, Charlie says, "The first games are about to start." All the early NFL games on that Sunday started at the same time, 1:00 pm Eastern, so if there was a game already underway on TV in the briefing room, all the games had already started.

- Sorkin is really on the ball here with writing skills. I mentioned the heartfelt, meaningful speech Toby gives to his aides; earlier, though, Sorkin apparently takes his own personal view of writing and speech and puts it right in President Bartlet's mouth:

Jed: "Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of performance, are music. They have rhythm, and pitch, and timbre, and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us, and lift us up in ways that literal meanings can't. Do you see?"

Abbey: "You are an oratorical snob."

Jed: "Yes, I am. And God loves me for it."

Abbey: "You said He was sending you to hell."

Jed: "For other stuff, not for this."

I guess when you're writing your own television series, you get to put your personal opinion about language and speech right there in the script for all to hear. Ha!

- Sawyer tells CJ he's been out of the country for 2 1/2 years (she thinks it feels like three months). This would put his departure in the spring of 1999, not long after the Bartlet administration took office. It's certainly plausible that he had a working history with the White House and CJ at that time, prior to the events we've seen in the series (that started in the fall of 1999).

- It's tough to see, but it appears Gail's fishbowl has some American flags as decoration. Perhaps that's a reference to the war crimes discussion between Leo and General Adamle, and the topic of American jurisdiction over its soldiers:

Later on, we see the fishbowl has swapped sides with the lamp on CJ's desk. Remember, the events of this episode take place over one day ... CJ must have had some time to spare and reorganized her desk that Sunday:

- Speaking of swapping sides of a desk, I've mentioned before that President Bartlet's collection of glass globes - usually on his left at his desk - occasionally switches to his right, as we saw in the previous episode. Now they're back on the left:

- A real nice directorial choice by Alex Graves: As the President and Vice President have their tense discussion in the Oval Office, with both characters having solid reasons as well as political motivations to back up their opinions, note how both actors are in shadow in this shot. A lot of this exchange leaves both Martin Sheen and Tim Matheson out of the light, which I thought was a bold and expressive choice:

- This was the second episode submitted by Janel Moloney for her nomination for the Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy award (along with the previous episode, On The Day Before). Castmate Stockard Channing ended up with that Emmy.



Quotes    

CJ: "Will Sawyer, is that you?"

Sawyer: "Yes."

CJ: "You back in the country?"

Sawyer: "Yeah."

CJ: "You working for the San Francisco Chronicle now?"

Sawyer: "No."

CJ: "Then you want to get your ass out of their chair?"

Sawyer: "There's assigned seating?"

CJ: "You see the little brass plaques with the names of media outlets on the front of the seats?"

Sawyer: "I thought that meant they made a generous contribution."

----- 

Charlie: "How was church?"

President: "It sucked."

Abbey: "It was fine. Stop it!"

President: "It sucked."

Abbey: "You're talking about church."

President: "Oh, like I'm not already going to hell." 

-----

Congressional staffer: "I'm gonna need to give the Congressman a good reason why the White House won't support the bill if they won't support the bill."

Sam: "Oh, don't make me give you a good reason."

Staffer: "You want your $30 billion in school repairs?"

Sam: "Well, we're already well on our way with 140 million pennies."

-----

(CJ walks by Toby's darkened office and notices him on his couch)

CJ: "Hey."

Toby: "I ... I'm, I'm not here."

CJ: "I called you at home. I had you paged."

Toby: "Yeah."

CJ: "I didn't know you were here."

Toby (covering his face with a newspaper): "I'm not."

CJ: "I think the jig is up."

-----

Sam: "Why?"

Josh: "Yes."

Sam: "Because this country is populated with unbalanced people. Many of whom find their way to Washington. As if the continent funnels them into this one spot." 

----- 

Sam (knocks on door, enters Leo's office): "Excuse me. Excuse me, General."

Adamle: "Hey, Sam."

Sam: "Margaret wasn't out here."

Leo: "What do you need?"

Sam: "No, if you're in the middle of something I can come back."

Adamle: "We're eliminating genocide, what are you doing?"

Sam: "Eliminating the penny. (pause) So I'll come back."

Story threads, callbacks, and familiar faces (Hey, it's that guy!)

• Will Sawyer, the returning reporter that CJ obviously has a bit of professional history with, is played by Michael O'Keefe (Caddyshack, Roseanne, Homeland):

• Leo's old friend Gen. Alan Adamle is played by Gerald McRaney (Simon & Simon, Major Dad, House Of Cards). I'm assuming his character is the same one referred to as a Pentagon contact named Adamle in A Proportional Response:

• Martin Sheen's daughter Renee Estevez is back as Nancy, here ushering Hoynes into the Oval Office:

• The President offers a beer to Hoynes before they get into their discussion over the trip to Texas and gun control. This shows the President is unaware of Hoynes' alcoholism and his attendance at AA meetings (which we saw in Five Votes Down). Jed's story of his father allowing Jed and his brother to share a beer after church also sheds some more light on the character of Jed's father, who we saw as a stern, unbending taskmaster in Two Cathedrals.

• We also get a callback to the events of The Stackhouse Filibuster and 17 People, with Leo and the President using the gun control issue/trip to Texas as a way to knock Hoynes down a peg or two for getting Jed in hot water (with his wife and the country) by revving up his Presidential campaign a bit early. 

• Gen. Adamle mentions "Hutchison and Berryhill," two names we've heard referred to as administration figures several times during the series. I don't think it's been explicitly stated, but the implication is that Hutchison (or Hutchinson) may be the Secretary of Defense, and Berryhill might be Secretary of State (a passing reference in A Proportional Response seemed to connect him to the State Department in some way).

• Hoynes complains to the President, "You let Griffith run around talking about legalizing marijuana," a direct reference to Surgeon General Dr. Millicent Griffith and her remarks in Ellie.

DC location shots    

• Not exactly a location shot, but an establishing shot of the building where Donna's deposition is taking place turns out to be the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. This location is on the 300 block of 12th Street NW:

I'm not sure why (or even if) Donna's Sunday deposition would be taken in the EPA headquarters, but I imagine the producers of the show appreciated the governmental look of the building. This is a current Google Street View shot of the building:

And this is the little plaza across 12th Street where the camera was set up. The red shape is the approximate location of the camera (or perhaps a bit further to your left, given the view of the benches/flagpoles in the camera shot), with the camera facing in the direction of the blue arrow:

• The fountain we see in the final scene with Josh, Donna, and Cliff ... not a DC location. As a matter of fact, that fountain (on the Warner Brothers backlot) is the exact same fountain seen in the opening credits of every single episode of the TV series Friends (1994-2004).

They Do Exist! It's The Real Person, or Thing    

• When the President is talking about speech hackery and being subject to one another, he mentions watching Larry King to find out who things will be about next (King had a nightly show on CNN between 1985 and 2010). 

• Abbey says she's going to take a bath and turn on Sinatra (Frank Sinatra), which causes a jovial Jed to ask how Mrs. Sinatra feels about that before breaking into song ("You make me egg foo yung ...").

• In an unusual turn for President Bartlet, rather than his typical Notre Dame mug he's seen using one from Antioch College in Ohio (note the logo on the mug is the same logo used by the college today). The connection to Antioch is a personal one for Sheen - he said attending a Shakespeare play there as a teenager in 1954 helped steer him to an acting career. He was actually invited to Antioch's commencement ceremony in the spring of 2001, but filming on The West Wing prevented him from attending. So, unlike the mysterious Florida Gators mug that kept showing up throughout Season 2, I was able to discover the motivation behind this prop:

• President Lincoln gets a mention (as Sam's reason why Illinois tollbooths still take pennies, since Lincoln, a noted Illinois figure, is on the penny - at the time of the episode, despite Sam's belief to the contrary, most state's tollways still accepted pennies, although grudgingly).

• Operation Rolling Thunder was an actual military bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, between March 1965 and November 1968 (so Leo's mission in September 1966 would have fallen within that time frame).

• Product placement: An obvious Coca Cola can is seen being held by Sawyer:

A shot in the opening scene showed CJ with a logoed coffee cup, with a name that looked something like "Amore," but I was unable to find a coffee shop that could match that cup. It seems searching for a 2001-era coffee shop (in either Washington, DC, or Los Angeles) is a difficult proposition ...

End credits freeze frame: High-angle shot of Hoynes with his water and the President with his beer.