July 1968 - six months after The Tet Offensive put the lie to Vietnam, and 3 months after MLK was killed, and about 40 days after RFK was killed, and kinda in the middle of another whole year of some big bad shit going down in USAmerica Inc.
LBJ's son-in-law, Chuck Robb, was serving as commander of a combat rifle company in Vietnam. Johnson had asked him to send tape-recorded messages describing what was happening on the ground in what a lot of us came to call "Johnson's War". This picture is said to convey the anguish of a president as he learns the truth about how political policies play out in the lives of real people.
It's always about more than anybody wants to tell us it's about. So included in the mix is Johnson's anguish over being remembered as the Accidental President needing to ride the coattails of two dead Kennedys, while struggling to come out of their shadows; the guy who lost Southeast Asia, built concentration camps for black people, and made it almost impossible for Dick Nixon to lose in November of that year.
That's not to ignore some truly big-fuckin'-deal things like Medicare and Civil Rights and Public Education and other good things as well. I'm just trying to remind myself to see the whole thing - or as much of it as possible; to go back and look at it again once in a while, because there's probably something I missed - like not remembering ever hearing about what was playing on the tape recorder in that picture.
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