De Niro, Damon: Spies, patriotism and politics

MATTHEWS:  So you basically said a president of the United States, someone like Clinton, would start a war because he had an affair—or whatever you want to call the little thing—with his intern and it turns out that we—right after the movie comes out, not only do we have a president with a messing around with his intern problem, but she’s wearing a damn beret just like in the movie.  How did you know to put a beret on Monica Lewinsky before Bill Clinton ever met her.  How did you know that?

DE NIRO:  That’s—yes, you know, that’s David Mamet.  That’s why he’s a great playwright.

MATTHEWS:  He’s a prophet.

DE NIRO:  He has great writing.  He’s a prophet too.

MATTHEWS:  What did you think when you saw that not only did you get it right, not that Bill Clinton started a war, but he was accused of doing that thing, you know, in Sudan or somewhere about blowing up the truck.

DAMON:  The aspirin factory.

MATTHEWS: The aspirin factory, but that you actually predicted a presidential embarrassment that led to a—like it or not an impeachment is what happened, and you had it so prophetic?

DE NIRO:  Listen, that was Barry Levinson, David Mamet, thinking and doing an as-if and somehow it just did get.

MATTHEWS:  But you played this incredible Gonzo political consultant who could do anything, who could turn reality into unreality, and the other way around, who could make things seem like something is going on in the world when it’s not.

DAMON:  Yes.  And that seems to have come to passage, right?

MATTHEWS:  How so?

DAMON:  Well, I mean, look at the war we’re in right now.  You know, you could certainly argue that that was a PR battle.  Yes, what do you think?  I mean really, what you know?

MATTHEWS:  Does this audience agree with him?

DAMON:  There’s no other reason to rush that fast to war unless you know, you don’t have it.

MATTHEWS:  Do you think the war was fought because the region—was it about WMD?  Was it about Mideast politics?  Was it about ideology?

DAMON:  It kept changing when their excuses would change.  They’d go, wait, actually they don’t have any of that stuff.  They’d go, oh, well then it’s actually about democracy.  Well democracy is not going to work.  We’re just going to settle for—as long as it’s secure.  I mean, it just keeps changing.

MATTHEWS:  Do you think guys like Cheney—I love to pronounce his name correctly, by the way.  Do you think guys like—it’s like a Dickensian name, Cheney.  Do you think he knew he was saying stuff that wouldn’t turn out to be true, or was he just mad dogged to fight the war?

DAMON:  I’d like to see him under oath.

MATTHEWS:  I would, too.  I’d like to see him with you.

(APPLAUSE)

MATTHEWS:  Do you think if you waterboarded Cheney, like in the movie, that you’d get a different truth out of him?

DAMON:  Well, there’s two answers to that question.  One is he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who has any real personal courage.  When it was his turn to go, he didn’t go.  He deferred six times.

MATTHEWS:  He said he had other priorities.

DAMON:  Yes, he had other priorities.  And he doesn’t seem to have other priorities about sending other kids there and other peoples kids.

(APPLAUSE)

The second part to the answer is that I believe that if you waterboard anybody, they’ll tell you anything and that torture is completely impractical, on top of being dishonorable.  It’s completely impractical because if you torture a normal person, if you torture anybody, they’re going to tell you whatever you want them to tell you.  So if you’re getting information that you’re going to then use and you get it by torturing them...

MATTHEWS:  ... Why has man at his worst throughout history used it then if it doesn’t work?  Why has it always been part of—going to the Middle Ages, back to ancient times?  People were so cruel to each other, they get what they want out of them.  Why do they do it if it doesn’t work?

DAMON:  I don’t know.  I don’t do it.

(LAUGHTER)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP OF "THE GOOD SHEPHERD")

JOE PESCI, ACTOR:  These are the guys that scare me.  You’re the people that make big wars.

DAMON:  No, we make sure the wars are small ones, Mr. Palmi.

PESCI:  Let me ask you something.  We Italians, we’ve got our families and we’ve got the church.  The Irish and the homeland, we use their tradition.  What about you people, what do you have?

DAMON:  The United States of America.  The rest of you are just visiting.

(END VIDEO CLIP OF "THE GOOD SHEPHERD")

QUESTION FROM STUDENT:  My question is for Mr. De Niro.  If your character, General William Casey, were alive today, what do you think he would say about the current state of the CIA?

DE NIRO:  Well it’s based on Donovan, not Casey, but it’s a good question.  I think he would not be happy based on what he said, because I feel he’s like the conscience of the piece and of the story. 

So he would—he’s probably—if he had anything to do with it, he maybe would have changed it or I’d like to think of him being—changing it or correcting the things before they happened, but that’s all easy to say, you know. 

MATTHEWS:  Because he’s the real bad guy you guys are fighting in that war, even though the movie is tough and somewhat cynical in a way because he talks about motivation and maybe about how people were manipulated in their motivation.  There really was a Nazi threat to the world.  I mean, they killed all the Jews, the threatened the world, 50 million people died in that war.  There really was a Cold War, especially under Stalin.  He really did want to go for Europe and the world maybe.  It’s a real fight and you have to win it, right?

DAMON:  Right.  Absolutely.  And I think that argument or that issue—that issue in that scene is what I say.  He says he wants oversight, and I say how can you have oversight of a covert agency?  And that is—it’s going back to what...

MATTHEWS:  How do we answer that question?

DAMON:  It is the essential question of the day though?  What of your liberties are you willing to trade for your security?  How scared are you?  How real is the threat?  What do you know, as you say, those were real wars.  There are real wars—there are people who want to do great harm to American civilians in American cities.  That—you know, we live in lower Manhattan.  You guys are right next to D.C.

I mean, this is real and so this is a question we need to be asking ourselves, but it needs to be something that we all—to me, what bothers me the most about the state we’re in right now is I don’t feel that there’s a shared consciousness and a shared sense of sacrifice, and we have these young men and women who are fighting a war and our president tells us to go shopping.  And I think that more can be asked of us and we need to be participating more, for I think that makes for a more robust democracy.

MATTHEWS:  But didn’t the country really respond pretty strong—and the world—at Abu Ghraib? Our country really didn’t take an interest, right?

DAMON:  Well, of course, absolutely.  Yes, and Rumsfeld, if you ask me and a lot of people, everyone thought he should have stepped down then after that. 

MATTHEWS:  You think that knowing what you know, that think that went up the chain of command, the whole idea of how they treated prisoners?

DAMON:  Yes, yes.  Absolutely, yes.

MATTHEWS:  You think that, Robert?

DE NIRO:  Yes, I think so.

MATTHEWS:  Let’s go to the next question please.

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