A Detour Into Prescott Bush
Over the holidays, my wife and I added The Bourne Legacy , the fourth episode of the Hollywood franchise loosely based on Robert Ludlum novels, to our collection of DVDs. My fascination with the series was one of the reasons I started this blog, as I outlined in this early post : The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha. The MacGuffin of the Bourne franchise, the element that's necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, is a set of de...