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Phil Donahue to get Metzenbaum accolade, show 'Body of War'
By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer
Published on Saturday, Sep 13, 2008
On Sunday, Cleveland native Phil Donahue will receive Ohio Citizen Action's Howard M. Metzenbaum Award, which goes to ''an Ohioan who best reflects Senator Metzenbaum's example of principled tenacity.''
Donahue said he was not a close friend of Metzenbaum, who died in March, although the senator had been a guest on Donahue's long-running TV talk show. Still, it won't take long for Donahue to reveal his principles and his tenacity. If you have no interest in an old liberal's views, you might as well stop reading here.
Seventy-two years old but still unabashedly outspoken, Donahue's appearance at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque will also include a showing of Body of War, an unflinching documentary for which Donahue is executive producer and, with Ellen Spiro, co-director.
It follows Tomas Young, 25, an Iraq war veteran from Kansas City, Mo., who is fighting the effects of a paralyzing war injury suffered five days after arriving in Iraq — but who has also found the time and energy to speak out against the war.
Young's story — which details his physical limitations and personal problems along with his activism — is combined with politicians' speeches during the October 2002 debate about whether to go to war in Iraq. Overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate consented to war.
Donahue himself, who had returned to TV with a show on MSNBC in July 2002, found his opinions were not welcomed even though they were cleared before he went on the air. An NBC study obtained by AllyourTV.com said in part that Donahue appeared to offer ''a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.'' His show was canceled in February 2003.
Now, Donahue said in a recent telephone interview, ''The nation has come to see the folly of this. This is a massive blunder. It took us six minutes to get in. Is it going to be 60 years to get out?''
Donahue thinks Body of War will add to the sense of the effects of the war by showing what Young has gone through. He said ''corporate media'' have shied away from showing young people who ''have come back with hideous injuries.''
He likened Body of War to the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing after her village had been bombed during the Vietnam War.
''See the pain,'' Donahue said.
For Young, in fact, things have gotten worse since the film was made; he has suffered a pulmonary embolism, been in a coma and is trying to recover from the resulting speech defect and loss of movement in his hands.
As the events of 2002 demonstrated, Donahue is not a newcomer to the anti-Iraq-war movement, or to liberal politics. He campaigned for Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election. ''I would introduce Michael Moore,'' he recalled, ''and Eddie Vedder would play songs by Woody Guthrie.'' (Vedder also contributed songs to Body of War.)
''None of us expected the firestorm Ralph would start,'' he said, when it appeared that votes for Nader tipped the election away from Al Gore and toward George W. Bush. But he was strongly reminded of it in 2004 by his wife, actress and activist Marlo Thomas, who will also be at the Cleveland event. ''To save my marriage, I got off the [Nader] bus in '04,'' Donahue said.
But Nader, who Donahue said was the most frequent guest on his 1967-1996 show, and Donahue remained in touch. And after the 2004 election, Nader invited Donahue along to meet an Iraq war veteran — who turned out to be Young.
Young was in the hospital and dosed with painkillers at the time. Still, Donahue said, ''I couldn't get him out of my head.'' Eventually he ended up working on the film with Spiro; she did most of the up-close work with Young, while Donahue's major task involved going through C-SPAN footage of the war debate, assembling with an editor's help moment after moment of politicians parroting the president's lines.
But he hasn't taken his eye off current politics; he plans to vote for Barack Obama, but he thinks Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is a great story.
''How many men have striven for the highest office,'' he said. ''And suddenly a woman we don't even know comes from behind a tree, with a gun. And is now one 72-year-old heartbeat from the presidency.''
You could almost hear Donahue's 72-year-old heart thumping on the phone.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://www.ohio.com. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 and rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
On Sunday, Cleveland native Phil Donahue will receive Ohio Citizen Action's Howard M. Metzenbaum Award, which goes to ''an Ohioan who best reflects Senator Metzenbaum's example of principled tenacity.''
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