American coup d’état

A charismatic, media-savvy US general publicly attacks a president over a disarmament treaty with a dangerous foreign power as a prelude to a coup d’état in this 1964 political thriller.

In John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, Burt Lancaster is U.S. Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, war hero and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Scott uses the right-wing news media that worships him to enflame popular opinion against liberal President Jordan Lyman (Frederic March) over a comprehensive disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.

Apart from a great conspiracy yarn, Frankenheimer and screenwriter Rod Serling also tell a tale about the rule of law. Fascism here is not simply rule by military fiat, but an impatience with and intolerance or misunderstanding of the system by which the US constitution directs government to exercise its authority through the legislative process, courts and elections. 

White House picketers in Seven Days in May.

We first see Scott’s image on signs carried by anti-Lyman picketers outside the White House in a demonstration that quickly turns violent. Jerry Goldsmith’s music heightens the drama and Ferris Webster’s editing gives this black-and-white film a raw, realistic documentary feel.

The story comes from a 1962 bestseller of the same title by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. A concern at that time was that high-profile military men such as General Douglas MacArthur, venerated by the US public after the Allied victory in World War II and leading the crusade against Communist ‘world domination’, would exploit the public’s ignorance of civics with the rhetorical comfort food of square-jawed patriotic talk.

President John F. Kennedy reportedly liked the novel. He discussed with co-producer and co-star Kirk Douglas how it might be filmed and allowed White House access to the production team. But Kennedy never saw the movie. Its December 1963 release date was postponed two months after he was assassinated in November.

Although occasional cranks turn up in the highest ranks, it seems less conceivable then than it does now that a member of the Joint Chiefs, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, would grandstand as Scott does here on national television.  

General James Mattoon Scott on national television in Seven Days in May.

Kirk Douglas is Marine Colonel Martin ‘Jiggs’ Casey, administrative director of the JCS. Casey respects Scott as his boss but does not agree with his politics; he does not agree with the administration, but abides by its authority. He is not part of the plot. Casey gets wind that something is up on a Monday morning—the first ‘day in May’—when Lt. Junior Grade Dorsey Grayson (Jack Mullaney), a young staff officer, unknowingly quips about an office betting pool among the top brass (which earns him an immediate transfer to Hawaii).

Jack Mullaney and Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May.

The betting pool involves the upcoming Sunday running of the Preakness Stakes, an annual horse race held in Baltimore, Maryland, on the third week in May. (The race is run on Saturday, not Sunday. Several background cues address this discrepancy by noting that this is to be the ‘first ever’ Sunday running of the race.) The race date coincides with the date of a top secret alert known only to the president and the JCS.

Through an officer friend, Casey incidentally also learns of a brigade-sized Army Special Forces unit called ‘Ecomcon’ at a secret base called ‘Site Y’ in the desert in west Texas, commanded by signal corps officers. He surmises that Ecomcon is a military acronym for ‘emergency communications control’; he can find no official authorization or funding source for the unit or the base.

Casey kids offhandedly with Scott’s aide about the Preakness pool and gets a terse, angry warning not to discuss the alert or the pool. Scott himself later asks Casey more collegially to keep the pool confidential. Further circumstantial clues implicate a California Senator and a right-wing media broadcaster, among other things. And then the cautious Scott gives Casey ‘the rest of the week off’.

On Tuesday night, Casey visits the White House to share his concerns with President Lyman and his aide Paul Girard (Martin Balsam), who quickly assemble a crisis-management team. Lyman’s skeptical team works round the clock from Wednesday to Sunday hoping to disprove Casey’s hunch, but preparing for the contingency that he is right as more evidence comes to light.

All the president's men strategize in Seven Days in May

The ‘seven days’ are the days from Monday to the Sunday horse race. The action is set in the ‘near future’—May 18 fell on Sunday in 1969 and 1975—but beyond the seven days at issue, chronological time in this story is vague.

 

Lyman in the end calls ‘a whisper’ that the US ‘somehow lost our greatness’ a ‘slander’. But he also earlier rebukes an advisor that neither Scott and the generals, nor the ‘very emotional, very illogical lunatic fringe’ are ‘the enemy’.

Frederic March as President Jordan Lyman in Seven Days in May

The enemy, as Lyman sees it, is an age which has ‘killed man’s faith in his ability to influence what happens to him.’ He said that this produces a sickness which brings about ‘a frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness’, and in our desperation, ‘we look for a champion in red, white and blue.’

‘Every now and then a man on a white horse rides by, and we appoint him to be our personal god for the duration. For some men it was a Senator McCarthy…now it’s a General Scott,’ the president said.

Seven Days in May 1964 U.S. (118 minutes). Directed by John Frankenheimer; written by Rod Serling, based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Chares W. Bailey II; cinematography by Ellsworth Fredricks; music by Jerry Goldsmith; edited by Ferris Webster.