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      ‘Untold: Caitlyn Jenner’ Review: Honoring the Athlete

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      Caitlyn Jenner recalls her past as a decathlon champion in this sports documentary directed by Crystal Moselle.Caitlyn Jenner is best known as a tabloid celebrity and family member of the Kardashian clan who publicly transitioned as a transgender woman. But “Untold: Caitlyn Jenner” — an episode of the new Netflix documentary series “Untold” that highlights underappreciated stories from sports — illuminates the events that brought Jenner her first taste of international recognition; namely, her gold medal win as a decathlon athlete in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.Jenner narrates her own story, describing an intense training regimen that included grueling practices every day for four years. The director Crystal Moselle (“The Wolfpack,” “Skate Kitchen”) supports Jenner’s recollections with archival footage, culled from home videos, practice footage and clips from the Olympics broadcast. The combination of contemporary footage and the present-day internal monologue creates a sports-broadcasting dream of sorts: allowing the audience to hear the athlete’s thoughts at the moments Jenner executes seemingly impossible leaps, races, vaults and throws.But if the sports footage is rich with detail, the treatment of the purportedly untold portion of this story is thinner. The documentary shows that the greatest athlete in the world — as decathlon winners are often called — was a transgender woman. Yet Jenner’s perspective on her past suggests a unique alienation. She speaks about how she “built this Bruce character,” as she puts it, and she attributes her successes to this invention. She acknowledges that she used sports to avoid coming to terms with her gender identity, but she remains proud of what her creation achieved. It’s an intriguing perspective that unfortunately receives little follow-up or elaboration, leaving the film flat-footed when it steps away from the track.Untold: Caitlyn JennerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 9 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Cartier Joins the Sponsors of the Venice Film Festival

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      As part of the agreement, the Paris high jewelry house will present an annual award, with the first going to the director Ridley Scott.Along with lavish screenings of new films starring Oscar winners like Penélope Cruz and Olivia Colman, the 2021 Venice Film Festival will feature a different type of premiere: the debut of Cartier as a new main sponsor.The festival “has elegance. It has exclusivity. It has glamour,” said Arnaud Carrez, Cartier’s chief marketing officer. “And that’s exactly what we want to build on.”As part of a three-year agreement, the festival, scheduled to begin on Sept. 1, will present the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award annually. This year’s recipient, chosen by the festival director Alberto Barbera, will be Ridley Scott, whose new film, “The Last Duel,” is scheduled to be shown at the festival on Sept. 10. (The award is to be presented immediately before the film’s screening.)The trophy — which will feature a panther, one of the house’s recurring motifs — is being made at the Cartier Creation Studio in Paris.Neither Cartier nor the festival would detail the financial aspects of the relationship, but film festivals can generate millions of dollars from sponsorships, which are typically offered on a variety of levels. There are two other new festival sponsors this year, both in less prominent tiers than Cartier: Repower, a Swiss energy company, and the Chinese electronics brand Xiaomi.For luxury brands like Cartier, choosing events and companies for partnerships can take some care. “The brand values need to be in line with the kind of art or the kind of activity they are sponsoring,” said Federica Levato, a Milan-based partner for Bain & Company.And, she said, consumers expect synergy in sponsorships. “If a brand is sponsoring an event with no link between the brand and the event, the customer will find it strange,” she said. (Last year, the festival had four main sponsors; three returning are Armani beauty, Campari and Mastercard.)Roberto Cicutto, president of La Biennale di Venezia, which oversees the festival and other cultural events in the city, wrote in an email that Cartier fit well as a sponsor because it had “the ability to best interpret a collaboration with a cultural institution.”Cartier has partnered with cinema-focused events before — like the Deauville American Film Festival, the French event it sponsored from 2005 through 2014 — as well as numerous art exhibitions through the Fondation Cartier, including current shows in Milan and Paris. “Art and culture have always been intimately intertwined with the history of Cartier,” Mr. Carrez said. More

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      ‘Kipchoge: The Last Milestone’ Review: Skipping Ahead

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      This documentary about the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge takes a victory lap for an athletic feat.Never cut the course at a marathon, but you could probably skip the first half-hour of “Kipchoge: The Last Milestone” without missing much. A tribute to the pathbreaking Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge, this documentary sets out to show how, in 2019, he became the first person in history to run a marathon distance in less than two hours.The well-intentioned but bromide-laden first part of the film introduces us to Kipchoge the man, shown as a runner with a tireless work ethic, a contemplative attitude and a fundamental modesty. We hear about how he inspires colleagues and young athletes. There are so many slow-motion running clips, abrupt switches to black-and-white or scenes that appear staged for effect (e.g., as Kipchoge discusses how his mother instilled a sense of discipline, we see a woman awakening a boy for a morning routine) that you could cut the movie into Nike ads with minimal alteration. The director, Jake Scott, son of Ridley, has in fact made such commercials.But the documentary’s pulse quickens when it turns its attention to Kipchoge’s efforts to beat the two-hour mark. His 1:59:40 doesn’t count as an official world record because he didn’t run it under traditional marathon strictures. The film illustrates how a wide array of collaborators optimized conditions. Various participants describe the road surfacing, how laser guidance helped set the pace and how teams of fellow runners took turns making Y formations around Kipchoge to reduce air resistance. The athleticism, physics and what one person calls the “bit of ballet” of the event are all stirring to witness.Kipchoge: The Last MilestoneRated PG-13 for … strenuous running? Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      A Steamy French Thriller Is a ‘Sleeper Smash Hit’

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      The 1969 film “La Piscine” was supposed to run for two weeks at New York’s Film Forum, but it’s been extended to the fall.For the past 14 weeks at Film Forum, a longstanding independent and repertory theater on West Houston Street in Manhattan, the 1969 French film “La Piscine” has been playing — a run that has extended its initial engagement by 12 weeks, and counting.“Rear Window,” “8 ½,” “La Strada” and a popular Humphrey Bogart series that included “Casablanca” have all come and gone, but “La Piscine” swims on.If there is a film of New York’s 2021 summer, this may be it.“La Piscine” (which means “The Swimming Pool”) revolves around Jean-Paul (played by Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), who have retreated to a house with a large pool outside St. Tropez. Sadly, he only gets one month of vacation. The lovers are unexpectedly joined by Harry (Maurice Ronet), Marianne’s former paramour and Jean-Paul’s former best friend, and his 18-year-old daughter, Penelope (Jane Birkin). Much decadence and extremely French crossover love ensues.Of course, life at the pool is not as it seems. (If you are a person with strong opinions about spoiler alerts for 50-year-old French films, skip the rest of this paragraph.) Tensions mount and in the final half-hour Jean-Paul coldly murders Harry by slow, brutal, drowning. After one of the chicer funeral scenes committed to film, Marianne covers for Jean-Paul to the police, despite the fact Jean-Paul had just declared his desire to leave her for Penelope.Sex, opulence, a dash of danger. Could anything better describe New York’s post-lockdown mood? And then there’s the epic style: Come for Alain’s open-to-the-navel denim shirt, stay for Romy’s Courrèges-designed bathing suits. It turns out, many New Yorkers have.“It’s a total sleeper smash hit,” said Bruce Goldstein, the director of repertory programming for Film Forum and the founder of Rialto Pictures, which distributes “La Piscine” in the United States. “The numbers have not dipped at all. We hit all the right nerves with this.”Ah, yes, those nerves. After more than year of pandemic restrictions, a lot of people, including me, were more than ready for a heavy dose of outrageous beauty. I have seen the two-hour film four times since it arrived in mid-May.“It’s vicarious,” Mr. Goldstein said, trying to explain why a 50-year-old French film starring actors who were largely unknown in America, has been such a hit. “It’s a vacation in the south of France that a lot of people can’t take. There’s also the incredible magnetism and chemistry of the two stars, who were real-life lovers.”The film is classified as a psychological thriller, but to first-time viewers, very little happens until the very end. “Can you believe there’s another hour of this?” I overhead one older woman marvel to her friend near the halfway mark.“A Bigger Splash,” the marvelous 2015 remake starring Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, which Americans may be more familiar with, maintains the broad strokes of the plot, but, as the title suggests, it is much splashier. In that version, the drowning is an accidental crime of passion, far from the cold, calculating murder of “La Piscine”; the dialogue is faster, the cuts sharper, the music louder.Watching it now, having done a deep dive (ahem) into the original, made me acutely aware it was the very absence of action, the unapologetic decadence, that kept pulling me back to the theater. This is not a film interested in passing judgment on la belle vie.Even as I became more sensitive to the subtleties of the film’s dialogue (“the first swim really takes it out of you,” says Marianne, when Penelope returns from the beach having lost her virginity to Jean-Paul), I remained more interested in simply watching beautiful people do very little. “Tomorrow I will take a long siesta,” Marianne declares, lying on a couch in her bathing suit after a day by the pool. Yes, please.That a film so grounded in the gratuitous has resonated in 2021 is perhaps not entirely surprising. After a year in which New York City suffered enormous loss and its residents lived heavily circumscribed lives, it’s understandable we are looking to take our clothes off and have a good time, onscreen and off.Perhaps, too, there is something unconsciously appealing about the pervading undercurrent of anxiety. Much like the “hot vax summer” that never was, it turns out there is not another hour of this.After returning from Harry’s funeral, Jean-Paul, Marianne and Penelope stand at the pool’s edge. “I will have the pool drained,” Jean-Paul says. “I will never swim in this pool again,” Marianne says.New York will, no doubt, swim in many pools again, but for the moment, as the darker days return, there is some comfort in still being able to do so for two hours at a time. More

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      Lisa Joy on ‘Reminiscence,’ ‘Westworld’ and the Lure of Techno-Noir

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      The writer-director says she is obsessed with time. One way to have more of it is “to create whole new timelines and dimensions.”In her first writers’ room, Lisa Joy was politely pulled aside and told she didn’t need to work so hard. After all, born in New Jersey to British-Taiwanese parents, she was just a diversity hire.The experience did little to stifle Joy’s ambitions or work ethic. In 2013, while expecting her first child, she wrote the screenplay for “Reminiscence,” a tech-noir thriller, and began developing the cerebral sci-fi “Westworld” for HBO with her husband, the “Memento” screenwriter Jonathan Nolan.After three seasons of the show — the fourth is on the way — Joy stepped up to direct “Reminiscence” herself. In the film, debuting Aug. 20 on HBO Max and in theaters, Hugh Jackman plays a private investigator who taps into clients’ memories but becomes torturously fixated on his own. It’s a story about the pull of the past set in the future, in a Miami that has succumbed to rising waters and is populated by people who have turned nocturnal to escape the searing heat of the day.In a recent video call, Joy spoke from her office in Los Angeles about being a perpetual outsider, current events imitating science fiction, and her partnership with Nolan. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.You wrote “Reminiscence” while pregnant. It does feel like the work of someone at a turning point — looking back while looking ahead.My main goal was to write something that entertained me while I was puking with morning sickness! Certainly it was a very dramatic moment. My husband was working a lot, I was at home with the dogs. I had a lot of time to contemplate my life. At the same time, my grandfather passed away. So there was loss as well as new beginnings. Sorting through his belongings was what really started my meditation on loss, and memory, and the way our memories start to fade.Rebecca Ferguson, left, and Hugh Jackman in “Reminiscence.”Warner Bros.Looking at the level of detail in your screenplay, I wonder if to some extent you had mentally directed it already?When I write, I imagine the characters talking, I design the room, I block the scene in my head. I kind of transcribe the movie I’m already looking at. So when other directors were pitching their ideas, I realized that none of the visions aligned with my own. I wanted it to have the spirit of an independent film, to take some more risks, tell a story that wasn’t in a clear genre.And Hugh Jackman in the lead role?The second I even contemplated directing it, I knew Hugh was the right leading man. I wanted to show a hero unraveling, questioning his own memories and coming to understand a more nuanced version of the world. Hugh has that soulfulness. And he can also kick a lot of ass.A lot of ass-kicking along with a lot of mind-bending.And romance. I wanted to have all those elements in the film. Because life is like that. The polarity of film is frustrating for me. “This is an art-house film. This is a popcorn film.” I think that underestimates audiences.You started out writing in comedy, on the series “Pushing Daisies.” When did you feel the gravitational pull toward science fiction?I’ve always liked stories that tackle great, big timeless themes. It’s just where my curiosity took me. When I first went around trying to pitch “Reminiscence” — I was heavily pregnant — people would look at me and think, what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you writing this mysterious, dark, violent, sexy thing? Do a rom-com! People didn’t expect me to do huge, ambitious, world-building things as a junior writer.Why set the film at some unspecified time in the future?Stories are more universal when you don’t stick a pin in it. And when I first started contemplating this world, it was nothing like the world we live in now. I didn’t think reality would catch up to science fiction so quickly. And then, right about when the trailer dropped, there were photos of the walls they’re building in Miami. I think it was the front page of The New York Times. They looked exactly like our set designs. There are also scenes of upheaval and rioting in the streets in the movie, and political and socioeconomic unrest. There was a moment when people were like, this is too far-fetched. And then the next week riots broke out.Joy said she’s obsessed with time:  “Maybe one way to have more of it is to live in multiple worlds every day, to create whole new timelines and dimensions.”Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times“Westworld” premiered around the time of #MeToo, and the treatment of the androids in the show seemed to speak to that movement. Were you conscious of drawing on your own experiences in the industry?None of my work is explicitly confessional, but at the same time, we are who we are. I had just come off a staff that was all-male [USA’s “Burn Notice”]. I wanted to take back my story in the only way I knew how. Which was to write.It’s not like I have some gift of prophecy. We live in this world. And we need to find a way to survive it. For me, acknowledging the cage you’re within is a way to break out of it. And it’s not just women — it’s anyone who’s felt trapped or been subjected to cruelty.You’ve said you’ve felt like an outsider for much of your life.I was born in America, but my mom is Asian, my dad is British. Hollywood was as far away as the moon when I was a kid. There’s always been a feeling of displacement. But almost everybody has that. That’s part of the human condition: to feel bereft from the currents rushing around us. And it’s one of the things that you can explore in fiction without being didactic or presumptuous about another person’s specific experience. And hopefully form a connection.You were working as a consultant in finance and tech before Hollywood called — in the middle of a presentation you were giving, is that right?It was kind of an abrupt change! I’ve always loved writing, but in the beginning, trying to be a writer was impossible. I had college debt, I had financial obligations. I worked in corporate jobs, but the whole time, I kept writing. Not because I had any expectation of being a working writer, but because it made me happy.But working in another field for 10 years before becoming a paid writer — that’s not wasted time. When you’re a producer, it helps to be able to know how money works. Everything is a language. Math is a language. Computer science is a language. I spend a lot of time trying to be conversational in as many as possible.Jackman plays a private investigator who taps into client’s memories.Warner Bros.There was even some Pythagorean problem-solving on your film set, wasn’t there?It was for this complicated scene where Hugh is looking at a hologram of a memory of Hugh looking at a hologram of a memory. I called it a Hugh turducken.Is it true a friend introduced you to Jonathan because you had a similar verbose email-writing style.[Laughs] It’s true. We met at the premiere of “Memento.” I didn’t expect to meet my future husband on the red carpet the second I stepped on it. I was skeptical of him. Hollywood has a reputation — not entirely unwarranted. But we became friends. We were pen pals for a long time.You ended up married and being collaborators. I’ve seen you describe creating a fictional world together as “romantic.”I remember when we wrapped the finale of the first season. We had built Sweetwater [the town in “Westworld”] in Santa Clarita. It was a magical thing — you could walk those streets. The world in our head had manifested. Along with a child. We took a golf cart, and the sun was rising in the distance. And we drove through the center of Sweetwater, with our baby on my lap.I am obsessed with time. There’s never enough of it, especially with the ones you love. And maybe one way to have more of it is to live in multiple worlds every day, to create whole new timelines and dimensions. More

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      ‘Sweet Girl’ Review: Violence as an Insurance Policy

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      A health care company is the bad guy in this revenge thriller starring Jason Momoa.Grieving husbands, fathers and even dog owners are a cornerstone of the revenge thriller, a genre that uses violence to reflect the anxieties of their audiences. At their best, revenge thrillers deliver the catharsis of the wronged hero triumphing over society’s ills — corrupt political systems, terrorist groups and human traffickers. The innovation in the otherwise nondescript action film “Sweet Girl” is that here, the shadowy organization employing contract killers and evading justice is a health care company.Ray (Jason Momoa) is a father lost in grief for his beloved wife, who died of cancer. He is haunted by the idea that her death was preventable, if only Bioprime, a powerful medical research company, hadn’t blocked a generic version of a patented cancer medication from reaching the market. Ray is contacted by a journalist looking to write an exposé on the company, but the reporter is murdered during their conversation. Ray and his teenage daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) are witnesses.Years pass, yet Ray’s obsession with the Bioprime conspiracy never subsides. He seeks out insurance executives, but his attempts to get answers result in fatal encounters with private security. Ray’s investigation becomes a rampage, and through it all, Rachel remains by his side.For this action film, the director Brian Andrew Mendoza favors a utilitarian style. His color palette leans toward grays, blues and browns. His fight scenes are not flashy, or even particularly memorable, but they are clear, effectively conveying the necessary information about whose fist has connected with whose face. The simplicity of the visuals means there is little to distract from how characters have been cast in the movie’s morality play — a family faces down the organized crime syndicate of modern medicine.Sweet GirlRated R for strong violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Protégé’ Review: Ladykiller

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      Maggie Q and Michael Keaton play characters that get turned on by termination in this monumentally silly action movie.“The Protégé,” — a lady-assassin movie whose heroine is as indestructible as the genre clichés surrounding her — might profit from the unexpected presence of Michael Keaton, but not by much.An ultraflexible Maggie Q plays Anna, rescued as a child from Vietnam by Moody (an underused Samuel L. Jackson) and trained to follow in his contract-killer footsteps. When it appears that Moody has been offed, Anna embarks on a vengeance spree that will unearth a seductive villain named Rembrandt (Keaton) and a ragtag biker gang led by Robert Patrick, who seems understandably uncertain of his character’s motivation.The silliness in Richard Wenk’s script is epic. Anna is no everyday executioner, but a cat-loving, cupcake-making bookstore worker who knows her way around a first edition. She’s the kind of gal who can go from torture chamber to dinner table with nary a blemish, and she does, flirting with Rembrandt over the size and capabilities of their respective firearms. Who knew waterboarding could give you such a glow?Plot credibility, of course, is the least important aspect of movies like this, which are all about attitude, lethal accessories and generic, smart-mouth dialogue. (When someone says, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” you know it will occur almost immediately.) Shot mainly in and around Bucharest, Romania, “The Protégé” has little to distinguish it except a director, Martin Campbell, with competent action chops and a penchant for pairing violence with make-out music.Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her. If there’s a sequel following her and Keaton’s characters in couples therapy, I might be forced to buy a ticket.The ProtégéRated R for risible romance and creative slaughtering. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Joe Galloway, Decorated Vietnam War Correspondent, Dies at 79

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      He chronicled the first major battle of the war in “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” and raised questions about the invasion of Iraq.Joe Galloway, a war correspondent whose wrenching account of the first major battle of the Vietnam War was the basis for the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which became a best seller and the basis of a hit movie, died on Wednesday in Concord, N.C. He was 79.His wife, Dr. Grace Liem, said the cause was complications of a heart attack.Mr. Galloway started in journalism at 17 and worked for 22 years as a war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International. He was the only civilian awarded a medal of valor by the Army for combat action in the Vietnam War.He later wrote for U.S. News & World Report and for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. He played a vital role in the skeptical reporting by the chain’s Washington bureau about the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, claims the administration used to justify the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.“He hates war, and he loves soldiers,” Lewis Lord, a former colleague at U.S. News, told the Military Writers and Editors Association when it honored Mr. Galloway in 2006 on his return to his home in Texas from his reporting base in Washington.Mr. Galloway and Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore collaborated on a wrenching account of the first major battle in Vietnam, published in 1992.In the foreword to “We Are Soldiers Still,” a sequel to “We Were Soldiers,” General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led allied forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, called Mr. Galloway “the finest combat correspondent of our generation — a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”Mr. Galloway, who carried a weapon while covering the Vietnam War as a U.P.I. correspondent, was embedded with American troops during the four-day battle of Ia Drang, in the jungle of the Central Highlands, which began a day after his 24th birthday in 1965. He was awarded a Bronze Star Medal with the “V” device, denoting heroism, for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire during the engagement.Both sides claimed victory, with the United States convinced it could win a war of attrition and North Vietnam confident it could withstand whatever technological advantage the Americans wielded over Vietnamese guerrillas.The U.S. troops were commanded by Harold G. Moore, then a lieutenant colonel and later a lieutenant general, with whom Mr. Galloway would collaborate on “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.” The book was published in 1992 and adapted 10 years later into the Randall Wallace film “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson, in which Barry Pepper played Mr. Galloway.Nicholas Proffitt wrote in The New York Times Book Review that “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” was “a car crash of a book; you are horrified by what you’re seeing, but you can’t take your eyes off it.”Mr. Galloway and Lieutenant General Moore published “We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam” in 2008.Articles by Mr. Galloway reconstructing the battle, which became the basis of the first book, won a National Magazine Award for U.S. News & World Report in 1991.As a result of Mr. Galloway’s critical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld summoned him to a meeting with high-ranking officers and accused him of relying on sources who were retired and out of the loop. As John Walcott, a colleague of his at U.S. News, Knight Ridder and McClatchy (which bought Knight Ridder), recalled, Mr. Galloway startled the group by declaring that some of his sources “might even be in this room.”He later admitted that he only said that to rattle the assembled military brass, and that “it was fun watching ’em sweat.” Mr. Galloway was an author, along with other U.S. News staff members, of “Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War” (1992). His coverage of the later Persian Gulf conflict was portrayed in Rob Reiner’s film “Shock and Awe” (2017), in which Tommy Lee Jones played Mr. Galloway.In the 2002 movie “We Were Soldiers Once,” based on their book, Barry Pepper, left, played Mr. Galloway and Mel Gibson played General Moore, who was a lieutenant colonel during the Vietnam War.Stephen Vaughan/Paramount PicturesJoseph Lee Galloway Jr. was born on Nov. 13, 1941, in Refugio, Texas, to Joseph Galloway Sr. and Marian (Dewvell) Galloway. His father worked for Humble Oil.Less than a month after he was born, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four of his mother’s brothers went to war; so did his father and five of his brothers.“I did not meet my father until the end of 1945, when he came home from the service,” Mr. Galloway said in an interview seen on C-SPAN. “My earliest memories,” he added, “are of living in houses full of frightened women looking out the window for the telegraph boy.” He was so affected by the war, he said, that he decided to become a war correspondent.He was hired by The Advocate in Victoria, Texas, when he was 17, joined U.P.I. at 19 and was bureau chief or regional manger in Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi, Singapore, Moscow, Los Angeles and Vietnam, where he served four stints.In addition to Dr. Liem, whom he married in 2012, he is survived by two sons, Joshua and Lee, from his first marriage, to Theresa Magdalene Null, who died in 1996. (His second marriage, to Karen Metsker, ended in divorce.) He is also survived by a stepdaughter, Li Mei Gilfillan; three grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. He lived in Concord.Mr. Galloway acknowledged that when he arrived in Vietnam, most of what he knew about war he had learned from John Wayne movies, but he understood the need for accuracy in a combat zone. “You really don’t want to screw up a story about men who are armed and dangerous and who you will likely see again,” he said in an interview with historynet.com.He was also torn about reporting his doubts about American prospects for an honorable exit strategy.“I thought, ‘This war we can’t win, but I’m not going to say that, because I don’t want to hurt my friends, the soldiers who are fighting this war.’” he recalled. “You know the one thing about soldiers is that if they are in combat and they are losing their friends and buddies, you can’t tell them that they died for nothing. You can’t say that; you wound them, you hurt them, you damage them. And that I could not do.”Still, he said, he wished he could have “written a story so powerful about that battle” that it would have driven President Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw.Mr. Lord, his former colleague, described Mr. Galloway as “a most unlikely antiwar activist — a big, blunt Texan, proud to bear arms, as politically incorrect as he could be, full of unprintable epithets and anecdotes.” But, he added, Mr. Galloway “had a heart as big as his home state, a superb intellect that shone mischievously through smiling Irish eyes, and an openness that made it possible for him to conclude that it was an unpardonable sin to send young Americans to fight meaningless wars.”Mr. Galloway’s view of war came through when he responded to criticism from the Pentagon after he profiled a retired Marine general who had critiqued Mr. Rumsfeld’s conduct of the Iraq war.In an email exchange, Mr. Rumsfeld’s spokesman maintained, “We’re all hard at it, trying to do what’s best for the country.” So was he, Mr. Galloway replied, during four decades of covering America’s valiant warriors.“Someone once asked me if I had learned anything from going to war so many times,” Mr. Galloway told the Pentagon spokesman. “My reply, ‘Yes, I learned how to cry.’” More