A WEEK of Americana, as three documentaries examined the influence of the United States. Trump vs Harris: The battle for America (Channel 4, Wednesday of last week) was hastily made, sparked by President Biden’s withdrawal on 31 July from the presidential race (News, 26 July).
Matt Frei’s sober presentation from Washington showed the advantage of time-served journalists when big news breaks. Kamala Harris supporters, often women, spoke of “walking through fire” to get their candidate elected. In a bar in the swing state of Pennsylvania, a young male believed that he would be financially better off if “my man Donald” won the vote.
The UK-based commentators Sarah Churchwell and Bonnie Greer articulated their new optimism. With no access to the presidential hopefuls, we saw footage of Donald Trump crediting his gunshot survival to “the grace of God”, but received no analysis of Ms Harris’s upbringing as a Hindu, her Jewish husband, or her Baptist church attendance.
The Oscar-nominated Dror Moreh’s analysis of American foreign affairs since 1945, Corridors of Power: Should America police the world? (BBC 4, Tuesdays), was an elegant mixture of montage and archive, including interviews with Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. The now hazy rise of Saddam Hussein was examined through the long lens of the 1979 Shah of Iran’s overthrow by Islamic revolution, and the US’s need for a replacement ally in the region. Thawing diplomatic relations opened a chink for trade. Once American companies had an economic stake, sanctions against Saddam’s regime became unpalatable.
Opening credits of Kurdish children’s contorted bodies after chemical-weapons attacks, following footage of Belsen’s liberation, foreshadowed the results of pro-business foreign policy in Iraq. Reflecting on the US’s action after Saddam’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait, President Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, said: “Money’s worth fighting over.”
The US’s cultural soft power was an element of The Other Mrs Jordan (ITV1, Sundays), an examination of the American bigamist William Allen Jordan’s quarter-century of deception. “I blame romcoms for my views about life,” Mary, a mother of three from Edinburgh, said. She met Jordan online in 2000, when she had a good job, was raising her daughter alone, and “the only thing missing was love.”
For Mary, marriage was “a promise for life”. Switching between Mary’s believing that her husband, William, was a CIA spy in the early 2000s, and the belief of a New Jersey single mother, Mischele, that her lover, “Liam Allen”, worked under cover for the UK’s Ministry of Defence ten years later, the artful documentary sustained suspense.
The former US Marshal Tex Linsey’s diagram of Jordan’s often simultaneous victims in the US, Britain, Mexico, and Japan, revealed dozens of defrauded women, and at least 12 children. It is tempting to believe that we could smell a rat at the first unexplained absence, demand for money, or lame analysis text while “under cover” in Jenin. But Mary cautions against pride: “Don’t ever think it can’t happen to you.”