The evidence, then, suggests that while his connection to Robert Capa mattered deeply to Morris on both personally and professionally, for Capa the relationship on those levels proved more peripheral — at least until the brief year between his hiring of Morris for Magnum and his death in Vietnam. Not a two-way street, in short, though Morris takes pains to intimate otherwise. […]
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In place of the established myth, with its enticing melodrama, I supplied an alternative tale with its own attractions, a complex skein of personal and interpersonal motivations: camaraderie, fear, failure, guilt, self-protection, white lies. No less rewarding, I’d like to think, just in a different way. […] The fact that this roll, along with the other films most likely classified top secret, got developed in LIFE‘s darkroom under the supervision of not just darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw and LIFE staff photographer Hans Wild but also a SHAEF custody officer, precludes any possibility of some fatal neglect during processing. […] Robert Capa’s habit of self-invention proved contagious for John Morris, his self-styled “adopted brother,” both of them prone to the condition Steven Colbert named “truthiness,” which he formally defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” […] Ironically, Robert Capa’s life and work — committed, above all, to the fight against fascism — has ended up, by his own doing, enmeshed in its very own “big lie,” which, repeated often enough (as that strategy’s progenitor predicted), has become what people believe. An object lesson in how “the big lie” functions. We’ve had 70 years of that lie — surely enough. It ends here. […] |
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