The first night of my first Christmas break from college, I reunited with my closest friends from high school and we went to the opening night of A Few Good Men. We had all gone of to different universities, including Mike, who was in his first year at West Point. Mike had always dreamed of going to the military academy, had pulled it off and was a military guy through and through.
I assume you know the story A Few Good Men is tells, so I won’t recount it here, but walking out of the theatre, I had experienced what I think director Rob Reiner wanted me to experience. Tom Cruise’s Daniel Kaffee had bested Jack Nicolson’s Nathan Jessup, but Mike saw it differently. As we went to the car, Mike said, “Jessup was right.” Years later, I discovered that neither of us individually experienced what writer, Aaron Sorkin, was going after, but we did experience it together. Sorkin’s take is more nuanced. He says, “they were both right. They just weren’t both lawful.”
While nearly everyone quotes, “You can’t handle the truth,” the more thoughtful articulation of Jessup position is in the extended monologue.