October 15, 2006 -- Sure, a picture is worth a thousand words. But to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the brain trust prosecuting World War II, one particular photo had a price tag of $14 billion.
At least that's the premise of Clint Eastwood's accomplished new movie "Flags of Our Fathers," which opens Friday, based on the best-selling book by James Bradley. In the film, an off-screen narrator notes that "The right picture can win or lose a war."
The photo in question is AP newsman Joe Rosenthal's 1945 shot of six U.S. servicemen raising an American flag on Iwo Jima. The image is among the most iconic in American culture. It has been rendered in everything from stamps and posters to - as recreated in some of the film's more inspired, cynical scenes - ice-cream desserts and bizarre football half-time show extravaganzas.
(It even resonated in the most memorable image of 9/11, as firefighters hoisted an American flag at Ground Zero.)
But the facts behind the raising of the flag are less translucent than the infamous black sand on this Pacific island 650 miles south of Tokyo. And it is the question of what really happened on Iwo Jima, along with subtler explorations of heroism and propaganda, that make up the central themes of Eastwood's film.
"If we don't raise 14 billion dollars, this war is over by the end of the month," an unctuous government handler in the film tells the three surviving Iwo Jima flag raisers, who have been ordered home to capitalize on their new-found fame as stars of the world's most recognized photograph.
Their new mission: become living symbols of American valor, lift the spirits of a war-weary nation and fill the coffers of the American treasury by leading the War-bond effort.
Today we take it for granted that the government can spend whatever it needs to, and run up as large a deficit as is necessary, to fight a war. But that wasn't always the case.
"World War I and World War II were financed by selling bonds to the American public," author Bradley reminds The Post.
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