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Captain America vs. The Winter Soldier: 70 years of legacy against 70 years of atrocities
By Georgia Tanner, for Rolling Stones Magazine
Steve Rogers is a tall man, imposing, and intimidating, even when surrounded by armed military and sitting comfortably at a low couch. He watches everything with the air of someone clearly traumatized, assessing threat levels at the door, at the barred windows, at the people who come in and provide him with everyday services.
He is, famously, the most controversial war criminal on the planet, at the same time that he is America’s hero. His jail - and make no mistake, it is a jail - is comfortable and serene, decorated to look like a 1940s apartment, and one can almost forget the heavy bars and steel doors, the constant surveillance of armed guards, or the Starktech cameras, designed to watch him twenty-four hours a day, and reportedly unbreakable.
But Rogers assures me that’s all unnecessary. He doesn’t smile when he does it - in fact, he doesn’t smile at all through our conversation - and tells me, as I sit, that he’s never destroyed anything in the apartment. “My mother wouldn’t have wanted me to,” he says, snappish, more at the guards than at anyone else.
Rogers famously was the hero America needed in 1945, and after his disappearance and presumed death, the media around him hyped to a fever pitch that included comics and cards, movies and radio show, until the mid 1960s when young Baby Boomers found a distaste for war that culminated in the Hippie movement. Since then, Captain America has made resurgences in various forms - a 1980s cartoon designed to sell toys, a comic, and of course, most recently with the Avengers book series, where a fictionalized account of their lives includes heroes like Captain America, as well as fictional characters such as the Wasp and Marvel Girl. But Rogers isn’t interested in much of it. “I have some of the old comics,” he says, seriously, “but mostly I keep them because it reminds me of 1944. Not much does.”
Rogers was also recently discovered alive during the storm of the Triskelion falling and the Helicarriers destroying key parts of Washington D.C. Hauled out of Hydra control by the Avengers Black Widow, he helped eliminate key components of Hydra military operations while the Black Widow uploaded SHIELD files onto the internet with a fervor that overshadowed Snowden’s Wikileaks. But shortly after the events of April 13th went down, Rogers turned himself in for trial.
When questioned about it, he doesn’t reply, instead favoring a gaze that suggests I’ve asked a stupid question. In fact, I spent a great deal of our hour together feeling as if all I was able to do was ask stupid questions. Suffice to say that Steve Rogers has a face for scolding. When I ask him about if he’s nervous for his trial, though, he shakes his head. “I’ve been waiting for this trial since 1946,” he tells me, “and I think that the American people and the global community need it. I owe it to everyone who is related to the people that the Winter Soldier killed, and I owe it to the world to provide them with the answers that only I know the truth about.”
Special prosecutors, however, seem to be unsure if they agree. Matthew Murdock, normally a defense lawyer in New York, and Jennifer Walters, an expert on war crimes, are both examining this case to see what can be done. They have gone on record stating that this is a complicated situation due to Rogers conditioning and treatment at the hands of Hydra, even while many pundits loudly call for Rogers head. However, and perhaps most importantly, what is left of SHIELD - including several analysts and some agents - state that Rogers is the key to dismantling what is left of Hydra, and that if any punishment is to be served, it should be done with SHIELD in an arrangement not unlike Frank Abagnale’s arrangement with the FBI. “I’ll do it,” Rogers says, his jaw clenching and unclenching, “I’ll burn down every head of Hydra, if I have to. But I don’t know if it’s a good idea. What they did to me, I don’t think it can ever be undone.”
Neurosurgeons agree, stating that they just don’t know, so Rogers remains in lockdown for now, although he admits that he provides as much information as he can in the form of maps, technical manuals, and anything else he remembers. “It gives me something to do,” he says, although there is an easel and a sketchpad lying on the apartment table. “Something worthwhile,” he adds, although worthwhile is an interesting statement from a man whose wartime sketchbook fetched over two million at auction in 1998, and whose modern sketches are sold at rates that astonish art dealers when he allows one to slip out of his control.
The impression left, then, is of a man who will never forgive what has been done to him, even as he forgives himself for what he has done. “Don’t think that I mix up blame and responsibility,” he tells me, severely, when I ask him if he understands that many people do not blame him for his actions. “I was not to blame, I was brainwashed. But I was raised to take responsibility. Someone has to.” He finishes this statement by saying, “Bucky tried-” before he went silent, staring at the window.
Bucky, of course, refers to James Buchanan Barnes, his best friend, second in command, and until recently, a covert agent of SHIELD. The fact that James Barnes had survived in a similar fashion to Rogers, which is to say frozen only to be discovered recently, seems to be one of the great cover-ups of our time. Posing as his own grandson, Barnes was responsible for not only working diligently as a sniper and an agent for SHIELD, but also for the retrieval of Rogers, at the expense of his own life.
Rogers is reluctant to talk about Barnes, at first, until Hawkeye, my official escort, points out that if he wanted to memorialize Barnes, this would be the place to do it. “He was my best friend since we were six,” Rogers starts, with an impassioned tone to his voice. “He was always fishing me out of trouble, our whole lives long. I was always the one in trouble,” he clarifies, “Bucky was like a star, in our neighborhood. He had all the girls trailing after him, and he could have been friends with anyone. When I used to ask him why he chose me - this was mostly when I was fifteen - he would roll his eyes, and shake his head, and say what do you mean, why? It’s not my fault no one can see how great you are. That’s their problem.”
In fact, Rogers spends the next forty minutes talking about Barnes - recounting scrapes, telling war stories, giving me insight into a man who history books sometimes gloss over a little for the shine of Rogers. But listening to this, clearly, Rogers doesn’t agree with those books, or anyone who thought that Barnes wasn’t responsible for the man who Rogers became. “My mother gets a lot of credit for raising me, but it was Bucky who loved me best.”
I ask him to clarify. Rogers almost refuses, but finally he says it. “He loved me best, like he should have loved some girl. I wish he had said something before he found me four months ago. I wish I had told him that I felt the same back.” But then he sits, stony in silence for a moment. “You can publish that,” he tells me, “because I’m not afraid of what people will say. Bucky was the best man I ever knew. He saved me, and I couldn’t save him. If people can’t respect that about him, it’s their problem.”
Rogers spends the last ten minutes of our meeting apologizing; not in a begging way, but in a way that befits Captain America. “I’m sorry I couldn’t live up to what people saw me as,” he begins, “I’m sorry I killed so many people. I’m sorry I didn’t fight them more, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t save Bucky.” He has to pause, then, visibly upset, and Hawkeye moves between us, but Rogers waves him away. He continues to apologize, and before I leave, he hands me two pieces of paper. “I want you to publish these, too,” he tells me, “if you can.” One is a list of names, hundreds of names, of the people who he killed, and the other is a beautiful rendering of James Barnes, his famous smile with the crooked front teeth making him shine through the paper.
Rogers is both a hero and a villain in his own life story, perhaps. But to say he is only the sum of the things he has done condemns him in a way I’m not entirely comfortable with. Perhaps the only thing that will allow us to truly understand the mind of a man so distinctly out of time, with a life so complex as his, is the time to see how the future events turn out. But I’m sure that we are better for the acts of Steve Rogers when he acted under his own power, as much as he sees himself responsible as well for the acts of the Winter Soldier.
Editors feedback: Georgia, this piece needs serious polishing, and the title is not working for me, unless you’re really going to go into more depth about this. Give me more quotes, don’t hesitate to transcribe entire portions of this interview - unless you’re turning it into a book. Are you? If you are, see me, we can discuss. I’ll print the Barnes picture but I can’t print the list of names, not without D.C. breathing down my neck. Also, if you’re going to insinuate that Rogers came out, can you do it with a bit less ambiguity? God, you know how I hate ambiguous statements like that one. 11am meeting on Monday over this. Good work, otherwise.