August 1, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: The West Wing

[Thiscoming weekend, the greatMartin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been asimpressiveand inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even moreinspiring Americans!]

On theiconic actor who was almost the fictional President Bartlett, and two ways toAmericanStudy the one who was.

As both aserious West Wing fan (especially in its particularly stellar first fewseasons) and someone possessing a wealth of useless pop culture knowledge, I’lladmit to being surprised that I didn’t know until researching this post thatthe role of President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett was initiallyoffered to Sidney Freakin’ Poitier.As that article notes, negotiations apparently didn’t get too far, but we canstill imagine not just this particular show with Poitier in that lead role, butalso and even more importantly a fictional Black President on television in1999. On that latter note, it was only two years later that 24 debuted,featuring presidential candidateDavid Palmer (the great Dennis Haysbert) who beginning in Season 2 (2002-2003)would in fact become the nation’s first Black President. Butimportant as Palmer was to 24, in season 1 and throughout his time onthe show, he was always a supporting character to Kiefer Sutherland’s iconicand badass protagonist Jack Bauer, and so it still would have been quite differentand far more significant for the President at the heart of The West Wingto be portrayed by a Black actor. What might have been!

When negotiationswith Poitier fell through, the show’s creator Aaron Sorkin and his fellowproducers decided to go with an actor with whom Sorkin had already worked on apresidential project from just a few years earlier: MartinSheen, who had played Presidential Chief of Staff A.J. MacInerneyin The American President (1995, and written by Sorkin). While it mayhave been simply the existing working relationship between the two men that ledto this choice, it’s really interesting to think about President Bartlett as aWest Wing promotion for Sheen from that earlier role, and I would say thatthere’s an ethnic American undercurrent to that trajectory (if not nearly as dramatic,or at least not as visible, of one as Poitier would have been). That is, as I’vetraced at length in this series, Martin Sheen’s birth and legal name of RamónEstévez, and the Hispanic heritage through his Spanish immigrant fatherreflected in that name (as well as the multi-ethnic heritage and familialhistory of cross-culturaltransformation contributed by his Irish immigrant mother and their marriage),make his President Bartlett very much an American first in his own right.

And yet (aphrase with which I’ve started many third paragraphs in this blog’s history, Ibelieve). It’s not just that Sheen, through the name change I wrote about inyesterday’s post among other elements, could be described as white-passing (orat least not overtly Hispanic in any identifying ways for folks who don’t knowhis biography). It’s that the character of Josiah Bartlett is explicitlydefined as part of a foundational and elite New Hampshire familythat dates back to at least the time of the American Revolution (which we knowbecause none other than Paul Revere designed their carving knife),and thus that both the family and the individual are almost certainly not intendedto be Hispanic. If Sheen’s heritage and multi-generational family are defininglyAmerican in some of the best ways, I’d say that a politician having to minimizeor even disguise ethnic heritage to be perceived as more of an “AmericanPresident” is definingly American in some of the worst. Would The West Winghave been as successful or long-running if its President were overtly Hispanic(or Black, or any identity other than white non-Hispanic)? I’m not at all sureit would, and that’s a frustrating thing to recognize.

LastSheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?