White House Says 'No' to Denzel Washington's 'Great Debaters'


One Golden Globe-nominated movie that won’t be shown at the White House this month: Denzel Washington’s “The Great Debaters.”

The highly praised film, starring Oscar-winners Washington and Forest Whitaker, was just nominated for eight NAACP Image Awards.

But a memo from the White House’s Paris Dennard, which this column has seen, says that “there will not be a screening here at the White House. I could not get time on President Bush or Mrs. Bush's calendars.”

The memo says that three White House staffers saw the movie, which is a fictionalized account of tiny all-black Wiley College’s debate team in Texas beating that of Harvard University in a 1935 competition.

Ironically, Laura Bush gave a speech in March 2005 at an Atlanta high school praising urban debate programs at an event called “Helping America's Youth.”

“How is debate helping children in Atlanta?" she said then. "Debaters learn how to identify a good argument and reject a bad one, so they're better equipped to deal with the hazards of negative peer pressure.”
Dennard, of the White House’s office of Legislative Affairs, told me when I spoke to him Friday morning that “there were never plans to screen the movie officially at the White House.”
Among the movies Mrs. Bush has screened are “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” “Charlotte’s Web” and “Glory Road," according to the White House Web site

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