POLITICAL ODYSSEY Film about Biden's first year and admission of mistake in Afghanistan

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - President Joe Biden's team may have been serious and well-intentioned. But the documentary crew that gained wide access to key members shows a White House that encountered failures partly due to its arrogance.

That is the central conclusion from the upcoming HBO documentary “Year One: A Political Odyssey” which premieres on Wednesday and features several interviews with Biden's Covid-19 and national security teams during 2021.

West Wing Playbook got an early look at the film, which begins with the pandemic and a militarized Washington at the start of Biden's inauguration on January 20, just days after the Capitol attack, Patria writes.

Some employees had to board buses at the National Zoo to get to the White House on the first day and watch the inaugural address on their phones. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan watched the ceremony from the Situation Room to help monitor for violence.

However, after that ominous start, the film shows how Biden's top officials quickly began to gain confidence, after launching a mass Covid vaccination campaign ahead of expectations.

“The president set us a goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days. We did 100 million in 58 days,” Biden's then-Covid “czar” Jeff Zients tells the filmmakers.

It was a premature celebration, one that the filmmakers meticulously documented as key White House aides began to realize they had made a mistake, Patria writes.

After showing Biden's July 4 remarks from his “Independence from Covid-19” event, the documentary pivots to the Delta variant spreading across the country, even among those vaccinated.

“We did not, clearly, have a sense of the impact of new variants,” admits then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

"It became clear that we were going to be dealing with a much larger number of cases than we had anticipated," notes Andy Slavitt, the top official on the Covid team. "It needed this very clean story of vaccinated and unvaccinated and it read: vaccinated, yes, but with an asterisk."

Documentary director John Maggio told West Wing Playbook that "Delta caught everyone off guard - Zients, Slavitt, everyone was." But the film isn't just about pandemic-era missteps. It's about a White House realizing that good intentions aren't always enough to overcome real-world challenges, NAP reports.

In the film, Secretary of State Tony Blinken candidly admits a major miscalculation in orchestrating the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“I firmly believed that we would have a strong embassy presence in Kabul certainly throughout this year [2021], and into next year,” he says. “Everything we were planning and doing was based on that assumption.”

Maggio said he first gained access to Blinken and the State Department, then gradually worked his way out from there. The documentary includes interviews with Chief of Staff RON KLAIN, Secretary of Defense LLOYD AUSTIN, Climate Envoy JOHN KERRY, and other top officials along with New York Times reporter David Sanger, who also produced the film.

Although the President and Vice President's offices declined the crew's requests to interview their directors, the HBO documentary offers a window into how the White House psyche can shift. Maggio noted that “by the end of the summer it felt like the wheels were coming off... Suddenly they became a band that couldn't shoot straight.”

Still, Maggio concludes that Biden's team learned from Afghanistan. As a result, they became hyper-vigilant as Russia began to amass forces on Ukraine's border. “That was sort of their saving grace for the 'first year,'” he said.

Whether that portends future revelations elsewhere, Maggio said, can only be speculated.

“This kind of urban nature of this administration, they are very worldly – Is that the best approach? I don't know. I think it will hold up on its own. It will be interesting to see what happens.”