The program’s classified history meant that there was no established public record of what the Code Talkers had done — no contemporaneous newspaper coverage, no wartime public acknowledgment that could be pointed to as establishing the program’s historical significance.

The advocates were simultaneously trying to tell a story that most Americans had never heard and to argue that the men who had lived it deserved recognition commensurate with its significance.

The 2001 ceremony and the 2008 legislation that followed were the culmination of decades of that advocacy.

They represented genuine victories — formal, governmental acknowledgment of what the Code Talkers had done and what the delay in recognizing it had cost.

They were also, as several Code Talkers and their advocates noted, incomplete: the recognition came decades too late for most of the original twenty-nine and for many of the subsequent Code Talkers who had died before 2001.

The Film and Its Discontents