revealed that Queeg was suffering from post-traumatic stress caused by his service as a destroyer captain on the harrowing "North Atlantic run", making Keefer, who has never experienced combat, all the more odious. Ben Munceford, the journalist, serves as an analogous character to Keefer as the resident intellectual aboard the Bedford who has a worldview that is essentially opposed to that of the Navy, but he is portrayed as a far more sympathetic and likeable character. Unlike Keefer, the writer who was reluctantly drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II, Munceford is a journalist, being the only civilian aboard the Bedford. However, Keefer and Munceford have similar short term expectations of the Navy, as Keefer is writing a novel aboard the Caine that he intends to publish after he is discharged, while Munceford is only on the Bedford to write a story about Finlander. Both Keefer and Munceford are intellectuals who are skeptical of authority figures and are always asking inconvenient questions. Keefer successfully undermines the leadership of Queeg and provokes the mutiny, while Munceford is unsuccessful in challenging the leadership of Finlander, leading the latter to embark upon a course that leads to the deaths of everyone aboard the Bedford. Munceford comes to serve as the voice of reason against Finlander, and in both the novel and film he is portrayed as quite justified in challenging Captain Finlander. Whitfield argued that the different messages presented about obeying authority and the portrayal of the military men and intellectuals in The Caine Mutiny vs. The Bedford Incident illustrated how much mentalities had changed from the 1950s to the 1960s. Widmark, a political left wing liberal, modeled the mannerisms and rhetorical style of Captain Finlander after Senator Barry Goldwater, who was the Republican candidate in the 1964 United States presidential election. Goldwater had been attacked during his campaign as being too hawkish, most notably in Lyndon B. Johnson's infamous Daisy Girl television commercial, which warned that, if elected, Goldwater would start a nuclear war. The film's message—told via the story of Finlander, whose obsessive anti-Communism and relentless determination to provoke a confrontation with a Soviet submarine leads to the deaths of everyone on both the Bedford and the sub—is that Cold Warriors like Goldwater could provoke a nuclear war that would be the end of humanity. This criticism of hawkish, confrontational Cold War policies was part of a backlash against