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https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...ntally-un-american-attacks-alexander-vindman/
A documentary crew working for Ken Burns was exploring New York in the early 1980s, working on a feature about the Statue of Liberty as part of Burns’s “America” series. Near Brighton Beach, they found an elderly woman sitting on a bench with twin boys, then about 10 years old.
They'd come from Russia, from Kyiv, the twins told the camera, their explanations overlapping. “Our mother died, so we went to Italy,” one added, “and then we came here."
In the final version of the film, titled, “Statue of Liberty,” the twins begin a section of interviews with other immigrants to the United States: a woman from Austria, a couple from Italy, a man from Cuba who worked at Yankee Stadium. The through-line is obvious, even without historian David McCullough’s introduction to the segment.
“To me, the Statue of Liberty is like the light that’s left on back home,” he said. Being at the statue, he said, made “you feel something I think much more than just being an American. You feel the importance of being human. And you feel a kind of fraternal [bond] with everybody who has come here."
That’s when the film transitions to the twins, identified as having come from the Soviet Union — at that point, the fiercest international rival to the United States.
Above that identifier is the twins’ family name: the Vindmans.
The twins, Alexander and Yevgeny Vindman, both ended up working for the White House under President Trump. Both Vindmans served in the U.S. Army, and both rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Each now works for the National Security Council.