I have written about this in another section, and alluded to it in a post made earlier today, but now I raise the possibility that maybe Tom was not as loyal to Michael as one might think.

First of all there is no question that Tom, Sonny, and Vito were a tightly knit team. Tom enjoyed the affection of Vito and Sonny, but not so much Michael. After Vito's shooting, and Michael's departure to Sicily, we see cracks in the relationship with Sonny, but their arguements are brotherly, and there is no hint that Tom wants the Corleones to prevail in the war. After Sonny's death and Vito's surrender, Michael re-emeges, and basically the first thing he does is dismiss Tom because he is not a wartime consigliere, and from there on out seems to go out of his way to embarass him whenever he can.

Once Vito dies, Tom is further moved out of Michael's inner circle, and is only brought back in after the attempt on Michael's life in Tahoe. While Tom is temporarily back in charge of things, he manages to keep the family business profitable, ad he manages to compromise Senator Geary. His reward? Further humiliation by Michael.

Still, maybe it is Tom who is playing Michael and not the other way around. Maybe Tom wanted Michael out of the way.
Certainly he knew how to legitimize the family business, and he could have persuaded Connie and Fredo to go along with him.
Rocco and Neri would be more problematic, but if it is true that Rocco was on the outs with Michael, Tom could have persuaded him to align with him and get rid of Neri.

Maybe Tom was not outsmarted by Roth as he leads eeryone to believe, and maybe the Senate hearings were the ultimate set up. Its a good explanation for his withholding the truth from Michael about Roth's possible rescue of Fredo in Cuba, and more importantly "forgetting" to check New York sources about Pentangeli being alive, thus setting Michael up for a perjury rap. The plan to bring Pentangeli's brother into the mix was Michael's idea, and Tom had to go along to keep his cover, and ultimately his plan to undo Michael, under this scenario, fell apart. Still and all if he was really messing around with Sonny's widow, and fielding job offers from hotel chains, maybe he was looking at a post Michael time where he could gain leadership in the legitimized Corleone family.

After all at the beinning of GF III we leard that Tom had died. Of what? A fishing accident?

Now about those drapes......

i LOVE TOM HAGAN. He was fabulous in Days of Thunder.

What does that have to do with what DT said?

No he was squeezed to death by Francis Ford Coppola's cheapness. He would have appeared in Part III if FFC only agreed to pay what Duvall was asking, but FFC was watching his pennies so he could play with his wine.

Tom Hagen was loyal to Mike. Take that to the bank!

I see Tom as loyal to the bitter end. Even if he was hurt, bitter or angry at Michael (as brothers occasionally are sometimes) he never would have done anything against Michael or Michael's family. Although Tom's view of Michael as a brother is not always reciprocated, Tom certainly was viewed as a brother by Sonny and Fredo and perhaps as a son by Vito and Mama Corleone.

So Tom would be loyal to Vito's memory if nothing else.

Loyal, loyal, loyal. Tom was orphaned and homeless when Sonny brought him home. The Corleones gave him a home, sent him to college and law school, gave him an excellent living, but most of all gave him a family to belong to.

He would never betray that. Never.

Ditto.

Never a doubt as to Tom's loyalty. In addition to loyalty being ingrained in his character, he also (as we saw) needed the family and desperately wanted to be a brother--even more so than consigliere. I think Michael was telling the truth when he told Tom (after the Tahoe shooting), "Right now you're the only one I can completely trust."

Who are you? Sam Wheat??

Poor Sam Wheat, he was stuck in between two worlds.

And here I thought he may have died from smelling to much napalm in the morning.

Actually, he died in a surfing accident...

Actually, he died in a surfing accident... [/quote]


Consigliere don't surf.

What do you know about surfing, Major? You're from goddamn Virginia.

That's no joke. According to Mark Winegardner, Tom went surfing in a car and drowned!


Don T, are you implying that it was actually Tom who opened the drapes?

While I like your post and the possibilities you provide as to why Tom may not have been as loyal as we originally thought he was, to Michael, (and you do provide some legitimate food for thought) when push comes to shove I really have to agree with the others. Tom was loyal to the very end.

I think that even if Tom was not happy with the way Michael was handling things or the way that Michael treated him, he could never bring himself to betray Michael. In a man like Tom hagen's mind, to betray Michael would have been disloyalty to the memory of Vito. It would have been like he was actually betraying Vito.

I don't know, DC. I think Don Tomasso is just partial to Irish lawyers.

I'm just trying to be a bit provocative with this thread, and I recognize it is a long shot, but if we think of Tom as more than a two dimensional figure, there is the possiblity that he was out to undermine Michael ---- maybe even subconsciously.
After all if those stories about all the comedy he was playing with Sonny's WIDOW are true, that would be a betrayal to Vito wouldn't it?

Don T, don't get me wrong. When I first read your post I initially began to really think about and ponder what you had written. You absolutely provoked thought. You provide some really legitimate reasoning.

But after really thinking about it, I just cannot see Tom Hagen betraying the memory of Vito by betraying the son that Vito was most fond of. Tom seemed really moved when he and Michael are conversing, especially when he tells Michael that he always wanted to be thought of as a brother by him.

Well, with DC and TB PB and the rest all piling on here, I'm going to keep this thread going and come up with more on this theory. Wsant there a deleted scene or something in a draft about Tom complaining to Sandra about how Michael treated him?

If I'm not mistaken, Tom had an affair with Sandra (Sonny's widow) in an early version of the script.

I've said it more than once; Part II is one of the best movies I've ever seen, but it was rushed when it was produced (especially in writing the storyline - too many inconsistencies). Early versions of the script shouldn't be used as a source of info from which to argue a point.

That's a great point, and I'm often guilty of this. We can't look at early drafts of Parts II or III and draw any conclusions from them. The only thing these early scripts are good for are "what could have been," not what actually happened.

Well it's from the book and not the movie but when Vito was promoted to consigliere, (paraphrasing here) Tom was amused to learn that the other Families were slightly contemptuous of this move and had started calling the Corleone Family "The Irish Gang". It let Tom know that he'd never be fully accepted in the Sicilian organization and could never hope to succeed the Don.

But what's important here per the book is that Tom never had any desire to succeed the Don and viewed such an ambition as disrespectful to his "father" Vito and Vito's sons.

So even though Michael abused Tom's loyalty and treated him disrespectfully I don't think Tom ever could have had taken any action against him. At most he might have left, but as we know his loyalty (love?) wouldn't let him do that either.

Well, how far goes loyalty in general? I mean, if there has ever been a loyal person in history or fiction, it was Tom Hagen. But there's always a limit. And I think his loyalty was tested more often than that of Jesus.
Many times Michael has betrayed the memory of his father. So if Tom happened to distance himself from Michael it could be one way of keeping his loyalty to Vito.

Good points. Michael's exclusion of Tom from Family business, his emotional manipulation and humiliation of Tom, forcing Tom to carry out the "hit" on Frankie, the fact that Michael had either Rocco or Neri spying on Tom's personal life, and just his overall coldness and disdain for someone who was not only an older "brother" but a pretty important power broker all had to grate on Tom tremendously.

I could see Tom starting to give less of himself to Michael. Tom could just give the facts and the absolute minimum asked of him, offering no advice or analysis (since it would be ignored anyway), and showing up less and less at family get togethers-brothers do that all the time in real life.

Maybe ultimately he would have left but I don't see it.

...which raises a question: What if, after Michael scornfully told Tom he could take his family and his mistress and move to Vegas, Tom said, "Yeah, right, Mike, I think I'll do that." Would Michael have let him? I don't think so. Tom knew far too much. And, if he left Michael's employ, the lawyer-client privilege he had with his boss would disappear. Tom would be an easy target for law enforcement, and Michael's mistreatment of him would reduce his resistance. Michael would know that, too. So, if Tom said he'd leave, he'd be a dead man.

Good point, TB. Let's not forget, this is 1959; years before the idea of any kind of "Witness Protection."

Frankie was a protected witness in the same vein as Valachi was in the '60s. Valachi in a segregated place in prison, Frankie on an army base. But if a guy like Tom ever did turn, where would he have gone?

I think that Michael would have let Tom leave. I think the exchange, supposedly about Roth, was actually about Fredo, and that Michael was trapping Tom into supporting the murder of their brother (You gonna come along with me in these things I have to do -- or what?). In his warped way, Michael was always fair, so having given Tom the choice I think he would have let him go.

If Tom had said that Michael would have said. That's interesting, Tom because the family just bought an interest in that hotel chain, and the offer's been withdrawn.
Al, Rocco, you have the boat ready?

LOL

That's an interesting point, MP.
I believe that Michael didn't tell Tom he was going to whack Fredo, but you can infer that "Are you gonna come along with me in these things I have to do" definitely included Fredo's death, whether or not Tom knew about it.
Michael probably thought that the fewer people who knew about the plan, the better. And he also must have assumed that Tom would have figured it out himself.

But I also think Michael might have had two other motivations for not telling Tom:
--Bad Michael: He couldn't be absolutely, positively sure that Tom wouldn't warn Fredo, out of brotherly concern;
--Good Michael: He wanted to spare Tom the agony of knowing that Fredo would be whacked.