Nixon Family Blasts Oliver Stone Over Movie on President’s Life

Director Oliver Stone has committed “character assassination” against Richard Nixon in a published version of the screenplay for the upcoming film “Nixon,” the late president’s family said in a statement released Monday.

Stone and his collaborators, the family charged, had waited until after the deaths of Richard and Patricia Nixon to “concoct imaginary scenes” of the 37th president’s life, both private and public, “that are calculated solely and maliciously to defame and degrade President and Mrs. Nixon’s memories in the mind of the American public.”

Stone--a onetime Republican and Nixon supporter--responded that he understood that any effort to examine the life of Nixon might create distress for the family. But his intent in making the film, he insisted, was neither “malicious nor defamatory.”

The film, which opens Wednesday, is billed as a “dramatic blend of historical fact, interpretation and conjecture.” It is being released by Hollywood Pictures, a division of the Walt Disney Studios. Another Disney unit, Hyperion, published the 563-page, annotated version of the screenplay.

The family’s statement, released by the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation, also denied the suggestion that Nixon was responsible for U.S. government plans to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and that an operation he allegedly created for that purpose was ultimately turned against John F. Kennedy. The charge that Nixon was complicit in the assassination, they said, was so “reprehensible that it should render wholly illegitimate any text or narrative in which it is contained.”

To bolster its charges of bias, the release cited a comment made by Stone in the January-February issue of Film Comment about his views during the 1960s and 1970s: “When [student protesters] took over NYU and all the kids trashed the place, when Cambodia was invaded, I thought they were nuts. I said, ‘If you want to protest, let’s get a sniperscope and do Nixon.”

In a written response, Stone his purpose “was to attempt a fuller understanding of the life and career of Richard Nixon--the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies and the legacy he left his nation and the world.”

“I believe that those who see our film, regardless of their opinion of Mr. Nixon, will come away with a more empathetic view of him, a man who embodies all the contradictions of our country and our century.”

Though neither the Kennedy nor the Johnson families responded to Stone’s 1991 film “JFK,” a furor arose surrounding certain plot twists. In an attempt to defuse that possibility this time around, the director documented his research in the published script.

Former Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman has also criticized the script, based on a reading of a pirated version. Countering critics who have called the film among Stone’s most compassionate, Ehrlichman said in a TV interview earlier this month, “It’s made-up stuff and it’s very cruel.”

Nixon family members said they would have no further comment until they had seen the film.