‘Nixon’: History or Stone’s Story?

The authentic images of the real Richard Nixon will be replayed for generations. Two videos will likely stand out. First, Nixon’s famous 1952 Checkers speech, one of live television’s rawest and most emotional moments, in which he successfully appealed to the public for his political survival and forced Dwight Eisenhower to keep him on the ticket as his running mate. Second, Nixon’s 1974 farewell to the White House staff the day he resigned the presidency--another raw and emotional moment. In those 22 years between the pleading and the goodbye lies the heart of Nixon’s political career.

Future viewers, who never had the real Nixon in their lives, will likely ask: How could such a man have been president? Even those of us who lived through Nixon’s era have asked that question.

In Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Nixon,” he and actor Anthony Hopkins, in the title role, attempt to find answers. But for all the power and superb spirit of this movie they never reach the heights of the real Nixon of those speeches. Nixon himself later wrote of the Checkers speech: “Apparently my emotional nerve endings had been rubbed so raw by the events of the previous few days that I was able to convey the intensity of my feelings to the audience.”

Raw, rubbed nerve endings were the theme of Nixon’s life, and his story was of triumphs and failures on the epic scale. This is the movie-maker’s dilemma: The actual facts of the rise and fall of Richard Nixon cannot be made more dramatic, no matter how they might be dressed up.

But Stone has not made a history. As best as I can tell, about half the movie is based on facts. The other half ranges from sound speculation to borderline slander.

What Stone has undertaken is nothing less than a cinematic psychoanalysis of perhaps our most mysterious president. As with all psychoanalysis, the result is a mixture of fact, interpretation and some fantasy.

A single question--Why?--pulses through “Nixon.” The movie Nixon (like the real Nixon) searches mercilessly for scapegoats--the East Coast, the Kennedys, the CIA. Hopkins, as Nixon, says “the press, the kids, the liberals--they’re out there trying to figure out how to tear me down.” But Stone and Hopkins show that Nixon did it to himself.

Why?

In scene after scene, Stone shows Nixon searching for a qualified analyst, someone to explain him to himself. Desperately, Nixon auditions everyone around him on his psychic casting couch--from his wife, Pat, to his top aide, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman; from his mother, Hannah, to the 19-year-old woman he confronts during an anti-war protest, who tells him that even the president is not in control, that the system is an unmanageable “wild beast.”

In the end, Nixon gets the analyst he deserved--Oliver Stone. Both manifest paranoia. Though Stone shows some tenderness and empathy, like a good shrink Stone is relentless. And his ultimate version of Nixon is, in many respects, at least as compelling as the truth.

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I’ve spent some hours trying to truth-squad the movie and its annotated script--which cites such sources as books, tapes and testimony in 168 footnotes. Stone has the outline of Nixon’s life about right. He sees the centrality of Watergate. The movie begins with the Watergate burglary in June 1972 as Nixon is seeking reelection as president, and it ends with Nixon’s resignation. Most characters are at least partially true to life; the only totally concocted one is a rich Texas oilman, played by Larry Hagman.

Stone nicely portrays some of the complex reality of Nixon’s key relationships with men--particularly with Henry Kissinger, and with his two chiefs of staff, Haldeman and Alexander Haig.

Nixon’s interactions with women in the film--particularly with his mother and with Pat--are wildly speculative, however, and among the least supported parts of the film. But Stone uses these invented scenes convincingly to show Nixon’s deep isolation and his cold, needy, rocky love. They are high drama but very bad history.

In a manufactured confrontation near the end of the movie, Nixon and his wife get into a spat about the secret White House tape recordings. “No one will ever see those tapes,” Nixon says. “Including you!”

“And what would I find out that I haven’t known for years?” Pat replies in this fictitious conversation. “What makes it so damn sad is that you couldn’t confide in any of us. You had to make a record . . . for the whole world.”

“They were for me,” Nixon says. “They’re mine.”

“No,” Pat answers. “They’re not yours. They are you.”

To Stone’s credit, however, the movie quite nicely lays out the whole range of illegal activities undertaken by Nixon’s administration--bogus national-security wiretaps, the payment of hush money to the Watergate conspirators, the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in the truly bizarre effort to discredit the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

But he places Watergate in an imaginary context of some deep-seated obstacle hampering Nixon. Stone hypothesizes that Nixon is racked with guilt over some vague, perhaps indirect, pre-presidential involvement in CIA plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro; this fiasco, Stone suggests, in turn led to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Thus, when Stone’s Nixon is told that one of the Watergate operatives is a former CIA agent named E. Howard Hunt, he worries obsessively that the whole tale might become public. For Stone, this is a key motive for the Watergate cover-up.

There is no convincing evidence of this. In reality, the core problem for Nixon during Watergate was not a sense of guilt. It was an absence of guilt.

The voluminous Watergate record shows that Nixon had little or no regard for the law. The Watergate cover-up became necessary because Nixon’s administration had used government power--the FBI, the IRS, the CIA--illegally. Not in the distant Eisenhower era, but during his own presidency. Such conduct was widespread. It was habit. And when some of his operatives were caught in the Watergate burglary, they had to be silenced before they led to what Nixon’s Atty. Gen. John Mitchell later called the “White House horrors.”

The mix of fact and fiction is intricate. The 126 scenes in Stone’s film are themselves often a blizzard of fragments--phrases from the tapes, real dialogue, concocted dialogue, real news clips, Hopkins speaking real Nixon speeches and so on. For those who know the story, Stone’s version feels as if the script had been written on note cards that Stone dropped, then scooped up in random order, on his way into the studio to make his film.

But Stone has been honest in his labeling. At the beginning, he issues a clear warning that scenes have been compressed and “hypothesized.” So this is fiction. Stone has told us so.

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It’s not easy turning history into film. I have closely watched filmmakers translate two books I co-authored. I have some sympathy, having seen the process up close.

“All the President’s Men,” the book Carl Bernstein and I wrote about reporting the Watergate story, was made into a movie in 1976. The filmmakers were painstaking with the facts, but still there were compromises. Four key editors at the Washington Post supervised our Watergate reporting. In the movie version, they became three. Things said by one editor were put in the mouth of another for dramatic compression.

In one climactic scene, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, played by Jason Robards, tells his reporters to pursue the story even though it looks as though Watergate is going to lead to Nixon himself: “Nothing is at stake except freedom of the press, free speech and possibly the future of the country.”

In fact, as the book version shows, Bradlee said that night, “What the hell do we do now?” It was the right question, because Watergate was unknown journalistic territory. But the real question didn’t have dramatic punch.

Our second Watergate book, “The Final Days,” is cited 14 times as a source in footnotes to Stone’s script. Again, the film version of “The Final Days,” by ABC television, got more than 90% of it right. But filmmakers need freedom to turn explanation into drama, sketch into intimacy.

Stone’s Nixon is an unexpected success as an intimate portrait; his fictionalized version of Nixon’s inner turmoil is stunning--a caged man who has made his own prison in the highest office of the land.

This is not the Nixon of historical record, but he rings true emotionally. And here Stone has captured something important. The factual histories, the memoirs, the volumes of sworn testimony and some 60 hours of secret office tapes show a Nixon hellbent on settling scores with real or imagined enemies. This Nixon of history is hateful. He is small. He speaks the language of vengeance.

But there has always been something more, an unpleasant quality that I’ve never been able to name until seeing this film. That quality was Nixon’s selfishness and self-centeredness.

Here it is, in all its paranoid ramblings. Stone’s Nixon is literally using the American presidency and its power to find himself. Each meeting and encounter, each speech and fragment is all about self. Stone’s diagnosis of narcissism is palpable, and though he gives us an extreme presentation of the symptoms, he is starting with the truth. The great psychosis in the Nixon presidency was that it was all too often and all too much about Nixon.

Not enough about principle. Not enough about the public that had elected him president. Not about doing good. Not about elevating ourselves as a nation.

This is the Nixon of the tapes, of the Haldeman diaries, and of the hundreds of interviews I have conducted with those close to Nixon over the last 23 years.

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Is it possible that Nixon’s greatest corruption of office was using the presidency for his own radical psychoanalysis, to finish the business of his childhood and other real or perceived slights? Scene after scene in Stone’s film turns on discussions or depictions of mother, father, death, childhood, hate, love, lies, secrets, power, darkness, sacrifice, tears, manhood. The stuff of psychiatry.

Nixon is shown cavorting with his past relentlessly, self-indulgently. And everyone plays the game. Unfortunately, it seems all too true.

After the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and the thousands of deaths in Vietnam, and after Nixon has won the presidency, Stone shows him reflecting aloud, “Who’s helping us? Is it God? Or is it . . . Death?” It’s a great line, but the annotated script gives no footnote. There is no reason to believe it was ever said. Yet it is plausible. Nixon could, conceivably, see God and history as servants of his own cause.

Or his line: “I feel too much sometimes.” Again, I don’t know any evidence he said it. The line is right out of “Oprah,” but again it is powerfully plausible. Nixon felt his way through the presidency. He personalized everything, every event. “This is about me,” Stone’s Nixon tells Pat. “It’s not the war. It’s Nixon! They want to destroy Nixon!”

I have a good deal of sympathy for Nixon’s two daughters and their husbands; they issued a statement last week charging that the Stone film includes scenes “calculated solely and maliciously to defame and degrade President and Mrs. Nixon’s memories in the mind of the American public.” But beyond their personal feelings, theirs is a magnificently Nixonian statement, one the old man would no doubt be proud of: Still and always, “they” want to destroy Nixon.

I believe Stone when he emphatically denies his intent was to defame and degrade. He says he is trying to reexamine and understand. The energy, depth and richness of his film proves that. But at the same time, Stone has been unnecessarily sloppy and self-indulgent. There was no need to mix up history this badly, because his central theme converges with the facts.

Stone is saying, in dramatic terms, precisely what history has said and will say with increasing authority as more tapes are released, more books published and more testimony sifted. The point is simple: America had the wrong person as president. Nixon was not suited to the office. It’s not just the criminality, the insularity, the almost-total absence of higher purpose. It was the sheer inadequacy of the man, who could not order his own life, much less the life of the country.

Peter Gay, in his biography of Sigmund Freud, summarizes the essence of modern psychology: Personality is about the organization of inner conflicts, not the resolution of inner conflicts. In many ways, the real Nixon and Stone’s Nixon converge on this: Nixon failed even to organize his inner conflicts.

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But this is not the final version of Nixon, surely. There are reasons to hope for still a better, fuller, truer version. Before Nixon found an analyst in Oliver Stone, he had his private Dictabelt machine. These weren’t the famous White House tapes, but a more-intimate private diary. Only a few of these Dictabelts made their way into the public record during Watergate, and Nixon used carefully selected excerpts from dozens more in preparing his memoirs.

According to Nixon’s Watergate lawyer, the late J. Fred Buzhardt Jr.--one of the few people who ever heard more than a few of these recordings--these evening monologues were “not meant for human ears.” The machine was his psychiatrist, Buzhardt said once in an interview. “It was uninhibited. I’m embarrassed at the insights I have from those.”

Though he declined to give much detail, he said Nixon on the Dictabelts was a true introvert who hated campaigning and public gatherings. His chosen work, politics, was the antithesis of his nature. Nixon lived a false life, Buzhardt said, creating an almost-unbearable psychic strain.

“When a man does something like that to himself, (he) puts on an outer shell,” Buzhardt said, and Nixon’s shell made close relationships impossible. Nixon lived a submerged, artificial and distant life.

There are about 500 of these Dictabelts in the hands of Nixon’s family. Whoever gets to study them--if anyone does--will likely make the next significant advance on the Nixon mystery.

Stone ends his film with an epilogue noting that Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation, wrote six more books, traveled the world as an elder statesman and was eulogized at his funeral by President Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas).

But a stronger ending was available: On the final page of his thick 1978 autobiography, “RN,” he tells of leaving the White House that August day in 1974. After delivering his raw and powerful farewell address, he gave his famous double-V salute and climbed into the presidential helicopter.

“The engines started,” Nixon wrote. “The blades began to turn. The noise grew until it almost blotted out thought. . . . There was no talk. There were no tears left. I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. I heard Pat saying to no one in particular, ‘It’s so sad. It’s so sad.’ ”