Dean, Haig: Conflicting Views on ‘Nixon’

Oliver Stone’s new movie on Richard Nixon drew conflicting reviews Sunday from two top advisors to the former president, who was forced to resign in 1974.

“I don’t find it to be a three-hour lie,” said John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel and consultant to the movie “Nixon.” He added that he thought the film was well documented.

But Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, said that “the historical portrayal of events is totally off the wall.”

Both were interviewed on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

Haig and other critics have complained that the movie unfairly depicts Nixon as involved in an assassination attempt on Cuban leader Fidel Castro and in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Dean said the movie simply raises questions, but Haig disagreed and complained, “This is a terrible distortion.”

Dean and Haig also clashed over whether people might come away from the movie believing everything they saw was true, as some critics have suggested.

“When people looked at ‘Schindler’s List,’ when they look at ‘Apollo 13,’ they don’t seem to ask these questions,” Dean said. “I think because Oliver Stone is such an effective political film maker, that these questions all get asked. . . . I’m one who goes to the movie theater and I do not think I’m seeing history on the screen. I think I am seeing a theatrical story.”

But Haig said he worried that Stone “projects something to America’s youth who will see a very good film and be inclined to take it on face value.”