‘NIXON’ THE FILM : Stone Leaves the Truth on Cutting-Room Floor

Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” is disappointing and regrettable. The film is a disappointment because it distorts and misrepresents; and it’s regrettable that a brilliant filmmaker failed to realize the compassionate portrait for which at least one side of him seemed to be striving. Stone is defeated by his inability to disenthrall himself from the passions of his youth in the radical wing of the Vietnam protest movement. His characters repeat the familiar slogans but, lacking a context, they no longer elicit the same knee-jerk reactions.

In the film, Richard M. Nixon’s policies are presented as the product of a disturbed personality--frequently inebriated and driven by a combination of inferiority complex and pressure from a shadowy conspiracy of Mafia, CIA, military and big-business figures. As a grotesque, the former president is deprived of the stature that would give his fall the tragic dimension Stone aims to convey.

Ironically, the truth would have offered a much better backdrop to Stone’s intended tale of the fallen overachiever. Few presidents have agonized more deeply or meticulously over his decisions than did Nixon, at least in making foreign policy. Nixon’s decision-making reflected a nearly obsessive reluctance to overrule subordinates to their faces. He preferred to hear disagreements one-to-one or, better yet, via memorandum. Nixon almost never conveyed his decisions orally to a group. If he rejected the views of Cabinet members or other senior associates, he would generally do so in writing or through emissaries.

Nixon’s style of decision-making produced its own problems, but these were the precise opposites of what the movie depict. He never fired from the hip. Rather, he continually reviewed his options until those of us who participated in the decision-making sometimes wished that another crisis would come along to interrupt the exercise. Since Nixon was rarely confident of success, his decisions reflected a remarkable self-discipline and dedication.

Stone’s failure to grasp this central aspect of Nixon’s character causes him to thrash about between the Nixon of his preconceptions and the Nixon he encountered in his research. A host of inaccuracies results. For example, neither I nor anyone I know ever heard Nixon call his wife “Buddy,” address any foreign leader, least of all Leonid Brezhnev, by his first name or refer to himself in the third person. And what is the point of having me smoke cigars when it is easy enough to determine that I have never smoked?

Unable to admit the rational basis for Nixon’s decisions, Stone invokes bizarre demons--for example, “the Beast,” an absurd assemblage of CIA, military leaders, businessmen and Mafiosi who alleg- edly keep Nixon from ending the Vietnam War. In the course of daily contacts extending over nearly six years, I never heard Nixon refer to any such individual or group. And, of course, Stone himself never puts a name to any member of this preposterous group. This propels Stone to yet another fantasy: Nixon’s alleged involvement with an assassination ring, purportedly approved by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which in the film’s fevered imaginings led to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, blighted Nixon’s conscience and turned into the dark, unspoken obsession of his administration.

Resurrecting the Vietnam era in this simplistic manner deprives the film of even dramatic impact. How much more interesting it would have been to re-examine the period as a series of complicated, often heartbreaking, dilemmas than as a morality play of black and white choices. A more balanced presentation would have acknowledged that Nixon had inherited a real and not imaginary, much less a psychological, problem. Growing opposition to a war that had enjoyed nearly universal support when it was initiated spiraled from the judgment that, as fought, the war was unwinnable and escalated into criticism of the morality of U.S. policy, finally into an assault, often violent, upon the values of American society. The implication of “Nixon” is that ending such a tragedy would have been as simple as satisfying the yearnings of a 19-year-old anti-war protester featured at length but for the “Beast” and Nixon’s psychological proclivity for bombing.

The film raises a final issue that goes far beyond fairness to Nixon--the responsibility of the motion-picture industry to history itself. It is often contended that historic dramas can never be completely accurate because the artist requires creative license to put forth his interpretation of events, perhaps with a disclaimer to the effect that some events are fictionalized.

But how is a viewer to discern which portions of a three-hour film are real, which imaginary? On the one hand, the docudrama mimics reality: It appropriates the names of real persons; the actors are made to resemble the characters they play; the plot is developed against a backdrop of allusion to actual events in familiar settings. Yet, the characters go on to say and do things their real-life counterparts never said or did; all in the interest of creating a more compelling and more profitable drama than the truth alone might have provided.

With a filmmaker as adept as Stone, the viewer is almost completely at the mercy of his cinematic devices to induce a suspension of disbelief. When, in “JFK” and “Nixon,” Stone implies that two successive presidents--Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon--were somehow involved in the assassination of Kennedy, and that Nixon was destroyed by his alleged tangential connection with the plot, one is beyond the limits of creative license and in the realm of purposeful misinformation. This problem, serious enough for American audiences, becomes magnified abroad, where viewers lack background for assessing what they are seeing.

At a time when far more people gain their understanding of the past from movies and television than from the written word, truth is not a responsibility filmmakers can shrug off as an incidental byproduct of creative license. If a radical writer proclaimed the existence of a conspiracy such as Stone’s “Beast,” an author with an opposing view would almost surely write a rebuttal that would be as accessible to the general public as the original charge. But when such as Stone put forward a caricature of history on a $40-million budget, there is little chance that a comparable rebuttal will emerge, apart from the fact that truthful history rarely lends itself to the simplified presentation that evokes dramatic impact.

This is a challenge to the self-restraint and sense of responsibility of the movie industry. Whatever its outcome, the controversy about “Nixon” would, in all likelihood, elicit a grim smile from my old chief: Since three-hour movies are not made about insignificant personalities, he had, after all, triumphed over his adversaries by obliging even Stone to accord him major historical stature.