Now, before I go on, / I want to make one thing perfectly clear: / I have had it up to here / With certain people! / People who say I am two different men: / An OLD Nixon…and a NEW Nixon! / I am just ONE Nixon! / Just the other day, I said to my wife, Pat, / “Thank God there is only one Nixon!” / And Pat agreed.
—from a feature, “The Richard M. Nixon Presidential Primer,” by Larry Siegel, in a 1974 Mad magazine “Super Special” reprising content from about 1969
Subsections below:
The still-historically-notable fount of criminality that was Watergate
A big movie still falls short of its enormous topic, but merits attention
An unfortunately skimpy look at the parade of contributing actors
Controversial aspects: The “Beast” theme and the Cuba/JFK/Castro theory
Closing remarks: From grand history to letting an old soul be
[Note: I am uneasy and sometimes angered about dealing with this entry—I’d considered putting it on indefinite hold and withdrawing Part 1—but I already posted Part 1, and people have shown interest in it, so I thought I’d live up to the responsibility I seemed to set up for myself and post Part 2. But there is so much to the topics of both Nixon the man and Nixon the troubling film that I suggest you look at this entry as incomplete, a set of thoughts to prompt further research for those interested, and an acknowledgement that in our tough times, this old sick horse of a historical story is still worth checking into at times. By the way, playtime is coming; my next film review should be on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Edit done 12/19/12. Edit 9/14/13.]
When Nixon ran for the presidency in 1968, his first campaign for office since 1962 when he lost the race for governor of California
Johnson’s reputation was tarnished by the Vietnam War, despite his monumental achievements that still affect us in no small way today: after he had shepherded the first civil rights legislation passed in Congress in about 80 years, in 1957, as president he expanded on the assassinated John F. Kennedy’s liberal agenda and, building on his masterful power and artfulness as Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s, used all his accumulated ties and skills regarding Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other such laws expanding protection of rights, and started the Medicare and Medicaid programs. If it weren’t for Vietnam, Johnson may have cemented a reputation for himself as one of the top five or so most positively impacting presidents the U.S. has had. But Vietnam
Nixon inherited this mess when he was elected president in late 1968.
People have seemed to remember Nixon, in part, as if he were equivalent with the Vietnam
The still-historically-notable fount of criminality that was Watergate
Amusingly, various people have tried to paint Watergate as if all it was was a “third-rate burglary.” The Kissinger character in this movie says, “To be undone by a third-rate burglary is a fate of biblical proportions”—exemplifying the film’s summarizing strategy—and occasional flaws—in trying to address the enormous narrative task it has with a glib, drama-class line, or a remark made by an insider that seems more plausible as a summary in hindsight than something someone would have so cogently seized on at the time (such as the movie’s Al Haig advising Nixon that Gerald Ford, as the future new president, could always pardon him if he resigns now). Watergate, of course, was much more than a burglary; if only that’s all it was.
A book I have that was part of a wealth of main-product-and-extras that comprised the edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the yearbooks, an atlas, and so on that we got in about 1973 includes the not-insubstantial tchotchke of a book, The Graphic Story of the American Presidents (Chicago: J.G. Ferguson Publishing Company [distributed to Doubleday], 1973). It lists the presidents in reverse order, trying to give a fair account of each. And it starts with Nixon, looking so “modern” in photos. Since Nixon was the most recent president and the subject of 1973 news at a rolling boil, it goes on at some length about Watergate. The narrative seems breathless (though maybe a bit regretful)—written through mid-1973, with the writer not knowing the outcome yet—in recounting the unspooling story: “Public interest in these matters [surrounding the initial burglary] had not been great, because they had been overshadowed by events leading to the end of the Vietnam War and by the ceremonies surrounding the President’s inauguration to his second term. But now, with all these events in the past, the Senate voted unanimously on February 7, 1973, to establish a seven-member select committee…to conduct a year-long investigation of the Watergate incident and the 1972 presidential campaign. Other investigations of Watergate also were proceeding: a Washington grand jury was continuing to hear testimony on the Watergate burglary, a New York
I won’t tell very many of what this old book lists, but just consider the following passage (occurring amid others like it), and imagine if you heard about this as a matter emanating from the White House today: “In the days immediately following the President’s [April 30, 1973] address [announcing the resignations of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and others], newspapers disclosed that [G. Gordon] Liddy and [E. Howard] Hunt had been part of what was called the ‘plumbers’ unit in the White House, using illegal methods to discover ‘leaks’ of information that the administration wanted kept secret. On May 7 it was disclosed that the President’s former White House counsel Charles W. Colson had used the ‘plumbers’ to forge cables to show to newsmen to make them believe President Kennedy had ordered the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem during the Vietnam War. … [On] May 14, the Senate Armed Services Committee heard testimony that the White House had tried to enlist the CIA in illegal domestic spy activity, and two days later heard the deputy CIA director tell of White House attempts to use the CIA to cover up the Watergate scandal” (p. 24).
This book came out before the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” in later October 1973, when, in response to a subpoena for some of his tapes, Nixon demanded that Attorney General Elliot Richardson fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and in the chain of command, Richardson refused and quit, and his deputy William Ruckelshaus also resigned, and a lower-level staffer, Solicitor General Robert Bork, ended up doing Nixon’s bidding—firing Cox. (For his effort, you could say, Bork met with his own frustration when his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was defeated in 1987 during the Reagan Administration. Update 12/19/12, fixed 9/14/13: I figured right after I'd first published this that I was speaking rather loosely on the arguable association of Bork's part in Watergate and his 1987 rejection for the U.S. Supreme Court. To be sure, Bork was rejected for a position on the Supreme Court hugely along the lines of his ideology [and his uncompromising nature] in 1987. But I seem to recall that his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre" was mentioned somewhere--in the media?--during that 1987 period in which he was subject to hearings on his nomination. Anyway, he died Dec. 19--see a New York Times obituary here.)
The movie itself lists—as I take the movie on faith on this—a few of the famed Nixonian “dirty tricks,” noted (typically) in presidential chief aides H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman talking together as they know full well their administration, and their own fates, are unraveling: plans or a notion to firebomb the Brookings Institution; planting a forged cable on Kennedy (this was maybe the same thing I mentioned above)…a host of things, as if now all the sudden these two men had the conscience to realize how much bad had been going on, so no wonder things newly looked super-critical…. And later in the movie, a “smoking gun” is brought to light where instructions by Nixon to Haldeman were to have the CIA block an investigation by the FBI, or such.
The sleazy stuff—not just the cover-up of the Watergate break-in itself, but the earlier nasty retaliatory acts such as breaking into the office of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg, who was responsible for the leak of the so-called Pentagon Papers, and many other instances of using illegal means or simply not heeding a sense of the rule of law and proper procedure—piled up over time into such an enormous amount that Nixon’s story became one of a president so corrupt that, despite his monumental achievements, he was his own worst enemy, to use a trite phrase.
A big movie still falls short of its enormous topic, but merits attention
Outside sources viewers can use; and why study Nixon?
People can take from my paltry description here a sense of the mess to be understood. They can read the history from their choice of sources: Wikipedia, an American history textbook, whatever…. This story—just of Watergate and Nixon’s presidency’s breaking down—was as complex and big as it was depressing. Add to this Nixon’s long career, and how do you make a movie of it?
I wrestled with how I would write this entry. At times I thought I would say, “Don’t watch this movie; it’s too flawed. And the Nixon story itself, as salutary in some ways, is too complex to do a decent blog entry on.” And certainly it would be a smear to suggest that Mitt Romney is another Nixon.
But if there is a lesson Nixon’s tale still holds, it’s that we mustn’t be blind to important factors in deciding who to elect president, and not let passions aroused by some ongoing national tragedy to obscure our view of who is running for office and claiming to be a national savior.
I will try to address this movie with a few scattered notes, reminding you again that you should not take it as a primary source on Nixon, but if you choose to watch it, get boned up (if you haven’t already) on Nixon so you can appreciate how the movie lives up to, and other ways does not, its ambitious aim.
(The screenplay was written by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, with help from Oliver Stone. I don’t know any more about them than the film’s Wikipedia article relates.)
Testing any film’s merits isn’t frivolous; how this film does
One point of my blog is to show how movies achieve, and sometimes fail, to address areas of life that, for some people, they are the main ways people get educated to some degree on these. Not everyone can read all the reputable books that are out there on various problems, whether political, historical, health-wise, family-related, or other. Movies seem to step into the breach in this regard, but of course movies can also fumble. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to see what good comes out of some of these (even severely flawed) movies, partly because some set of people expended millions of dollars, employed actors and other craft workers for beastly-long days, and tapped into the enthusiasm of many creative types to assemble a film on, as it sometimes happens, an important subject. The film then remains in collections of DVDs, or is available online, for any unsuspecting consumer to watch it. So it pays to try to understand—without trying to cover all the bases—how some films achieve their objectives, or not quite.
In a brief presentation on the old videotape I watched, Oliver Stone says his original cut of the film was 4:15—obviously much too long for releases expected to bring in big audiences. Even the combined Godfather films—the first two combined totaled over six hours—wouldn’t have been released in an individual version so long as even four hours; it took years of the first two being circulated and becoming unexpected monster hits before Paramount thought to combine them into an “omnibus” version. So, Stone says, he whittled the film down, with difficulty; the release version was about 3:10. (The complex editing process for the film, which is referred to in the Wikipedia article on the film, is somewhat reminiscent of that for Apocalypse Now, as director Francis Ford Coppola talks about that on the 2006 DVD of the film.)
Even at that length, I think the film tries to do too much—some things are handled too cursorily. Even the pivotal Watergate mess is handled sketchily—whether with the framing device of the overall structure, or with the unfolding drama within the last third or so of the film.
An unfortunately skimpy look at the parade of contributing actors
Many actors contributed to this film—so many that I wonder how the budget accommodated them, though I feel they (at least some of them) were paid on the low side, and maybe they participated just to be part of a movie statement being made about Nixon.
J.T. Walsh, often with a sort of painfully pinched look, plays one of Nixon’s key aides, John Ehrlichman.
Paul Sorvino, portly and with nerdy horn-rimmed glasses, plays Henry Kissinger, his voice apparently electronically altered to approximate Kissinger’s gravitas-conveying earthquake rumble. Incidentally, the movie does include the famous quote of Kissinger’s, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” though it has him say it in not the original context. People might forget that, during the Nixon administration, Kissinger mugged in a public-relations mode—despite his portly-professor appearance—as a sort of sex symbol, with his droll remarks meant for comedy.
James Woods plays chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, in what I thought is a sympathetic role for a staffer who was in an especially difficult role for Haldeman, Nixon’s facilitator/executor who ended up an unfortunate fall guy. Haldeman’s diaries from his days in the Nixon administration were published some years ago and are a fine first-person reflection of how things went there, both in the pre-exposure, hectic, seedy-behavior days and in the immediate wake of when the light of investigation was snapped on and “the cockroaches suddenly were in a panic.”
Ed Harris, his slightly homely face right for the murky-character part, plays Watergate operative E. Howard Hunt.
David Paymer plays aide Ron Ziegler.
Fyvush Finkel, an actor in Yiddish theater (and more mainstream venues) who isn’t well known to American audiences (and who appears as a dybbuk in the Jewish-folklore “short” at the front of the Coen brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man), is an advisor to Nixon during the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debates; I have a feeling Finkel may have done his role at “scale” pay, to make things easier for the producers, and did this film as a labor of love, to “pay his respects” to the old shaygetz that he may have felt Nixon was. (Please excuse my spellings of Yiddish words; I know their spelling tends generally to vary, anyway.)
Annabeth Gish plays Nixon’s younger daughter Julie. Though it shows Julie loyally believing in her dad at his time of being under siege, the movie misses the opportunity—though this probably speaks to there being too much to say—to show just to what extend Julie went to to defend her father, even while he exploited her (in a sense) for what good she could do him: in fact, she spoke publicly and earnestly in his defense, even while he knew, or should have, that she was wrong at least to some extent. Annabeth Gish first came to notice in the mid-1980s film Mystic Pizza, which also was a debut of sorts for Julia Roberts, who became a much bigger star. Gish has a face that seems adequate to conveying Julie Nixon’s being a lovely, devoted daughter, and turns out to represent virtually the only young-female presence in this film, which is, after all, a big story of “men behaving badly.”
Madeline Kahn plays Martha Mitchell, colorful wife of John Mitchell, who is played by E.G. Marshall with grave expressions in the film. Mitchell was Nixon’s Attorney General until Nixon had him be one of his fall guys.
Bob Hoskins plays FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, seeming to give enough of a quietly sinister air to him, with some riffing on the theory Hoover was homosexual, with a provocative scene of him flirting with a houseboy. Hoskins looks a little young for how old Hoover would have been in 1969-71, whenever he died.
Who can forget Joan Allen, as Pat, Nixon’s “silent better half” who was probably one of his very most important allies, along with, in headier times, the “Silent Majority” who elected him to office in 1968. When the movie first came out, I was (shallowly) tickled by an actress playing Pat Nixon who looked so much like her. Today, what is to be noted is Allen’s handling a role well enough that would be difficult to pull off well, a quiet, unpretentious woman who suffered through a lot while being “there” for her husband who only really lived when he dove into the alligator pool of yet another set of years of political commitment. The movie has Pat trying, at times, with bravado to confront Nixon with the reality of his life; an example is (again, the movie trying to convey a complex story with somewhat-artificial dramatic moves) Pat’s line (maybe slightly paraphrased), “It took me a long time to fall in love with you…. They [the public out there] never will love you, no matter how many elections you win.”
Mary Steenburgen plays Nixon’s mother, who is revealed in a flashback relatively early in the film in an earnest picture of his somewhat impoverished, stoic, religiously pious youth. Hannah Nixon is a religious sort—she speaks with “thees” and starchy, Puritan-like language, reminding us of the type of people in The Crucible (see my May 5 entry)—and her way with her children appears both poignant and a little sad, and also as if to suggest how Nixon got to be the world-class noodge he later was. (Unfortunately I can’t look at the concept of, or any of the historical basis for, how Nixon was “the Fighting Quaker” as is riffed on humorously in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.) Here, as a cutie-faced boy, he promises his mother, “Think of me always as thy faithful dog,” and we know from real life that Nixon signed some letters to home during his youth with something like “your faithful dog.” Nixon’s father Frank, played by Tom Bower, was—as Nixon says in the rambling, surprisingly touching goodbye speech rolled out under closing credits at the film’s end—in a series of jobs a streetcar motorman, a farmer, a lemon rancher…then a grocer. We see dad as the grocer in the flashback scenes; he is a stern sourpuss at the dinner table, with his humorless but sincere enough upbraidings of his family, though not insubstantial with a remark like “Struggle is what gives life meaning.” Nixon also, of course, had a number of brothers, two of whom—one in particular affecting him—died of tuberculosis. Nixon’s mother, in the film, haunts him like a potent article of guilt in a hallucination, with her sitting reproachfully in his White House room while he listens drunkenly, hungeringly to the famed tapes—she seeming to have more power to touch his conscience than even his wife Pat, who has just left the room after giving him her best reproachful shot.
Anthony Hopkins as Nixon, I think, does a very good job without emulating Nixon perfectly. He adds a little mouth-twisting, jaw-jutting mannerism that I don’t think was Nixon’s, and the film’s Wikipedia article suggests there was an issue with Hopkins’ accent for Nixon, but I think when portraying such an unusual sort as Nixon anyway, close enough is good enough. Hopkins gets the dorky attempts at physical grace at a social event, the nerdy stabs at bonhomie, the droll endearment-type little name for Pat (“Buddy”)…it all conveys a world-class noodge that does a lot to make Nixon sympathetic, or pathetic. In fact, Hopkins does so much to humanize him, not least with his suffering toward the end of the film, that we may have a hard time piecing together a coherent understanding of this man. In fact, I feel that Nixon and Josef Stalin are interesting to compare, because both were paranoid men who were master politicians and grossly abused power; and I’ve studied Stalin in some depth. And I feel I have a better feel for what the monstrous Stalin was about than I do about Nixon, who comes across as more divided and is harder to see “as one person” than does Stalin, who is a little easier to see as a devious sort who both could master loyalty from people and be horrifically apt to betray colleagues and deceive a wealth of others about his agenda. All this is a topic for another time.
Adding to one of the trickier parts of this movie, Tony LoBianco, who played the heroin-shipment point man Sal Boca in The French Connection (1971; see my May 24 blog entry), is here, old enough as to be white-haired, as a mob figure Johnny Roselli [sp?] or such. One of the film’s subplots—which I don’t know is fictional or not—concerns some plot that Nixon was, it is alleged, involved in as vice president under Eisenhower, where an attempt was planned to assassinate Castro right after Castro came to power, and involved the CIA partnering with the mob in Cuba, or some such thing. This is referred to a number of times in the film, once or twice as “Track 2” in relation to something else more officially planned as “Track 1.” (See subsection immediately below for more thought on this.) However, the film does, more broadly, represent Nixon as obsessing an awful lot about Cuba, almost as if his (and his party’s) regret—and recriminations at the Democrats—for Castro’s regime being allowed to set up shop so close to the U.S. was almost as much a sort point as the “loss of China” to the Communists in 1949. As I think was generally true about Nixon in real life, a lot of his dispositions and strategizing in the early 1970s were based on regrettable matters of the late 1940s and 1950s, however historically they may no longer have applied: for instance, it would have been in character, however much reflected in real-life comments, that Nixon felt that to hit back at Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 was the same as getting Alger Hiss in about 1948, as the film virtually quotes him as thinking. Another position Nixon took in 1972, actually being progressive rather than acting on an old (party-related) grievance or regret, was with the opening to China: no longer need he, or the country, regret the loss of China to the Communists in 1949 when, now, in 1972, the U.S. was in some sense partnering with China, and in the same stroke breaking any lockstep alliance between the Soviet Union and China. (Going to show the baby steps of 40 years ago preceding where we are now: China is now both the factory of many consumer goods used in the West, and a holder of U.S. bonds that is a worryingly essential prop to the U.S. government at present. Let’s add to this the fact that Nixon’s administration also started the “floating dollar,” making the dollar’s value depend on exchange rates rather than being tied to a precious metal or such—don’t quote me; I’m not an economist.)
Controversial aspects: The “Beast” theme and the Cuba/JFK/Castro theory
There are two elements of Stone’s story, which function within the story in a somewhat similar way, that are either questionable or objectionable. One is a sort of mystical theory that could be called something of an article of faith among the liberal artists who have tried to grapple with the historical dislocations of about 1963-75 or so. The other is the sort of theory that Stone puts into his historical films that raise the hackles of those who feel he is in crank mode, which might include me.
The mystical theory is reflected in two formulations of a theme in the Wikipedia article on the film: Screenwriters Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson “conceived of a concept [sic] referred to as ‘the Beast,’ which Wilkinson describes as ‘a headless monster that lurches through postwar history,’ a metaphor for a system of dark forces that resulted in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., [and] the Vietnam War, and helped Nixon’s rise to power and his fall from it as well” (from Bernard Weintraub, “Professor Stone Resumes His Presidential Research,” The New York Times [December 17, 1995], referred to in Wikipedia article; all references noted here are derived from that article without being independently checked). This theme seems to be most consciously articulated in the film when Nixon, at the end of speaking with concerned students at the Lincoln Memorial, remarks—after he has described how hard it is to get a handle on the forces he is facing as president—“maybe I am” talking about a wild animal, after all; the system was something that was nigh-impossible to tame, he says.
The Wikipedia article notes, “Stone said in an interview that Nixon realizes that ‘the Beast’ “is more powerful than he is…,” “the Beast” comprising “the military-industrial complex, the forces of money” (from Gavin Smith, “The Dark Side,” Sight and Sound [March 1995], referred to in Wikipedia article). In another interview he says, “I see the Beast in its essence as a System…which grinds the individual down… [I]t’s a System of checks and balances that drives itself off: 1) the power of money and markets; 2) [s]tate power, [g]overnment power; 3) corporate power, which is probably greater than state power; 4) the political process, or election through money, which is therefore in tow to the System; and 5) the media, which mostly protects the status quo and their ownership’s interests” (from Mark C. Carnes, “Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies,” Cineaste, vol. XXII, no. 4 [1997]).
In some respects this—especially the last formulation—seems like a sociological interpretation; but when discussion of “the Beast” is done, it sounds mystical and dogmatic. It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon’s allusions to “the Furies” or whatever it was in Gravity’s Rainbow that Pynchon seemed to posit as motivating harassing trends in history (it’s been many years since I read the whole novel). To me it doesn’t seem necessary for Stone to allude to this sort of thing in Nixon’s story, but as a sort of decorative “arabesque” to add some apparent logic to the shape of things as they developed up to and including Nixon’s term of office, it doesn’t seem terribly objectionable, as long as viewers remember it is a sort of literary affectation and not a real, empirically based statement of fact.
What is more objectionable is what sounds like more of a Stone theory of the type that seems to have marred JFK (which I never saw, but heard solid criticism about). There are a number of allusions in Nixon to some dark doings regarding Cuba
Fortunately, this whole thing is referred to enough times in the film that it doesn’t just slide past your awareness as if it was mentioned once, almost like a flaky passing notion; it comes up several times, and to me it repeatedly gets flagged in my mind—“Wait a minute, there it is again; I’ll bet that’s an Oliver Stone ‘conspiracy theory’ being wormed in.”
Even in the large sequence that is included in the videocassette version as an outtake, where Nixon meets with CIA director Richard Helms (played pungently but a little oddly by Sam Waterston), seems to be largely concerned with Nixon’s worry about paper records about the old Cuba plot—he wants the original papers dug up, and he wants no copies of them around (something that nowadays would be virtually impossible). If this has to do with a questionable theory inserted into the story about Nixon/the mob/“Track 2,” it’s just as well this sequence wasn’t included in the release version of the film—though it is well staged and edited, and even scored by John Williams. If it’s about an obscurantist theory, it’s just as well it was edited from a movie that, in its release form, turns out to be rather unwieldy and a lot to analyze, even when it sticks to accepted-enough facts.
This alleged “plot” seems to be of a piece with what is referred to in a tiny plot summary in the Wikipedia article on the film: “The movie also hints at some kind of responsibility, real or imagined, that Nixon felt towards the John F. Kennedy assassination through references to ‘the Bay of Pigs,’ the implication being that the mechanisms set into place for the invasion by Nixon during his term as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president spiraled out of control to culminate in the assassination and, eventually, Watergate.” This theory implies that Nixon set up preliminaries for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Usually the Bay of Pigs fiasco gets remembered as a Kennedy administration effort, though as one old source notes, the plan started under the Eisenhower administration (The Graphic Story of the American Presidents [Chicago: J.G. Ferguson Publishing Company (distributed to Doubleday), 1973], p. 63). Well, if Nixon felt some responsibility for Kennedy’s failure in the Bay of Pigs operation (I don’t know if he did in real life), even if Stone wanted to suggest this as one article of Nixon’s variously manifested paranoia, does this mean nothing more than a silly unsubstantiated fear or obsession on Nixon’s part?
I think if this interpretation of (one reason) why Nixon refers to Cuba as much as he does in the movie is considered to go along with the Nixon/mob/assassinate-Castro theory mentioned above, as if it all comprises a large part of Nixon’s paranoid motivation in the film, it seems it’s also of a piece with Stone’s separate theory about why Kennedy was assassinated (as presented explicitly in JFK), whether or not you would call Nixon some (unwitting) agent of “the Beast” that I earlier mentioned. I really can’t buy into this connection to the Kennedy assassination. Frankly, I never understood all the theorizing—by a wide range of people—about who killed Kennedy and why (aside from the loose-cannon activity of the loser/nut Lee Harvey Oswald), which seems to go along with a theory that if Kennedy had lived, we wouldn’t have had the Vietnam War, American history would have been more roses from 1963 on, and so on. To me some of the Kennedy-assassination stuff is well handled (pilloried) by Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977), where his character Alvie Singer, instead of enjoying intimate time with the character played by Carol Kane, is so obsessed with the Kennedy assassination that she mocks him by enumerating a long list of people and entities she posits he is believing are behind the killing, including the men’s room attendant at the Pentagon [?], and he says, “I would leave out the men’s room attendant.”
As far as Stone’s designing his movies is concerned, if he wants to present a controversial theory about Kennedy’s death in JFK, that is his prerogative, but if he is going to make an elaborate, researched film about Nixon, I have to give him demerits if he is going to import some, to me, crazy theories about Kennedy’s death. I mean, Nixon’s story is sad and tawdry enough without seeming to implicate him in Kennedy’s assassination, especially with a set of notions about the mob, a secret CIA-related role in a “Track 2” plan, or whatever. I have to admit I don’t know the full history here, but I am aware there is enough dubious about Stone’s version of the assassination that I think it begins to sound about as paranoid as Nixon could be in his own way; and Nixon’s real-life story provides enough paranoia and its associated negative impact on all and sundry without adding to it with a dubious Kennedy-related theory.
Closing remarks: From grand history to letting an old soul be
James Joyce, in his novel Ulysses, has his younger hero Stephen Dedalus (the other hero is the middle-aged Leopold Bloom) say at one point, “History…is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” For me, history is quite like this; whether I talk about what I’ve learned through books and classes alone—or try to add perspective by linking my own silly life to the great news stories within my lifetime, or trace connections between “starchy history” and real friends and associates I’ve known—still, chapters of history can seem like a big pile of haunting old pictures, trophies of past overdoing, spurs to a wild set of emotions you thought you’d gotten past.
Nixon is something like this: to try to dredge him up, package him in a story, figure out if the story is fair enough, remind young students of supplements that are necessary to touch base on before taking the story for what it’s worth…it all gets overwhelming. What is there to say about him now, and need we say it? This while we’ve got new crises waiting for our attention outside. New challenges to square with: money problems, the future of the young, national-security threats abroad….
And along with this, Nixon was also one man, a suffering person. He had a right to privacy too. He had the shame of how his presidency ended. He had his future to work toward, his family to provide for. He suffered a depression that almost ended his life immediately after he left office. But he forged on, and eventually—keeping up his effort to fulfill a role as an elder statesman—met with Bill Clinton in the White House within a year or so before he died.
