Nixon … not - Oliver Stone's film and book on Richard M. Nixon - Column

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Jacob Cohen

In an effort at spin control worthy of its subject, Oliver Stone has released a five-hundred-page book, Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film, which contains the "original screenplay" (including several scenes omitted in the final cut), 168 discursive footnotes, documentary appendices, and several short essays -- all to prove that Stone's version of Nixon is in the factual ballpark. As for Stone's fabled paranoia, which since JFK has become an international joke, readers are prompted to agree with John Dean, who, in an obsequious essay, comments that even when he strays from the strict record Oliver Stone "forces you to think."

Here is what Stone, an artistic bully, forces us to think (it is no laughing matter): Once again he is fixed on the Kennedy assassination, in a revised version. Kennedy, we now learn, was killed after the failure of several earlier assassination plots against Castro and after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, both of which were mounted late in the Eisenhower years by the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia and superintended (this is the big news!) by Vice President Richard Nixon. Allegedly, Nixon was terrified that evidence of his role in the Bay of Pigs -- and therefore, indirectly, in Kennedy's death -- would be revealed, destroying his reputation and, into the bargain, shattering the foundations of our entire corrupt political system. His masters -- whom Nixon called "the beast," according to Stone -- blackmailed him with the threat of exposure throughout his subsequent political career. "What is this Bay of Pigs thing?" John Ehrlichman asks H. R. Haldeman, referring to Nixon's frequent reference to "the Bay of Pigs" in the tapes. "They went after Castro," Haldeman whispers, "and in some crazy way it turned on Kennedy. I don't think the 'P' knows what happened but he is afraid to find out."

This is vintage Stone:

a) Breathlessly repeat commonplaces as if they were revelatory: CIA plots against Castro using the Mafia have been common knowledge at least since the revelations of the Church Committee in 1975.

b) Confidently stipulate facts for which there is no evidence and which, indeed, go against most of the record: Actually, Nixon was famously irrelevant as Vice President. (Astonishingly, there is not even the briefest mention in the film of his well-known fury with Eisenhower over this -- a little coverup by Stone, who is selling the notion that Nixon was a major player.)

c) Run to darkness with half the truth, simply ignoring the disconfirming other half: Thus, while it is true that Nixon was one of the first public officials to see and say that Castro was a dangerous Communist, at a time (1959 - 60) when Castro was hiding the fact, the historical record also shows that Nixon thought Castro was a naive Communist and recommended that we win him over to our side, not that we kill him. With regard to Stone's confident assertion that Nixon always linked the Bay of Pigs with the Kennedy assassination, in support of which he cites Haldeman's The Ends of Power, a close reading of the cited pages, 37 - 40, reveals that Nixon believed that a vengeful Castro was himself somehow responsible for Kennedy's death, which is the very opposite of Stone's view that the same people who tried to kill Castro, killed Kennedy.

d) Lie. No other word is appropriate for Nixon's assertion (clearly on Stone's behalf) that Kennedy knew nothing of the assassination plots against Castro ("He didn't even know about it. The CIA never told him. They just kept it going. It was like . . . it had a life of its own . . . like a kind of beast"). This is part of Stone's consistent whitewashing of Kennedy, the Lochinvar of his dreams. However, in the book, a footnote to Nixon's comment reveals that Kennedy -- who actually was all over the CIA to get rid of Castro, and much more zealous about it than the previous Administration -- learned of the plots from his girlfriend, a Mafia moll. And Stone cannot be unaware that Kennedy would also have learned of the assassination plots from his brother Bobby, the Attorney General, who knew, and from his close aide McGeorge Bundy, who knew, and from J. Edgar Hoover, who taped the Mafia, and probably told Kennedy about the plots on the basis of that source.

e) Fill in the holes in your fantasy with fabrications dressed up as documentary truth: Thus we have scenes in which Richard Helms of the FBI burns all the CIA evidence for Nixon's role in heading up and perhaps inspiring the plots and the Bay of Pigs invasion -- thereby explaining why there isn't any; and Stone even has the audacity to permit us to hear the famous erased portion of the Nixon tapes, the content of which was not known until Stone invented it. Not surprisingly, Nixon therein reveals everything: "These guys went after Castro . . . Seven times, ten times. . . . What do you think -- people like that -- they just give up? They just walk away? Whoever killed Kennedy came from this . . . This thing we created. This beast. That's why we can't let this thing go any further." According to Stone, Nixon agreed to resign only when Alexander Haig, a greasy eminence throughout the film, representative of the "Beast," threatened to reveal a copy of the erased tape which only Oliver Stone and his co-conspirators know about.