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

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Jacob Cohen

The image of "the Beast" returns like a mantra throughout the film. It operates like "the horror" in Heart of Darkness as synecdoche for all the demonic forces of destruction threatening civilization. In the screenplay, the actor playing Nixon is instructed to reel as with nausea whenever Nixon thinks about the Beast. A cabal comprising the CIA, Hoover's FBI, organized crime, Wall Street, Texas oil moguls, reptilian anti-Castro Cubans, Birchers, neo-Nazis, racists -- the Beast is behind every violent turn in modern American history.

We see its representatives meeting with Nixon, like the witches in Macbeth, predicting just before the fact that Jack and then Bobby would be killed in order that Nixon, their chosen one, might be President. During his Presidency, they spy on him and manipulate his every move. And when he strays to the left they warn him of the perils of betrayal.

What motivates the Beast? Capitalist profit is clearly part of it. Kennedy, we are told, had to die, partly because he was bad for business -- which in fact is entirely untrue, his tax cut having helped end the Eisenhower recession. The deeper impulse, however, is pure fascist, racist, anti-Communist malice. The Beast, Stone would have us know, is the sponsor of all social conflict and chaos. Every allusion to it is accompanied by cascading images from Vietnam, the Sixties, the McCarthy era, of atrocities, police and National Guard violence, assassination, including the "vicious" character assassination of innocent dissidents like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.

He was their perfect stooge for reasons having to do with his own family history and psychological makeup. A liar, a paranoiac, an attack dog, seething with resentment against an alien system which he sensed was controlling him and which he misnamed "the liberals" or "the Eastern Establishment," Nixon naturally assimilated the messages the Beast was beaming into his head. In an extraordinary argument, Stone suggests that Nixon had learned in childhood that assassination and mayhem are the necessary steps to a successful career when the death of his two brothers cleared the path for his own career. So he agreed to profit from the assassinations of the Kennedys. And he continued to enact the Beast's secret agenda -- like a sleepwalker -- out of subconscious fear that he would be the next victim.

He did, at least, until everything became clear to him, near the end of his Presidency. Here is the final, massive conceit in Nixon. He meets a 19-year-old antiwar protestor at the Lincoln Memorial and has an epiphany, accepting the truth of the gospel according to Saint Oliver. "She understood something it took me 25 f---ing years in politics to understand. The CIA, the Mafia, the Wall Street bastards . . . the Beast. She understands the nature of the Beast." So he begins to cross his bosses, initiates peace with China and detente with the Soviets, and flirts with leftish solutions to our social ills. And for that they destroyed him.