History News Network | This Is What Oliver Stone's Movie About Nixon Got Right - 0 views
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When a Hollywood filmmaker portrays a famous figure from the past, critics often express outrage over the portrayal. They denounce the filmmaker for taking too many artistic liberties and distorting the historical record. Oliver Stone came under that kind of attack in 1995 when he released Nixon, a dark and disturbing portrayal featuring actor Anthony Hopkins as President Richard M. Nixon.
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In the years following Watergate, Richard Nixon worked assiduously to improve his public image. To a considerable degree, he succeeded in shaping a revised perspective on his place in history. By 1995, many Americans remembered Richard Nixon as the architect of bold foreign policies and as a surprisingly liberal leader in domestic affairs, exemplified by his support of environmental reforms.
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In view of the late President’s improved standing since his embarrassing resignation, Oliver Stone’s movie struck many viewers as heavy-handed and disrespectful.
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So much information has come out since 1995 about Richard Nixon’s responsibility for criminal conspiracies, expanding death and destruction unnecessarily in the Vietnam War, and much more, that Rutgers historian David Greenberg concluded the new evidence renders “the pro-Nixon hagiography of yesteryear a musty artifact.
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Several important books resulted, analyses that describe a duplicitous politician. Kenneth Hughes’s Chasing Shadows describes Nixon’s interference in President Lyndon Johnson’s negotiations with North Vietnam shortly before the 1968 presidential election. The Nixon Tapes, edited and discussed by Douglas Brinkley (Rice University) and Luke A. Nichter (Texas A & M University – Central Texas) shows diverse examples of mischief at the White House, and One Man Against the World by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner connects much of the President’s lying and criminal behavior to his struggles with the Vietnam War.
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Some of the most intriguing evidence about Richard Nixon that fortifies Oliver Stone’s portrayal can be found in Bob Woodward’s recent book, The Last of the President’s Men. That publication is based on lengthy interviews with Alexander Butterfield, a Nixon aide
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Butterfield characterizes the Nixon White House as “a cesspool.” He reports that the President encouraged sycophants to attack “enemies” (politicians, print and television journalists, and antiwar protesters, among others). Alexander Butterfield describes Nixon’s efforts to remove the “infestation” of portraits of John F. Kennedy in the staff’s offices (which backs up Stone’s speculation about the President’s obsession with the Kennedys). As for drinking and swearing, evidence from Butterfield and other sources indicates that the President was much more engaged in these excesses than biographer Stephen Ambrose recognized
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Woodward said the recordings “depict a White House full of lies, chaos, distrust, speculation, self-protection, maneuver and counter-maneuver, with a crookedness that makes Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ look unsophisticated.”