Copyright New Republic Jan 22, 1996The most riveting episode in Nixon, the highly touted Oliver Stone film, involves a 1968 television appearance by Richard Nixon before a studio audience assembled by his presidential campaign staff. The event is supposed to be choreographed, but a black man in the audience brazenly accuses Nixon of smearing people as Communists, dividing America and hiding his real agenda. "When are you going to take the mask off and show us who you really are?" the man demands, advancing toward Nixon. Momentarily flustered, Nixon quickly regains his composure. And in a dazzling response, he says he's seeking common ground, just as Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln did. Then, he spots a young girl in the audience with a sign saying "BRING US TOGETHER." He asks the girl to hold up the sign, and he appropriates the idea. "Bring us together--that is what I want, and that is what the great silent majority of Americans want]"
This might have been one of the most memorable moments in the history of electoral politics, overshadowing William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold" speech, Reagan's deft defense against Jimmy Carter ("There you go again") and Lloyd Bentsen's putdown of Dan Quayle. Except it never happened. By itself, this isn't enough to dismiss the scene as spurious. After all, Stone tells viewers in a prologue that "events and characters have been condensed and some scenes among protagonists have been conjectured." And in an annotated screenplay published by Stone to enhance the film's credibility, the episode is characterized as "a composite of many of Nixon's appearances during the 1968 campaign." The trouble is these caveats scarcely apply in this instance. The episode is simply manufactured, ahistorical, dishonest--and so is much of the film.
It's one thing for Stone to create imaginary events in which a public figure participates. To a great extent, that's what docudramas consist of. Thus, while scenes of Nixon's private life with his wife, Pat, have drawn understandable protests from Nixon's daughters, they're within bounds. So are scenes of Nixon along, sloshing down drink after drink and listening compulsively to the tapes that doomed his presidency. And so are scenes of Nixon's strange relationship with his mother, even one in which Nixon as a boy asks her to treat him as a "faithful dog." These may not ring true--to me, they don't--but Stone is free to speculate about Nixon's private affairs.
He's not entitled to rewrite history. Stone himself says so. "There is no intention here to revise history," he writes in a note on the first page of the screenplay. Yet that's exactly what he does in the Nixon TV episode and in other scenes. The television appearances were staged events, watched by millions. They were an essential part of Nixon's general election strategy. The audiences were carefully screened and largely docile. Nixon got a few tough questions--his staff wanted some sharp queries in hopes that Nixon's responses would be more forceful--but there was no angry confrontation like the one Stone depicts. What Stone has done is falsify an historic event. It's like doing a movie bio of Lincoln and changing the words of the Gettysburg Address.
The details are wrong, too. The little girl with the sign did show up in the 1968 campaign, but not at a TV appearance. She was spotted by the Nixon entourage standing along the road on the last day of the campaign. Her appeal to "bring us together" became a slogan of the early days of the Nixon presidency, not the Nixon campaign. And "silent majority" wasn't a term used by Nixon in 1968 either. It didn't crop up in a Nixon speech until 1969, when Nixon faced rising protests over his refusal to withdraw all American forces from Vietnam. Stone has Nixon assert he has "big mo" in the 1968 campaign, though this phrase didn't pop up until George Bush's presidential run in 1980. He has Nixon deciding to run for the presidency in 1968 only after President Johnson withdraws from the race after the New Hampshire primary. By this time, Nixon had been campaigning for more than a year and had won the New Hampshire primary on the Republican side. In a scene in which Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller chat, the two are presented as political rivals. They were allies at the time. In another episode set in January 1973, Nixon is driven from the podium by snarling reporters after he announces a ceasefire in Vietnam. Rude and accusatory as White House correspondents are, they never acted like this. The scene ends with Nixon shoving his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, back toward the press. The Ziegler incident is famous, only it happened seven months later--Stone notes this in the annotated screenplay--and in a completely different context.
The ironic thing about Nixon is that the person who authoritatively disproves the movie is Nixon himself. He appears toward the end in a news clip of his departure from the White House in 1974 after resigning. As columnist Robert Novak has noted, Nixon hardly looks upbeat, but he does appear to be proud, composed, even a bit jaunty. Now, this was presumably the worst day in Nixon's life. But he looked better than Anthony Hopkins did, portraying Nixon as lugubrious and put upon and awkward twenty years previously. Obviously there's a false note here. It doesn't come from Nixon.
FRED BARNES is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
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