HENRY A. KISSINGER

NOT FOR PUBLICATION

December 20, 1995

Dear Bob:

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read the review of "Kissinger and Nixon" in the _Wall Street Journal_. What is the point of being the premier spinmaster if one is found out so easily? Here the old spinmaster has been busily confusing the issue on Vietnam for twenty years. Nixon and I nearly got away with creating the impression that we were standing up for the honor and credibility of the United States in refusing to turn over to the Communists millions who, in reliance on America's promises, had cast their lot with us. We had conducted policies from a besieged White House, gone through the anguish of Cambodia and the risks of mining North Vietnam, faced down scores of Congressional resolutions demanding withdrawal, to obscure the real purpose of the spinmastership - now, alas, unveiled in a TV film endorsed by the _Wall Street Journal_ - that all this was "not to score, but to win over the fans in the bleachers". Incompetent as Nixon and I proved to be, we were not aware that there were fans in the bleachers (they surely were not in Congress or the media) and the conservatives were uncharacteristically silent.

Of course, there are a few glitches: for example, how the spinmaster, whose office was down the hall from the President, managed to escape for his nefarious secret negotiations without Nixon knowing it or how he organized the airplane to get to Paris. In fact, the spinmaster was even cleverer than that. He left memos in the files, approved by a Nixon presumably too boozed up to know what he was signing, approving every trip and its talking points in advance and every trip report later.

Poor old doltish Nixon. He left a trail of handwritten notes urging the spinmaster to proceed and not _one_ document or tape that supports what the filmmaker and your

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reviewer discovered - that he wanted to delay the negotiations until after the election. But the old spinmaster who tried to trick Ford into resisting the Cuban troops in Angola, from which he was restrained by vigilant neo-conservatives, overcame all these obstacles. He even fooled Nixon into believing that there had been no real disagreement between them, as is shown in the extract from a letter to me from Nixon dated April 9, 1990 when a national magazine tentatively tried out the thesis so triumphantly vindicated in the film endorsed by the *Wall Street Journal* review, namely that Nixon and I were adversaries rather than partners.

"As you will of course recall, you often told me, as I have noted in my diaries, that Nancy believed that in view of McGovern's way-out position, our continuing to take a hardline on negotiations was politically helpful rather than harmful. While I shared that view, I often told you that if we could get the right deal before the election, we should do so regardless of what we thought the political circumstances might be. If we couldn't get the right deal, we should refuse to make an agreement even though we thought that the political effect would be negative. I believed that you shared that view then and still do.

There was only one area where we had a significant difference of opinion. I felt that you had more confidence in the negotiating process than I had. On the other hand, as I noted in my *Memoirs*, I had to admit, once you negotiated the Paris Peace Agreement, that you were right and I was wrong on this score."

Nixon and yours truly, the old spinmaster, were clearly trying to put one over when we presented our Vietnam policy as an effort to extricate our country honorably from a liberal debacle. It was two liberal administrations that transformed the containment approach of Eisenhower into a social reform policy that blew up in our face, as it was later to do in Somalia. It was these administrations which opened the supply routes through Laos (which Eisenhower

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wanted to defend) into Vietnam, overthrew Diem, then sent
500,000 troops with a strategy of attrition, thus leaving
the initiative to our enemy. And having negotiated a
bombing halt just before leaving office, the perpetrators of
that policy then joined the peace movement and made life
hell for those who wanted to extricate America with honor
from that war.

But the film and your reviewer were not so easily fooled.
They got to the heart of the truth - which apparently was
that the Nixon administration's heavy thinking was sham, and
the real failures were in the conservative camp because the
"two performers were eagerly awaiting the next morning's
reviews". And it was a measure of the clumsiness that the
performers' reviews turned out to be uniformly hostile
despite their most heroic efforts. No matter. Anyone
duplicitous enough to doubt that the Backfire was a
strategic bomber is also quite capable of spinning a yarn
for a TV film twenty years later to the effect that he
single-handedly achieved peace by double-crossing his
President and betraying America's allies. Such characters
must be exposed, even if it means that the _Wall Street_
_Journal_ ignores demonstrated factual misrepresentations and,
in effect, endorses the Jane Fonda version of history.

Mr. Robert Bartley
Editor
The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

# TV's 'Kissinger & Nixon' distorts history

■ On Sunday night at 8, and again at 10, TNT airs "Kissinger and Nixon," a made-for-cable account of the intense negotiations between U.S. and North Vietnamese leaders in 1972-73. The two-hour presentation features Beau Bridges as President Richard Nixon and Ron Silver as his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Dr. Kissinger has seen the movie and filed this special review.

N "Kissinger and Nixon," a Machiavellian Kissinger cons a boozing, anti-Semitic Nixon into peace talks with Hanoi. Nixon surreptitiously undercuts his adviser but joins him in double-crossing South Vietnamese President

Turner Pictures / All rights reserved

**FACT OR FICTION?** Ron Silver (left) plays Henry Kissinger and Beau Bridges (right) is the president in TNT's "Kissinger and Nixon," to be cablecast on Sunday night.

Thieu into a flawed agreement. The viewer is spared any ambiguity: Every single American policy-maker is depicted in various shades of sleaze. The few heroes are Vietnamese leaders, North and South.

This fairy tale raises serious questions about so-called docudramas — fiction presented as fact. Thus in the movie "JFK," President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were accused in documentary style of colluding in the assassination of Kennedy. Similarly, in "Kissinger and Nixon" a skillful blend of innuendo, distortion and misrepresentation is served up to a new generation unaware that Vietnam-era passions are masquerading as history.

Having been offered the script by Ron Silver (who plays Kissinger), I submitted dozens of primary sources documenting factual errors. I volunteered to join the producers in a Freedom of Information suit to settle factual disputes.

The producers, unwilling to let evidence interfere with their quest for ratings, proceeded with essentially the original script. As a result, the movie is filled with inac-

curacies that even a minimum regard for available documentary material could have avoided.

In an early scene, Nixon calls for me (asking for his "Jewboy") because he has just learned from a State Department intercept that I have started negotiations. The round of negotiations on which the movie is based, in fact, grew out of correspondence between Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev and Nixon. A summary of all these communications was available to the producer and ignored by him. The meticulous diaries of H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, make no reference to the movie's allegation.

In another scene, I am depicted as raging because the fact of the negotiations with Hanoi has been leaked to television. The next scene shows Nixon gloating and

congratulating the leaker because now I will get blamed for the expected failure of the negotiations. Nothing like this happened or could have happened. A minimum of research would have shown that there was nothing to leak, since every single negotiating session in the summer of 1972 was disclosed to the press within 24 hours.

Another scene shows Nixon giving Gen. Alexander Haig a fourth star, in effect for spying on me for him, and simultaneously keeping Haig on as my deputy, to my intense discomfiture. Nothing like this happened. Haig was given his fourth star after having left the White House to become Army vice chief of staff at a ceremony at the Pentagon. I was present; Nixon was not.

These factual misinterpretations

pale before the distortions of history. "Kissinger and Nixon" simply stands history on its head. In the real world, Nixon had put forward three irreducible conditions: continuation of the Saigon government, return of prisoners and end to communist infiltration into South Vietnam. No doubt, a Hollywood scriptwriter can, 20 years after the event, invent tougher terms; at the same time, these terms were assailed as far too stringent in scores of congressional resolutions, editorials, and by a candidate for president.

The film brazenly reverses history. Those who for four years braved often violent protests because they refused to abandon Thieu are portrayed as betraying him. No mention is made of a central element in the collapse of

See KISSINGER on Page 26

HENRY A. KISSINGER

NOT FOR PUBLICATION

December 11, 1995

Dear Mr. Goodman:

You might be interested about two factual points
suggested by your very fair review of "Kissinger and
Nixon".

I could not have "grieved" about never being invited
to dinner in the family quarters of the White House
because I dined there frequently, at least once a
month, probably more often.

Nixon never had a drink - at least in my presence -
in the Oval Office as the movie suggests; nor did I
ever see him take a drink before cocktail hour, and
then not regularly. The depiction of a boozing
Nixon is grossly unfair.

Mr. Walter Goodman
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

HENRY A. KISSINGER

NOT FOR PUBLICATION

December 11, 1995

Dear Don:

The review of "Kissinger and Nixon" on the front page of the Style section of Saturday, December 9 appeared six days after I demonstrated the untruthfulness of many details of the movie in TV Guide and a day after an expanded version of that criticism appeared in the New York Post (enclosed). None of this stopped your reviewer from portraying the movie as a Shakespearean rendition and describing me as Iago-like. Why would what is perhaps the country's leading newspaper collude in this manner with a falsification of history - which, by contrast, the New York Times review correctly and fairly labeled as essentially untrue.

The Nixon administration inherited 550,000 troops in combat as far away from the United States as it is possible to be on this globe. For four years we struggled amidst civil war conditions to extricate ourselves with honor - which we identified with not ending an inherited war by turning over to the Communists millions who had chosen independence in reliance on the American word given by our predecessors. Ending a war which had to reconcile American imperatives, South Vietnamese fears and North Vietnamese fanaticism was bound to be painful and messy. Those of us who navigated this searing experience should not be spared criticism of our policies, but we might be spared the sick caricature of our motives that the movie represents and your reviewer endorsed.

The Washington Post, which consistently attacked us for being too stringent, winds up extolling a movie that, in effect, blames us for selling out and never mentions the protests, the Congressional restrictions and media pressures

NIXON
ON THE ROCKS

Director Oliver Stone has made a career
out of rewriting American history to conform
to his stale countercultural obsessions. But
his latest effort went completely over the
top, except at the box office. Oliver's twist
missed—and Richard Nixon survives again.

JOHN H. TAYLOR

Those who pooh-pooh Newt Gingrich's rhetoric about the legacy of the sixties should see Oliver Stone's *Nixon*. Like the Japanese soldier hunkered down on a Pacific island a generation after V-J Day, Stone has the culture war raging in his brain on continuous loop, but with one difference: $43 million of fresh ammo from the Walt Disney Company. With all that money, and the grinding ruthlessness of the true ideologue, Stone has built a mausoleum of lies over the graves of Richard and Pat Nixon.

After fingering Lyndon Johnson in *JFK* for the Dallas caper and transforming wacky Jim Garrison into sexy Kevin Costner, Stone was widely judged to be a crank. But when he went to work on RN, the cultural secretariat seemed to want to clean Stone up. In the months leading up to the film's release, journalists reported that he had found Buddhism and stopped yelling at subordinates so much. Stone's flacks said *Nixon* was more carefully documented than *JFK*—and then Disney tried

to prove it by publishing an advance annotated script designed
to be weighed rather than read. It was an unnecessary gesture;
in this country you can say whatever you want about the dead,
regardless of the feelings and rights of their heirs. The Nixon
Library learned this the hard way when it obtained Stone's
shooting script last May and then consulted its attorneys.
Although the script did not say or show a single purely honest
thing about Richard Nixon, we were told we could do nothing
except speak out when the film was finally released.

Despite the Nixon family's condemnation of Stone's revisionism, some reviewers and journalists seemed happy to play along with the director. "Good Morning America," broadcast on the network Disney plans to buy, gave the film no fewer than nine promotional interviews and reviews. Snug in the lap of the surly-looking Stone, host Charlie Gibson didn't ask him to defend the slander that Nixon was complicit in the Kennedy assassination, nor did he question Stone's claim that Nixon "was one of the founding fathers of a system of political murder

March 1996 • The American Spectator

XAVIER CUGAT (1971) / ©1996 THOMAS MICHAEL O'KEY

in this country.” Siskel and Ebert gave Stone “two thumbs up,” but their Chicago-based program is distributed by Disney, too—and in Cook County they never learned to count anyway.

One begins to understand how thoroughly Nixon's reputation was destroyed during Watergate after reading the review in the esteemed *Daily Variety*, which deemed the film “uncharacteristically uncontroversial.” One supposes the reviewer, and the others who wrote in the same vein, really do think that Nixon was an incompetent, venal, pill-popping, asexual, megalomaniacal drunk who bombed Cambodia because Mary Steenburgen was cold to him and plotted the assassination of Fidel Castro—thus helping bring about the death of John F. Kennedy and the destruction of his own administration. I guess a controversial scene would have

involved barnyard animals.

In 1987 Stone remarked that, during the anti-war movement, he had advised his colleagues, “If you want to protest, let’s get a sniper scope and *do* Nixon.” As the Nixon family noted when the film was released, he settled for character assassination instead, accomplished in large part by drowning his character in alcohol and profanity.

One of the first words out of Nixon's mouth in the film is "cocksucker." I called a number of RN's aides, from Herb Klein to Charles Colson, and asked if they had ever heard him utter that word. None had. Nor had I, in fourteen years of virtually daily conversation. As for the drinking, I never saw him drink during the day or have more than two glasses of wine at night. His longtime aide Bob Haldeman, a Christian Scientist inclined to be judgmental about such things, frequently said that he had never seen Nixon drunk. In fact he was remarkably temperate in his personal habits, an aspect of his temperament consistent with his intellectual and political discipline.

JOHN H. TAYLOR is executive director of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda, California.

The American Spectator · March 1996

[LC]

23

The movie's ridiculous caricature was created by a director who insisted that he had come to empathize with his subject, which means either that Stone was lying or had previously been unaware that the thirty-seventh president walked upright or ate with a fork. The record shows that the director has been planning since President Nixon's death, if not before, to make a movie pinning the crime of the century on him, which, as empathetic acts go, is pretty weird.

A few weeks after the funeral, *Harper's* asked Stone and three others to guess what had been on the 18-and-a-half-minute gap in the June 20, 1972 Nixon White House tape that may— or may not—have been erased intentionally. Stone's submission was an imaginary dialogue between Nixon and Haldeman tying Watergate to the Kennedy assassination and telegraphing that his Kennedy demons had delivered him to Nixon's grave where he was already poised, licking his chops.

In March 1995, *Time* published a detailed summary of the major fabrications about Castro and Kennedy that Stone planned to peddle in his movie. He flatly denied the *Time* story, terming the allegation that his film was about RN's essential complicity in the Kennedy assassination "ridiculous." In a letter to the editor, Stone wrote, "Your item . . . totally misrepresents the film we are trying to make." To my knowledge nobody has called Stone on his bogus denial. In the film he has Nixon saying, "It's the lie that gets you." Stone got away with his scot free.

Tracking Stone was easy, since people close to the production kept leaking versions of the script to us—not only the May 1995 shooting script but the same one, dated February 1995 and bearing the names of Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, that *Time* obtained for its story. So we know that the essence of *Nixon* was in place months before shooting began.

Yet last spring Stone began a promotional tour for the film disguised as research. Through a family contact he put the arm on Republican guru Stephen Hess to arrange a meeting in Washington with people who had served Nixon, such as counsel Leonard Garment and press secretary Ronald Ziegler. One participant told me the director was largely passive during the session, though he did have one query: "Stone did ask me if the President had smelled funny."

Stone's search for the facts then brought him and some of his adjutants to the Nixon Library for an unannounced visit. They paid their $5.95 each and paraded around in high dudgeon: imagine Greenpeace activists in a rendering plant. "You must really *admire* him," Stone barked at a volunteer docent in the president's birthplace. Soon after, Anthony Hopkins materialized at the library along with his mother, who had flown in for the Academy Awards. He posed for pictures as President Nixon's last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, and I told him that Richard Nixon was a serious intellectual who as a president and as an elder statesman had spent an enormous amount of time working on the substance of what he said and wrote about the issues of the day. Hopkins kept looking nervously over our shoulders, as if afraid that G. Gordon Liddy might appear and offer to take him on a one-way ride. As soon as propriety permitted he rushed off, promising to give a fair portrayal. His mum confidently assured Kathy that "my Tony" would never say anything mean about anyone.

All of these contacts were evidently made just to be talked up by the Stone-Disney PR machine. The missions to Washington and Yorba Linda were described to every journalist who would listen as evidence that Stone's mind was still open. A letter Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote to Mrs. Hopkins had barely landed on her tea table in London before news of it was broadcast to the world.

Meanwhile Joan Allen, who played Pat Nixon, was also hitting the books. She told a reporter that she had read and admired Mrs. Eisenhower's biography of her mother, which contains nothing about threat of divorce or her spurned sexual overtures, nor anything about the president deceiving her about his political plans—all of which appear in the movie.

Allen's was *Nixon's* most praised performance, and the actress has been a potent PR weapon for the Stone-Disney machine. She resembles Mrs. Nixon, although her eyes are blue and the First Lady's were brown. When "Good Morning America" invited her back for yet another video press release on the eve of the movie's expanded distribution the first week of January, the actress was wearing brown contacts. Did someone think that the tens of millions who admired the First Lady would be more likely to go see the movie as a result?

Her eye color was the only thing they got right. In the film Allen drunkenly says to Hopkins, "I remember Alger Hiss. I know how ugly you can be—you're capable of anything." Mrs. Nixon berating her husband for his handling of the Hiss case, of course, is inconceivable. In the book Allen says that she studied, Julie Eisenhower, quoting her father's *Six Crises*, wrote that after the Hiss case in 1948, Nixon "was subjected to an ugly campaign of false charges, some whispered, others publicly aired: 'Bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury ...'" Eisenhower continued, "For my mother, the vindictiveness of some of the Hiss supporters in the years ahead caused an irreparable crack in her idealistic view of politics."

The dishonest portrait of the Nixon marriage is by far the cruelest cut in the movie. Stone's motive is obvious. To make his character a complete pariah, he wants to isolate him even from his wife. But anyone who honestly says that this portrayal honors Pat Nixon cannot have known anything significant about her. Hearing the lines Joan Allen speaks in her behalf would have broken her heart. As all who knew Mrs. Nixon will readily affirm, she was proud of having stood by her husband, beginning with the Hiss case and ending with her death in June 1993. It was her choice to do so. How dare Stone take that away from her?

A Hiss fault line, in fact, runs all through Nixon. In one of the film's faux newsreels the narrator says that Hiss was convicted "not of espionage but of perjury." Of course the perjury indictments were directly related to Hiss's spying, for which he could not be charged directly because of the statute of limitations. The Rivele-Wilkinson February script simply notes that Hiss was "convicted." Stone added the pro-Hiss spin later. Since a draft of Disney's own "study guide" for the film is honest enough to reveal that "the judgment of most historians is that [Hiss] was indeed a spy," why is Oliver Stone, whose buddies in

March 1996 · The American Spectator

In 1987 Stone remarked that, during
the anti-war movement, he had
advised his colleagues, "If you want
to protest, let's get a sniper scope
and do Nixon." Here was his chance.

Vietnam were slaughtered by
Communist aggressors, still carry-
ing water for a traitor?

Like Hiss's testimony before
Nixon's House committee in 1948,
the Stone-Disney annotated script
is a masterpiece of dissembling.
My favorite example involves the
Nixons' friend Bebe Rebozo, who
was also the godfather of their elder
grandson. The May 1995 shooting
script contains a coarse scene in
which Bebe attempts to persuade
Nixon to commit adultery with a
young woman. Stone's people evi-
dently discovered that Rebozo was

still alive. In the published script "Bebe" is a Cuban-American called "Trini." Consulting the footnotes of which Stone and his henchmen have bragged so prodigiously, one learns, "Trini is a composite character. Richard Nixon had a number of male friends who were successful businessmen and with whom he spent time." Composite com-shmosite. Call your lawyer, Bebe! If the person who's been defamed is still breathing, it works.

In the May shooting script former CIA director Richard Helms is a blackmailer of presidents and knower of all evil regarding the Castro and Kennedy plots. When I shared a copy of the script with Helms last summer, he asked in his courtly way for permission to have his attorney write a little note to Stone. Knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, Stone cut Helms out of the picture, even though he had already filmed scenes with Sam Waterston—who must have cost him and Mickey Mouse real money. Stone even ground down John Ehrlichman's rough edges after threats of legal action.

But only Watergate buffs will appreciate the favor Stone does for his paid consultant, John Dean. The director sends up a bizarre smoke screen about Watergate and JFK. If you want to know what was really said in the famous June 23, 1972 "smoking gun" conversation, the released transcript of which drove the president from office by tying him to the Watergate cover-up, don't go to the movies; go to the National Archives or come to our museum in Yorba Linda and listen to the real tape. There's no mystery about it. Said Haldeman to the President that morning, "[John] Mitchell came up with yesterday, and John Dean analyzed very carefully last night and concludes, concurs now with Mitchell's recommendation that the only way to solve this...is for us to have [CIA Deputy Director Vernon] Walters call [acting FBI director] Pat Gray and just say, 'Stay the hell out of this...'"

Conscious that the CIA was sensitive about its failure at the Bay of Pigs, Nixon approved the suggestion, and added that Walters should mention the invasion when discussing the matter with agency director Helms. Haldeman's handwritten notes confirm that Dean had argued his case for the cover-up vigorously. The record also shows that the president personally countermanded the order just two weeks later, but that's another movie.

In their 1991 book *Silent Coup*, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin suggest that Dean never discussed the matter with Mitchell, head of the Nixon re-election campaign, before pitching it to Haldeman. They argued that Dean wanted the cover-up launched to mask his own role in the break-in and brought Mitchell's name into the piece to get the president's attention. And so the brilliant idea that destroyed a president may have been the brainchild not of Nixon himself or Haldeman but of Stone's man Dean. If true, his ploy worked better than he could have

hoped, since RN always believed that the break-in occurred because his friend Mitchell was distracted by family troubles.

Dean and his wife have sued the authors of *Silent Coup* and its publisher, St. Martin's Press, for libel. With a trial pending, it is salutary for the Deans to have a movie stating that the Watergate cover-up was rooted not in John Dean's actions, as the White House tapes show it was, but in the Kennedy assassination. Why Stone cares enough to cover up for Dean, however, remains a mystery. Somebody should make a movie about it.

Stone's polemic has been condemned by authorities such as Stephen Ambrose, a Nixon biographer widely praised for his even-handedness, and former Tip O'Neill aide Chris Matthews; it's even been criticized, albeit more gently, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose royalty checks from Simon & Schuster presumably swell with any anti-Nixon wave that hits shore. Although Woodstein were among the first journalists in history to get rich writing about the First Lady's sex life, even they must realize that Stone twists the knife too sadistically to be even vaguely credible. The few sympathetic scenes were inserted by a cynical propagandist who knows you can magnify a character's fundamental evil by granting him a glimmer or two of humanity and even majesty.

How to explain any praise whatsoever in respectable circles for this ferocious assault on a statesman who—in spite of his imperfections, and in the opinion of many independent observers as well as his friends—left a legacy of progressive Republicanism at home and enlightened national interest in foreign policy? It's because Stone is channeling the angst of the most sanctimonious horde ever to have established hegemony over mainstream debate in this country. A whole generation of privileged youngsters concluded that the United States was acting not imprudently or unwisely but immorally in Indochina. It remains the unifying myth of a whole generation of commentators, reviewers, college professors, editors, television producers, corporate executives—just about everybody who smoked dope to the first Jefferson Airplane record.

Stone himself said it to *People*: "It [Nixon] sums up the conscience of that time" — the conscience, that is, of people such as Oliver Stone. The director represents those, for instance, who

looked at Nixon's swift and carefully planned move into Cambodia in 1970 and saw only the four young people who died at Kent State, not the countless young people serving in Vietnam whose lives were saved because Communist military sanctuaries were cleaned out. He represents those who looked at the greatest democracy in history and saw a nation controlled by secret, unaccountable interests—he calls this agency “the beast”—that killed presidents and launched wars at will. Stone has become America's pharisee of the sixties, guardian of a cynical elite's most cherished conceits. The defining one is that they were right about Indochina, although the Vietnamese gulag and the Cambodian

> Stone's search for the "facts" then brought him and some of his adjustments to the Nixon Library for an unannounced visit. They paid their $5.95 each and paraded around in high dudgeon: imagine Greenpeace activists in a rendering plant.

killing fields have long since proved they were tragically wrong.

By being as vicious as he was, Stone may have made Nixon-hating disrespectful for a time. Those rooted in the hard left of the sixties must have been alarmed by the outpouring of affection for Nixon at his funeral. If he stood tall historically, they reasoned, so might his achievements. So Stone panicked and overreached. His post-JFK rehabilitation was incomplete, and for Nixon he surrounded himself with unreconstructed lefties such as Robert Scheer, another paid consultant who has been one of the film's loudest defenders. In July 1969 Scheer wrote in *Ramparts*, "It is still the U.S. government which is, as Martin Luther King said shortly before his death, 'the major purveyor of violence in the world,' in Vietnam and elsewhere." It's no surprise that he's playing the role of Oliver Stone's Spiro Agnew on every talk show that will have him.

After reading the script but before seeing the movie, I was afraid that young people with no direct or scholarly knowledge about the Nixon years would be swayed by its mendacity. But the movie itself seems so malicious and cruelly invasive of the Nixons' privacy that I don't think it will have much impact on what an uninformed but intelligent person of good will thinks about the Nixons. Perhaps that is an overly optimistic view in an era when even college educators have conceded that students get much of their history and current events from films and television.

But as for people who do know the record—well, I’ve talked to several who said they were grinning much of the time, as I was, John Williams’s portentous score notwithstanding. My favorite scene was just before the credits rolled. The real Nixon spent several hours after his resignation speech working the phones and then got up at six for a plate of corned beef hash and poached eggs. Anthony Hopkins spent it wandering around in the cross hall of the White House, speaking a line to JFK’s portrait that Stone cribbed from Tom Wicker. Then Joan Allen emerges from the

shadows, doing the Lady Macbeth shuffle. Hopkins lays his head on her breast. Sounding like Dylan Thomas reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” he says that he remembered throwing up on his mother after taking some medicine and wished he could do it again. I laughed out loud and thought that in the old days, before he mellowed, when he was young and strong and angry and terrible and making Salvador and Wall Street and JFK, Stone would’ve had the guts to go for the big play and show the President actually vomiting on the First Lady. Everybody would’ve been talking about it.

Instead, after weeks of ads and controversy, Nixon failed to crack the top ten in box office receipts. As

Disney prepared to spend millions more advertising its early January rollout to nearly a thousand screens, the director himself was reduced to sending the Nixon Library (and every journalist in the country) a letter praising our loyalty to the president—and asking us to please spend money conducting a conference about his movie. One imagines he hated signing that message almost as much as the president did his resignation letter. Maybe Mickey made him do it.

Having congratulated himself repeatedly for helping pry loose classified Kennedy assassination documents in the wake of JFK, Stone clearly hoped to relive that glory. He also proposed in his letter that the Nixon Library "join me in an effort to overcome the legal disputes of the past 21 years and facilitate the earliest possible release of the nearly four thousand hours of tape-recorded White House conversations." Thanks anyway. For a year a federal judge in Washington has been sponsoring a mediation process in which the litigants—the late president's estate, the National Archives, and liberal Watergate scholar Stanley Kutler—have been negotiating about precisely that. The existence of the mediation is public information; the U.S. District Court is in the white pages, should Stone want confirmation.

There were a few other light moments as the extended Nixon family prepared over the course of the last year to get thoroughly Stoned over the holidays. When *Time* revealed that he planned to pin Kennedy's murder on a "Track II" apparatus personally created by Richard Nixon, Tricia Nixon Cox called me in Yorba Linda. She asked rhetorically if there wasn't anything that could be done to stop such lies about her father. I said I supposed that the president's family and friends would need to rally around in an orderly fashion to counteract the damage that Stone would inevitably do to the memories of her parents. Tricia laughed her mother's delightful laugh and said, "We'll call that Track III!"

So who's next for Stone? Hollywood wags say Dr. King, but I don't believe it. Hey, Ronald Reagan! As Johnnie Cochran might say, where were you on November Twenty-Two?

Sunday at the

John D. Sargent, who lives in New York, and a longtime theatrical friend, the British writer Anthony Shaffer, who lives in Australia and wrote the mystery thriller play "Sleuth," spoke by telephone about the art of murder, in a conversation arranged by The New York Times. Here are excerpts from their talk.

Stephen Sondheim: One of the things that intrigues me is whether there is still an audience for the mystery play and thriller that you and I love, Tony. Mysteries used to be the staple of a certain kind of theater. In London there would be two or three new ones every season. Now there's one every two seasons. They've been taken over by

A.S.: Plainly not. What you find out is that if you do not supply a solution, people are very dissatisfied. I once left it as late as a curtain call to give the who in "Whodunnit." Even then they couldn't get it because they expected all the work to be done for them.

S.S.: Do you remember John Dickson Carr and "The Nine Wrong Answers"?

A.S.: Absolutely.

S.S.: I was fonder of the notion than I was of the book. Every time you thought you'd solved it, he was ahead of you, putting in a little footnote saying "wrong — that may be what it looks like, but you're wrong." It was a constant, snotty, condescending shaking of the finger. It was exhilarating, and it made you run through the book. He deliberately set traps, so you would think you were smarter than the author, when, in fact, you weren't. Nor was he the least bit interested

in char-

scribed in one

don't have to worry about it

have to worry about it

A.S.: Carr was an absolute master of two separate accounts of the matter: supranatural and the other think he has been much neglected.

S.S.: It's partly because he's so literate, plots are elaborate; they appeal only to buffs like you and me. "Sleuth" [which opened on Broadway in 1970 with Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter, where it won the Tony Award for best play and was later made into a movie with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine] is full of takeoffs on John Dickson Carr: all those endless explanations of the insanely baroque and complicated solutions I associate with Carr.

She has already been put down, I hate to tell you.

A.S.: By Raymond Chandler.

S.S.: By God.

A.S.: I think the first was a little more serious.

S.S.: Actually, she was put down in this

one of the reads.

much is that his plot brings me back to you and "Sleuth" ever tell you about the time I met Sir Laurence Olivier? I was at a play in London, and during the interval [the British directed

*Continued on Page 48*

## Portraits of Nixon and Kissinger From Inside Out

WHEN HE WAS PREPARING TO DIRECT "Nixon's Nixon," a play that imagines the encounter between Henry A. Kissinger and Richard M. Nixon on the eve of Nixon's resignation as President in 1974, Jim Simpson made an artistic decision: no latex noses.

The actors would have to rely on their own inventiveness, not that of a makeup artist, for their portrayals of the former Secretary of State and the disgraced President. "You did have the choice of doing the 'Spitting Image' sort of thing," Mr. Simpson said, referring to the British television series that caricatured the celebrated with garish puppets. "For me, the theater is not about that."

For "Nixon's Nixon," in fact, Mr. Simpson did not even cast performers who looked much like their famous counterparts. Gerry Bamman and Steve Mellor were veteran Off Broadway actors who the director simply felt were up to the demands of Russell Lees's two-character play, a funny, surreal exploration of what might have transpired in the Lincoln sitting room on that historic August night 22 years ago. The 90-minute play was so well received at the MCC Theater in Chelsea last fall that it has moved to the Westside Theater on West 43d Street, where it opens on Tuesday.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Final Moments Steve Mellor, left, portrays Henry A. Kissinger and Gerry Bamman plays the former President in "Nixon's Nixon" at the Westside Theater—Impersonators need not apply.

The performances by Mr. Bamman, 54, as Nixon, and Mr. Mellor, 41, as Mr. Kissinger, are subtler than impersonations. Mr. Bamman mimics Nixon's hunched posture and Mr. Mellor approximates Mr. Kissinger's gravelly monotone, a voice so deep it seems to emanate from his shins. Mr. Mellor says his only study aid was a videotape of a talk-show interview of Mr. Kissinger. Mr. Bamman visited the Museum of Television and Radio to watch old clips of Nixon.

The absence of caricature is a reflection of the author's ambition to create a psychologically nuanced drama about a battle of wits at a desperate hour. The play by Mr. Lees, 39, an engineer-turned-playwright from Salt Lake City, portrays Nixon in turmoil, eager to be talked out of leaving. Mr. Kissinger is at once a confidant and a conniver, insisting that the President resign so he can stay behind to safeguard their accomplishments — and, of course, hold onto his job.

Unlike the all-star movie cast of Oliver Stone's "Nixon," the actors in "Nixon's Nixon" are unknown outside theater circles. "I'm the oldest living actor waiting for the Clarence Derwent Award," Mr. Bamman joked, referring to the acting awards for promising newcomers. When he is not on stage, Mr. Bamman, a native of the Midwest, can be found at his desk; he has collaborated on translations of several Ibsen plays. Mr. Mellor, born in New England, has been working on Off Broadway since graduating from Boston University. He has been cast in a new sitcom, "The High Life," to be filmed by HBO in New York.

Mr. Kissinger has been invited to attend "Nixon's Nixon," but so far has declined, the actors said. As for the former President, Mr. Bamman said playing him has not altered his assessment of Nixon. "There is this old actor's adage that says an actor has to love a character to play him. I said, 'God, what if I end up liking him?' But that hasn't happened."

PETER MARKS

NY Times - Sunday, March 10, 1996

Robert Carl McFarlane

FEB 09 1996

February 7, 1996

It was good to see you at the January meeting of the America - China Society. I left the next day for the Persian Gulf but upon returning found your penetrating article on "Stone's Nixon."

It has too often been your fate -- absent others of sufficient courage and loyalty -- to correct the record, to serve as advocate for the many positive elements in President Nixon's legacy. Deserving to be honored for your own role, you ought not be called upon to defend it. That you have is high testimony to your guts, your fidelity to the people and purposes which you served so well and to your intellectual integrity.

Apart from the outrage expressed in the film's content, there is an equivalent measure of degeneracy in what has passed for artistic criticism of it. What does it tell us that this horrible desecration was widely praised by so-called serious critics?

Over the course of the past ten years, it seems to me that the public mind has come to credit victory in Cold War to those who counseled realism, strength, and determination. That the left cannot accept that is annoying but in a larger sense, pitiful. Your role was and will remain a giant one. To have to constantly defend it is sad, but in the end worthy, and above all a further vindication of the special trust so wisely placed in you.

Warm regards,

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
350 Park Avenue
26th Floor
New York, NY 10022

[L.C.]

„ WIR SIND AUCH WATERGATE "

Zwei Jahrzehnte nach Nixons Sturz steht sein Fall nach wie vor im Rampenlicht. Vier politische Meinungsbildner aus Deutschland ergreifen für CINEMA Partei im Streit um Richard Nixon

„Ich bin kein Schurke“: Vergeblich setzt Nixon auf Fernsehansprachen zur Beteuerung seiner Unschuld

Stone den Fall Nixon als Material für eine klassische Tragödie gewittert haben. Die Umsetzung ist in ihrer Megalomanie faszinierend: Hochmut und Sturz werden erlebbar und über drei Stunden lang in all ihren Facetten ausgebreitet. Viele Freunde von Stone wird die so kräz zurückgenomene Polemik dieses Werkes überraschen, aber sie zeugt auch von einer Entwicklung des Filmemachers in der Beherrschung seines Materials. Eine Rehabilitation Nixons, auf die amerikanische Konservative hoffen, ist der Film nicht, aber für die erwartete Hinderung besitzt er zu viele Zwischenstöne. Als Richard Nixon im April 1994 starb, versammelten sich seine vier Amtsnachfolger an seinem Grab. Die Nachrufe waren verhalten, oft bemüht. Ronald Reagan beschrieb Richard Nixon als „komplizierten und faszinierenden Menschen“. Und Oliver Stone hätte ihm vermutlich zum ersten Mal in seinem Leben zugestimmt. Klaus Dahm

**Dr. Klaus von Dohnanyi** Die Filmindustrie der Vereinigten Staaten hat eine bewundernswerte Fähigkeit, sich der lebendigen Zeitgeschichte anzunehmen. Vermutlich liegt das auch daran, daß die Bürger der Vereinigten Staaten mehr als andere Völker wissen: Die Politik, ihre Leidenschaft, ihre Macht und Ohnmacht, ihre großzügige Grazie und ihre hinterhältige Bosheit – das sind wir alles selbst. Wir sind nicht nur „Lindenstraße“, wir sind auch „Watergate“. Nixon war einer der großen Präsidenten des Jahrhunderts. Und er war auch einer seiner kläglichsten, öffentlichen Figuren. Shakespeares Könige und Helden, seine großen Herzen und kleinen Geister waren Figuren seiner Zeit. Warum soll uns das heute nicht möglich sein? Deutschland traut sich nicht – Amerika macht’s möglich.

Dr. Klaus von Doh bis 1988 Erster Bümeister von Hamb

**Wolf von Lojewski** Es fiel mir oft schwer, in ihm einen amerikanischen Helden oder Schurken zu sehen. Eher schon eine Figur aus Shakespeares Königsdramen: genial und charakterlich höchst zweifelhaft, hin- und hergerissen zwischen Größen- und Verfolgungswahn. Seine Chinapolitik hat einer eingefrorenen Weltpolitik neue Wege geöffnet, innerpolitisch spaltete er die Nation in „die“ und „wir“. Als er im Watergate-Skandal versank und gehen mußte – Amerikas erster Präsident, der in Schmach vorzeitig das höchste Amt verließ –, da plagte ihn auch noch eine schlimme Venen-Entzündung. Und ich erinnere mich noch an einen Jesuitenpater, der ihn zum Ende hin in ethischen Fragen beriet. Wir standen auf dem Rasen des Weißen Hauses, und er humpelte an uns vorbei: ein gebückter Mann, von dem so mancher fürchtete, er könne notfalls schnell noch einen Krieg anzetteln mit den Russen – nur um seiner Amtsenthebung zu entgehen. Es war ganz still, und er schaute seinen Füßen beim Gehen zu. Sie passen ja nur halb, aber es gingen mir Shakespeares Verse durch den Kopf – Richard III, 1. Akt, 1. Szene: „...die Hunde fangen zu bellen an, hink' ich vorbei.“ Und doch: Als zehn Jahre nach dem Skandal Meinungsforscher die Amerikaner fragten, mit welchem ihrer noch lebenden, ehemaligen Präsidenten sie mal persönlich zusammentreffen wollten, entschied sich eine klare Mehrheit für ihn.

Wolf von Lojewski
Redaktionsleiter
ZDF heute-journa

**Manfred Bissinger** Mit „Tricky Dicky“ begann der Niedergang der politischen Kultur in den USA. Richard Nixon war Machtmensch, Menschenverächter und Meister der inszenierten Lüge, skrupellos und frei von ethisch-moralischen Gewissensbissen. Da solche Eigenschaften in Washington (und nicht nur da) inzwischen längst zum Polit-Repertoire gehören, verblaßt Nixons Monstrität in der Rückschau. Seine Sünden werden ihm heute also allzu rasch vergeben – zumindest vergessen sollten wir sie aber nie.

Manfred Bissinger
Chefredakteur
Die Woche

Faszinierende Charakterstudie des Watergate-Präsidenten im Aufstieg und freien Fall

Original: Nixon; USA 1995; 190 Min.; Regie: Oliver Stone; Buch: Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, O. Stone; Kamera: Robert Richardson; Musik: John Williams; Darsteller: Anthony Hopkins (Nixon), Joan Allen (Patricia Nixon), Paul Sorvino (Henry Kissinger), Powers Boothe (A exander Haig), Ed Harris (E. H. Hunt), Bob Hoskins (J. E. Hoover), E. G. 'Marshall (Mitchell), David Paymer (Ron Ziegler)

**Dr. Theo Waigel** Der frühere amerikanische Präsident Richard Nixon wird ungeachtet von der Watergate-Affäre als einer der großen Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten in die Geschichte eingehen. Mit einer weitsichtigen Strategie gegenüber der früheren Sowjetunion und der Volksrepublik China schuf er die Voraussetzungen für die Beendigung des Vietnamkrieges und die Überwindung des Kalten Krieges. Nixons fünf Amtsnachfolger haben sich zu seinen Lebzeiten stets auf die sachkundige Analyse und den weisen Rat des „Elder Statesman“ verlassen können. Als entscheidender Befürworter enger amerikanischer Beziehungen und einer starken NATO hat sich Richard Nixon bleibende Verdienste um Frieden und Stabilität erworben.

Dr. Theo Waigel,
Parteivorsitzender
Bundesfinanzminister

79

## Pipe Dreams

Exposed pipes, drop-cross handles, humongous showerheads, and faucets with handmade porcelain faces—they're all part of Waterworks's new Etoile collection. Based in Connecticut, this bath-and-kitchen-fixture company looks to France and England—and the Victorian and Edwardian eras—for inspiration. The Etoile fittings and faucets are made in France's Somme region and come in nickel or unlacquered brass (from $159 for a robe hook to $318 for a glass towel bar to $1,195 for a cross-handled basin set).

WATERWORKS/237 East 58th Street/371-9266

## How to Carry a Tune

While others search for yet more ingenious, generally dorky ways to store CDs, the Metropolitan Opera turns to old-fashioned simplicity: wooden valises. But the Met's carrying cases are far from dull. They're hand-painted by Blue Studio, then decoupaged with assorted opera memorabilia, such as a photo of Caruso in full regalia as Canio in *Pagliacci* ($200).

METROPOLITAN OPERA SHOP/

Lincoln Center, Broadway at 64th Street/580-4090; and 835 Madison Avenue, near 69th Street/734-8406

Photographs: clockwise from left: Amouration (2); Ken Kochey; David Sacks.

## Toying With an Idea

You won't find Micro Machines, Spider-Man, or Barbie at Geppetto's Toy Box. In fact, there are no TV-advertised toys at all in Jerry Eaderesto's new store. Eaderesto has applied his photographer's eye to the selection of playthings. His mostly handmade, whimsical menagerie includes fashion designer Nathalie Ferrier-Cohen's funky critters, Sigikid's exquisitely costumed dolls, and comical and musical bears from Cousin Janet's Kids (from $4.95 for a rubber duck to $89.95 for Roy Braeger's handmade wooden lamps to $495 for Sigikid's Emely).

GEPPETTO'S TOY BOX/161 Seventh Avenue South/620-7511

JANUARY 8, 1996 NEW YORK 43

MOVIES DAVID DENBY

Poor Richard

[LC]

Oliver Stone's 'Nixon' portrays a miserable man whose inability to escape his past proved to be his undoing.

Anthony Hopkins
doing his best
Richard Nixon.

ANGUISH IS NOT AN EMOTION THAT OLIVER STONE has ever shied away from—or that he has allowed his audience to escape. Stone put us through hell in his three Vietnam films, hectoring us again and again for not sufficiently sharing the troubles of the GI's and the Vietnamese. But tenderness is a new emotion for Stone, and the most surprising thing about **Nixon**, his obsessional, painful, fascinating new movie, is how much warmth the director extends to the unlikely figure of Richard Milhous Nixon (Anthony Hopkins). For here is a portrait of the most wretched man who ever lived. Clumsy and trapped, a bear carrying his own zoo bars around with him—even into his bedroom—the president is a harsh and fraudulent personality, deaf to others but far too intelligent not to notice how many people loathe him. For Nixon-haters, the movie is the moment of truth: Will they give up enough of their distaste to accept a complex view of their lifelong nemesis? Intellectuals in particular have always favored a satirical treatment—Nixon as malevolent clown and self-pitying opportunist. Two dimensions are enough for such a man! But now we get more. Two and a half, perhaps. We are asked to see Nixon as monstrous but afflicted, tough but infinitely troubled—a typical Stone character caught in perpetual anguish.

Stone has attempted Shakespearean tragedy within the form of a whirling, cyclical montage structure; the movie is an open homage to *Citizen Kane*, and that doesn't always work. As always, Stone overloads the medium, surrounding us with *film*. There are newsreels of the real Nixon, mock newsreels with Hopkins morphed into scenes with Kennedy or Khrushchev, childhood miseries from long-ago California. Color, black-and-white, and sepia footage clamor for attention, sometimes all three in the same sequence. The movie is exhaustingly expressive, as if Stone were afraid we wouldn't *get* it somehow. Just before Nixon's resignation in 1974, as the president falls into drunkenness and despair, an entire lifetime plays through his head with increasing violence. Stone also cuts back to earlier moments

in Nixon's career—the 1960 presidential and 1962 gubernatorial elections, the assassination of Kennedy—and those events set off memories as well. Poor Nixon! He can't ever escape the tragic Oliver Stone movie pounding inside his head. He gets dissolved into a hundred fragments and then reassembled as a man intolerably burdened by his past. *Nixon* is bullying and redundant—aesthetic terrorism, a friend calls the style. Yet there's a generous soulfulness here, an intimacy with defeat and rage, and a strain of shocked pity, particularly in the scenes between Dick and Pat. I was often moved.

It appears necessary to say that *Nixon* is an interpretation—necessary because some very distinguished journalists cannot understand this commonplace idea. Drawing on archival and biographical materials, Stone and his screenwriters, Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, combine, condense, recast, and rewrite. So does every maker of narrative nonfiction, from Mailer to movie-of-the-week. For instance, the filmmakers reworked the dead, cold, all but impenetrable language of the Watergate tapes into scenes that crackle with conflict and dark hints. The mad, circumlocutory evasiveness of the originals is gone, replaced by something more simply and plainly evil. Is this falsification? Can there be drama without something like it?

In all, *Nixon* sticks much closer to ascertainable fact than did *JFK* (which was, I admit, entirely reckless on

44

NEW YORK JANUARY 8, 1996

Photograph by Sidney Baldwin/Hollywood Pictures.

the subject of Lyndon Johnson and the assassination of John F. Kennedy). Stone offers only one major speculative line—Nixon's alleged involvement as vice-president in CIA plots to assassinate Castro. The plots failed, and the plotters, including Mafia gangsters and Cuban émigrés who became furious at Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, connived in JFK's assassination. (Or so Stone's Nixon thinks.) Years later, even though he had nothing personally to do with Kennedy's death, Nixon muses incoherently over the old conspiracies and secrets. Veiled references fall into his conversation, baffling his closest adviser, Bob Haldeman (James Woods). The obsession becomes a figure in the thick carpet of Nixonian guilt, where it mixes with memories of the two brothers who died young of TB years earlier in rural California. In Nixon's mind, both pairs of dead brothers—Arthur and Harold Nixon, Jack and Bobby Kennedy—sacrificed themselves so that Nixon could be president. He carries his unhappiness with him and, according to Stone, guilty undoes himself by first making the tapes and then choosing not to destroy them. At some level, he wants to be found out.

Now, it's fine for journalists to point out factual errors and inventions, but the implication that Oliver Stone is merely lying is ludicrous and philistine. Stone, after all, does not write newspaper articles. Such things as dramatic shaping, acting, pace, mood, counter-mood, and so on are not just dressing but the substance of whatever it is a director wants to say. Stone's journalistic critics won't, or can't, take notice of such complex moments as that eerie scene on the presidential yacht, when, after the Kent State killings, Nixon thinks of his brother Harold, who died at roughly the same age as the students. Depressed as he is by Kent State, Nixon cannot offer condolences to the students' families—"Nixon can't do that," he says, unconsciously switching to the third person so the public figure, rather than himself, refuses sympathy and grief. Regret, rage, and contempt pass through the moment like shifts in the wind. Now, if Nixon isn't a good movie, it's because scenes like these don't work, not because they diverge from the historical record. The journalists who hate Stone clearly want him off their turf, but they aren't always convincing about what his films "say," which is never something simple like "LBJ had JFK killed." The journalists belittle whatever they can't simply paraphrase.

I have mixed feelings about Anthony Hopkins's work. Despite sedulous imitation of the Nixon manner—sudden smile, flung-up arms, a tendency to top-heaviness—he doesn't much look or sound like Nixon. But that's not really the point. Hopkins gets some things dead right—the impersonality, the bluff, unconscious

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rudeness. The trouble is that Hopkins is too busy. He acts like crazy—cringing, cowering—and it's too much. Presidents are generally cold bastards, and none colder than Richard Nixon, but Hopkins responds emotionally to everything and hides nothing. A man this vulnerable

could not have come close to the White House. Hopkins, who has often played remote ordinary men, bizarrely forgets the remoteness of power.

The fault is Stone's, perhaps, more than Hopkins's. If we had seen more of Nixon the executive, Nixon the masterful strategist, the president's fall into bathos and incoherence would have been more striking. But Nixon begins with the president at the end of his tether, in 1974, and the

flashbacks don't offer much contrast.

Nixon is always a seething, resentful mess. Hopkins gives us a theater actor's overwrought projection of inner states of feeling. It works best in the scenes with Pat (Joan Allen), in which Nixon, gruff and clumsy, finds himself overmatched by a woman whose candor and whose sexuality intimidate him. Yes, this is Pat Nixon we are talking about. Joan Allen is a revelation, and Oliver Stone should be proud—he has gotten a whole woman on the screen at last.

Setting up Richard Nixon as the heir to soulless, power-mad Charles Foster Kane makes a kind of sense: the same public success and personal emptiness, the same tendency to fraud and cynicism. But does imitating the structural shape and expressive devices (the Gothic atmosphere, the multiple voices) of Citizen Kane also make sense? Kane is an extraordinarily entertaining masterpiece. The doomy, heavily shadowed, movieish quality of the atmosphere consorts well with its overall spirit, which is satirical and mischievous. But in Nixon, which shares the same atmosphere (the White House as a Gothic castle), the almost campy doominess is made to consort with grief and paranoia, and the two don't fit together. If Nixon is a tragic figure, Stone should have portrayed him with a simpler, more dignified technique. In all, I wish to God Oliver Stone would lighten up a bit. But this punishing, lugubrious yet oddly tender movie is at least a step in a new direction. Stone, 49, hasn't finished making himself

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46

NEW YORK JANUARY 8, 1996

yet. There may be a whole new range of expression within his grasp.

DANDIFIED GOATEE AND FULL, RICH HEAD OF hair; tattoos and prison-house rant; a rapid, furtive way of speaking, as if designed to conceal meaning—a few minutes of Sean Penn's performance in **Dead Man Walking**, and you know that he's got the role of the Louisiana death-row inmate Matthew Poncelet down right. Penn, narrowing his eyes, looks more like the photographs of actual criminals than any Hollywood actor I can think of. He defines "shifty": he's mean, cut off, mocking. His Poncelet tries to bully and seduce a nun, Sister Helen Préjean (Susan Sarandon), who takes an interest in his case; and when she proves to be tougher than he thought, he slowly opens up to her, seeking friendship and finally someone to confess to. *Dead Man Walking*, directed by Tim Robbins, and based on a book by the actual Helen Préjean, is the story of Matthew Poncelet's redemption and death.

The movie leaves me a little nonplussed. For long stretches, I admired Robbins's steady, sober decency and his willingness to look painful facts in the face. Poncelet has been convicted of murdering two teenagers, and as Sister Helen defends him, she takes abuse from the parents of the dead kids. Robbins observes the parents' rage neutrally, evenly, without turning them into vengeful hysterics. Unadorned, her voice low and steady, Sarandon gives a solid (though unexciting) performance as a woman determined to take risks and break through to one of God's more unsavory creatures.

But at the end, as nun and murderer reach out to each other in the death chamber, I began to get queasy. I don't question Sister Helen's commitment. But I can't help noticing that she seems to be doing ever so much more for herself than she is for Matthew Poncelet; and I can't help wondering if his death does not conveniently bring to an end (and on a very high-minded note) an attraction that would have proved troublesome in the extreme. The movie's high-mindedness goes askew. The filmmakers blow the case they are plainly making against capital punishment. The implication is that Poncelet shouldn't be executed because he has accepted God and may become a good man. But if you are truly against capital punishment, you're against executing the redeemed and the unredeemed alike. Robbins wants to horrify us, and he shows the execution in detail; the final scene mixes exaltation and death-pornography in a combination that left me almost ill. Matthew Poncelet, spread out like Jesus, goes to Heaven before our eyes. But in my religion, you see, dead men don't walk. They just die. The problem is to make something of yourself in life.

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47

THEATER JOHN SIMON

Falling Apartheid

Athol Fugard was
always worthier than
he was interesting.
But the freeing of
South Africa makes
his brand of
earnestness seem tired.

Athol Fugard
dispenses
uplifting wisdom
to Lisa Gay
Hamilton.

THE WORTHY ATHOL FUGARD COMES A COLOSSAL
cropper with **Valley Song**. In all of Fugard's pre-
vious plays, worthiness outweighed worth.
These works of a solitary, embattled playwright
exuded honesty, humanitarianism, and
courage. Every aspect of Boer inhumanity and
its dehumanizing effect on all concerned was
truthfully and fearlessly scrutinized. There was,
of course, dramatic value, too—how could there not have
been, coming from one who bore witness in both the sec-
ular and the spiritual sense?

It was thus easy to overlook a certain poverty of lan-
guage and invention. An innate sense of propriety pro-
tected Fugard from stooping to the agitprop level, and the
characters managed, by and large, to be emblematic with-
out becoming synthetic. But with *Valley Song* comes a

different dispensation: The old injustices are no
longer there, but there is new injustice, new vio-
lence brewing, what with a population unable to
cope with emancipation and turning anarchic in
new, often internecine ways. But Fugard, like a
good liberal, doesn't have the stomach to lay bare
the failure of those he helped liberate. Instead, he
gives us a fuzzy, sentimental fable or allegory suf-
fused with a naïve optimism and lacking all dra-
matic interest. So a simpleminded metaphor of
pumpkin seeds is worked into the ground, so to
speak. So both the new and old South Africa be-
have with rueful nobility of soul, self-realization
and self-sacrifice going peaceably hand in hand.
Newspaper accounts tell us otherwise.

Lisa Gay Hamilton gives an impassioned yet
finely shaded performance as a young Coloured
leaving the Karroo to seek her fortune in the city,
and there isn't a false note in her traversal of this
demanding role. She touches all extremes and
most points in between. Unfortunately, Fugard, a
not very subtle actor, has given himself not one
but two parts, which he does not even differenti-
ate convincingly. *Valley Song* is almost totally
bereft of action and groans under a load of high-
minded homiletics and righteous platitudes
heavy enough to crush and flatten Africa's entire
elephant population.

COMEDIANS TURNED PLAYWRIGHTS TEND TO HAVE
more success with short pieces, which run about
the length of a stand-up monologue. Hence I ex-
pected Steve Martin to do better with the four
one-actors subsumed under the title of the
longest, **WASP**, than he did with his rather uneven
full-length *Picasso at the Lapin Agile*. Sure
enough, the three skits that form the first part of
the bill are easy listening. Martin's ability to con-
trive endlessly oddball tropes that flash across
the stage like shooting stars衔mingles sweetly with
his gift for loopy conceits (a man buying a guil-
lotine for his home for an odd reason, a fellow
levitating his girlfriend in the vain hope of mak-
ing her respect him).

Two of these three amicably anodyne arabesques deal
with magic. Clearly, the stand-up comic and the magician
have much in common: Both depend largely on patter—
in the former's case to divert the spectators, in the latter's
to divert their attention. As the magician enhances his
tricks with spiel, this comic playwright enhances his vi-
ginettes with extremely clever magic acts, rather more in-
teresting than the writing (he used to mix the two in his
old comedy routines). It is slight but sightly stuff.

After intermission, however, **WASP** proves agonizing.
Martin's Wasps are not even A. R. Gurney's colorful New
England upper-crust variety but sorry middle-American
nonentities. The observation here is unoriginal, the hu-
mor stale and forced, and no point of fresh interest is
made. Leave at the interval, and you'll come out ahead.

NEW YORK JANUARY 8, 1996

Photograph by T. Charles Erickson.

JAN-31-1996 10:31

EOSG

P.02

To the Editor, Wall Street Journal

Stephen B. Young (letter to the Editor January 23, 1996) says that Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, "misled" by Henry Kissinger, told President Thieu that Kissinger's proposals would require all North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units to leave South Vietnam as part of a peace agreement. Young's presentation ignores the realities of that time and obscures the real source of the "betrayal" of South Vietnam.

I was Chief Staff aide to Ambassador Bunker during the period in question. Bunker never wavered from his view that the United States had an obligation to help bring about the departure of all NVA forces. The fact was, however, that this could not be achieved through a negotiated agreement. American domestic political pressures made this simply impossible. Thieu understood this throughout the critical months leading up to the agreement signed on January 27, 1973. The question then debated was how to get the NVA out of the south in the post-agreement period.

By producing an agreement to which the Government of the Republic of Vietnam was a full legal party, the basis was laid for insisting that Hanoi's troops had no right to be in the South. Intelligence analysis at the time clearly concluded that the communist forces in the south "were on their last legs". The analysts were correct; the Thieu-Bunker-Abrams effort had won the war on the ground and sealed it with the defeat of the Communist's Easter invasion of 1972. The Paris agreement provided for continued U.S. supply of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. That army, the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, and the U.S. mission all were ready, willing and able at the time of the agreement to make it work, and that was entirely possible had the U.S. continued to supply our allies as promised.

But when Minister of Foreign Affairs Tran Van Lam, who had signed the Paris Agreement for the Republic of Vietnam, visited Washington shortly afterward to discuss continued US supply he found that not one single member of Congress was willing to meet with him. This was the real moment of betrayal. Even then, with our allies utterly cut off, it took over two more years before Hanoi's forces were able to gain sufficient strength to conduct their final conventional military assault across the demilitarized zone and international borders to take Saigon in April 1975.

244 Bradley Street
New Haven, CT 06510
(203) 777 6625

JAN-31-1996 10:27

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FROM : YELLAND (POST)

PHONE NO. : 212 930 8280

Jan. 30 1996 04:41PM P2

Henry Kissinger is right. NIXON is not history. It is a dramatic portrait set against a historical landscape; a film that attempts to interpret a life, to get at the tragedy of a man who shaped an era the historical truth of which remains unsettled. And this latter fact is due in part, at least, to Henry Kissinger's continuing efforts to revise and re-interpret his own role in that period.

When one compares Dr. Kissinger's own account of the Nixon presidency with those of Walter Issacson and Seymour Hersh for example, very different impressions arise. Dr. Kissinger raises the question of how one is to know which portions of NIXON are imaginary and which are real. Yet a more pressing historical question is: Which portions of Dr. Kissinger's version of Nixon's White House are self-serving and which are real?

Dr. Kissinger often appears in the writings of historians and his Nixon-era contemporaries as scheming, petty, and petulant, by turns obsequious and mocking, fawning and spiteful. Nixon himself told John Ehrlichman that Kissinger's behavior was so erratic that he might need psychiatric help, and Bob Haldeman described the Doctor's manic tirade about Daniel Ellsberg as "beyond belief". The Nixon White House, including Dr. Kissinger's role in it, was characterized not exclusively by sober debate and decision-making, as the Doctor would have us believe, but also by vindictiveness, back-stabbing, and paranoia. We did not invent the notion, expressed in the film, that Dr. Kissinger tapped his office's phones, that he scorned President Nixon in the basest terms behind his back, and that he was the source of many of the leaks to the press that the Plumbers were created to plug. Indeed, to the extent that Dr. Kissinger actively contributed to the atmosphere of duplicity and distrust in the Nixon White House, one might argue that he was one of the architects of Watergate.

The Doctor declares that I "thrash between the Nixon of (my) preconceptions and the Nixon (I) encountered in (my) research", producing a "host of inaccuracies". He then parades these heinous errors, which range from our using Pat Nixon's youthful nickname, Buddy, to our depicting Dr. Kissinger holding a cigar. If Dr. Kissinger

1

JAN-30-1996 15:34

212 930 8280

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can find nothing more substantial than this to accuse me of, I ought
to feel vindicated indeed.

But there is a greater truth here that Dr. Kissinger wishes to
cover up. He argues that Nixon inherited a "real and not imaginary"
problem in the American public's judgment "that, as fought, the
(Vietnam) war was unwinnable". According to even so sympathetic a
Nixon biographer as Stephen Ambrose, this was not only the public's
judgment - it was Nixon's as well. Professor Ambrose states that as
early as January 1969, Nixon knew the war could not be won. If that
is the case, then fully half of the names on the Vietnam Memorial are
those of Americans who died despite that knowledge.

I suspect that Dr. Kissinger must have known it, too. Yet both
he and President Nixon continued for years to prosecute an
unwinnable war, while actively lying to the public about their hopes
and aims. For this very reason Dr. Kissinger was furious when Dr.
Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers, which threatened to
expose those lies, and he argued in the grossest language that the
reputation of his former colleague should be ruined in retaliation.

I was not "a youthful radical Vietnam protester" as Dr.
Kissinger states, but a wounded and decorated combat infantryman
who volunteered for the war. I do not forget or forgive the deaths of
friends that resulted from the Nixon-Kissinger war policy, nor do I
forget that Dr. Kissinger accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in the shadow
of the savage Christmas bombing of Hanoi, and with the deaths of
those young men and women on his head.

Dr. Kissinger derides as simplistic the "yearning" of a young
student in the film that the war be stopped, implying with
characteristic hubris that for reasons of practical politics beyond her
ken it could not have been. Yet, given that Nixon knew the war could
not be won, the politics that forced him and Dr. Kissinger to continue
it were "beast-like" as we suggest in our film. This was a beast that
that was nourished as much by the demons in Richard Nixon as by
the Machiavellian geopolitics of Henry Kissinger.

It is never the Nixons or Nobel laureates who pay the price of
grand global politics; it is the simplistic, "yearning" youths who
believe those statesmen even when they lie. Yet at some point those

2

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youths - millions of them - saw through the Nixon-Kissinger posturings, ceased to believe their lies, and helped force an end to their forlorn war. And it is clear from his article that Dr. Kissinger still wishes to malign them.

Dr. Kissinger dismisses our metaphor of "the Beast", yet by his continued collusion in an unwinnable war, he served its purposes. Though I mourn those young lives that were lost, I am glad, as Richard Nixon says in the film, that "History depends on who writes it." I should not wish Dr. Kissinger to have that field to himself.

3

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15:03

☎213 237 3769

LAT SYNDICATE

→→→ KISSINGER

002

[LC]

and the government.

Government interference is more

government, and objective reporting
is still considered a crime.

The Times

Kissinger's Role
in Nixon Era

■ Re "Stone Leaves the Truth on Cutting-
Room Floor," Opinion, Jan. 21: Henry
Kissinger is right. "Nixon" is not history. It
is a dramatic portrait set against a historical
landscape; a film that attempts to interpret
a life, to get at the tragedy of a man who
shaped an era the historical truth of which
remains unsettled. And this latter fact is
due in part, at least, to Kissinger's continu-
ing efforts to revise and reinterpret his own
role in that period.

When one compares Kissinger's own
account of the Nixon presidency with those
of Walter Isaacson and Seymour Hersh, for
example, very different impressions arise.
Kissinger raises the question of how one is
to know which portions of "Nixon" are
imaginary and which are real. Yet a more
pressing historical question is: Which por-
tions of Kissinger's version of Nixon's
White House are self-serving and which
are real?

There is a greater truth here that Kiss-
inger wishes to cover up. He argues that
Nixon inherited a "real and not imaginary"
problem in the American public's judgment

"that, as fought, the (Vietnam) war was
unwinnable." According to even so sympa-
thetic a Nixon biographer as Stephen
Ambrose, this was not only the public's
judgment—it was Nixon's as well. Ambrose
states that as early as January 1969, Nixon
knew the war could not be won. If that is
the case, then fully half of the names on the
Vietnam Memorial are those of Americans
who died despite that knowledge.

I suspect that Kissinger must have
known it, too. Yet both he and President
Nixon continued for years to prosecute an
unwinnable war, while actively lying to the
public about their hopes and aims.

I was not a youth in the "radical wing of
the Vietnam protest movement," as Kiss-
inger states, but a wounded and decorated
combat infantryman who volunteered for
that war. I do not forget or forgive the
deaths of friends that resulted from the
Nixon-Kissinger war policy, nor do I forget
that Kissinger accepted his Nobel Prize in
the shadow of the savage Christmas bomb-
ing of Hanoi, and with the deaths of those
young men and women on his head.

Kissinger derides as simplistic the
"yearning" of a young student in the film
that the war be stopped, implying with
characteristic hubris that for reasons of
practical politics beyond her ken it could
not have been. Yet, given that Nixon knew
the war could not be won, the politics that
forced him and Kissinger to continue it
were "beast-like," as we suggest in our
film. This was a beast that was nourished as
much by the demons in Nixon as by the
Machiavellian geopolitics of Kissinger.

OLIVER STONE
Los Angeles

knowledging in your
other articles the sin
ing the historic Los
We have an obligation
ized society, to protect
ecious civic and cul-
at have defined the
sm of this city.

died the soul and spirit
most 70 years. It would
explain how a world-
romote as one of the
nomies, a progressive
dynamic people that
multitude of industries,
and preserve its most

y the estimated reha-
s potential impact on
ding. But, let us hope
responsibility and able
we will transcend the
and undertake the
ritation and restora-
during symbol.
GIA ROSENBERRY
Project Restore, L.A.

of experience in the
ness, I am strongly
fitting of the L.A. City
built prior to 1933 is
amage. City Hall is no
ling has inadequate
as structural weak-
etrofitting will make
major earthquake. It
save the taxpayers
mishol it and rebuild
ent building. I am in
reservation groups,
given to safety, effi-

Terrorist Acts

■ On Jan. 17, you published a letter written by Aaron Breitbart of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This letter was nothing more than a personal attack on the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and its director, Salam Al-Marayati. Breitbart clearly knows nothing about the repeated condemnation by MPAC of all terrorist acts, regardless of the perpetrator.

Rather than engage Breitbart in his
unfounded claims as to who has condemned
what acts committed by whom, I would
recommend to him that if he is seriously
interested in human rights and combating
terrorism, it would be more appropriate to
engage in a mutually beneficial dialogue
with MPAC and other groups committed to
the same end.

SAMER M. HATHOUT
Acting Chairperson, MPAC
Los Angeles

How to Write to Us

The Times welcomes expressions of all
views. Letters should be brief and are subject
to condensation. They must include valid mail-
ing address and a daytime telephone number.
Pseudonyms and initials will not be used. Be-
cause of the volume of mail received, unpub-
lished letters cannot be acknowledged. Fax let-
ters to (213) 237-7679 or send via Internet to
<u>letters@latimes.com</u> or mail to

Los Angeles Times

RICHARD T. SCHLOSBERG III
Publisher and Chief Executive Officer

SHELBY COFFEY III
*Editor and*
*Executive Vice President*

WILLIAM R. ISINGER
Senior Vice President,
Finnisse

GEORGE J. COTLIAR
*Managing Editor*

WILLIAM A. NIESE
Senior Vice President,
Law and Human Resources

NARDA ZACCHINO
*Associate Editor*

KEATING RHOADS
Senior Vice President,
Operations and Technology

CAROL STOGSDILL,
*Senior Editor*

Vice Presidents

TERRY SCHWADKON
*Deputy Managing Editor*

ROBERT N. BRISCO

FRANK DEL OLMO

JANIS HEAPHY

Assistant
to the Editor

JEFFREY S. KLEIN

R. MARYN LEE

MICHAEL G. ROSE

JUDITH L. SWEENEY

JANET CLAYTON
*Editor of the Editorial Pages*

HARRISON GRAY OTIS, Publisher, 1882-1917

HARRY CHANDLER, Publisher, 1917-1944

NORMAN CHANDLER, Publisher, 1944-1960

OTIS CHANDLER, Publisher, 1960-1980

Published by The Times Mirror Company
MARK H. WILLES
Chairman, President and CEO

FEB-05-1996 17:49

213 237 3769

96

P.02

02/04/1996 12:46

8187956443

TONY AND LYNN DAY

PAGE 02

[LC]

# Letters to The Times

## City Hall

■ Thank you for acknowledging in your Jan. 29 editorial and other articles the significance of preserving the historic Los Angeles City Hall. We have an obligation and a duty, as a civilized society, to protect and preserve our precious civic and cultural landmarks that have defined the greatness and optimism of this city.

City Hall has embodied the soul and spirit of Los Angeles for almost 70 years. It would be difficult for us to explain how a world-class city that we promote as one of the world's greatest economies, a progressive city of creative and dynamic people that has led the way in a multitude of industries, could not protect and preserve its most important landmark.

We are troubled by the estimated rehabilitation cost and its potential impact on the future of the building. But, let us hope that through fiscal responsibility and able project management, we will transcend the present difficulties and undertake the much-needed rehabilitation and restoration of our city's most enduring symbol.

GEORGIA ROSENBERRY
President, Project Restore, L.A.

■ With over 50 years of experience in the construction business, I am strongly opposed to the retrofitting of the L.A. City Hall. Any building built prior to 1933 is prone to earthquake damage. City Hall is no exception. This building has inadequate foundations as well as structural weaknesses. No amount of retrofitting will make this building safe in a major earthquake. It would be cheaper and save the taxpayers additional money to demolish it and rebuild a safer and more efficient building. I am in sympathy with the preservation groups, but priority should be given to safety, efficiency and cost.

THEODORE R. GENTRY
Los Angeles

## Kissinger's Role in Nixon Era

■ Re "Stone Leaves the Truth on Cutting-Room Floor," Opinion, Jan. 21: Henry Kissinger is right. "Nixon" is not history. It is a dramatic portrait set against a historical landscape: a film that attempts to interpret a life, to get at the tragedy of a man who shaped an era the historical truth of which remains unsettled. And this latter fact is due in part, at least, to Kissinger's continuing efforts to revise and reinterpret his own role in that period.

When one compares Kissinger's own account of the Nixon presidency with those of Walter Isaacson and Seymour Hersh, for example, very different impressions arise. Kissinger raises the question of how one is to know which portions of "Nixon" are imaginary and which are real. Yet a more pressing historical question is: Which portions of Kissinger's version of Nixon's White House are self-serving and which are real?

There is a greater truth here that Kissinger wishes to cover up. He argues that Nixon inherited a "real and not imaginary" problem in the American public's judgment

"that, as fought, the (Vietnam) war was unwinnable." According to even so sympathetic a Nixon biographer as Stephen Ambrose, this was not only the public's judgment—it was Nixon's as well. Ambrose states that as early as January 1969, Nixon knew the war could not be won. If that is the case, then fully half of the names on the Vietnam Memorial are those of Americans who died despite that knowledge.

I was not a youth in the "radical wing of the Vietnam protest movement," as Kissinger states, but a wounded and decorated combat infantryman who volunteered for that war. I do not forget or forgive the deaths of friends that resulted from the Nixon-Kissinger war policy, nor do I forget that Kissinger accepted his Nobel Prize in the shadow of the savage Christmas bombing of Hanoi, and with the deaths of those young men and women on his head.

OLIVER STONE
Los Angeles

## Terrorist Acts

## How to Write to Us

The Times welcomes expressions of all views. Letters should be brief and are subject to condensation. They must include valid mailing address and a daytime telephone number. Pseudonyms and initials will not be used. Because of the volume of mail received, unpublished letters cannot be acknowledged. Fax letters to (213) 237-7679 or send via internet to <letters@latimes.com> or mail to:

Letters to the Editor, Los Angeles Times
Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053

FEB-04-1996 14:45

8187956443

## Los Angeles Times

SHELBY COFFEY III
Editor and
Executive Vice President

WILLIAM R. ISINGER
Senior Vice President,
Finance

GEORGE J. COTLIAR
Managing Editor

NARDA ZACCINO
Associate Editor

CAROL STOGSDILL
Senior Editor

Vice Presidents

TERRY SCHWADRON
Deputy Managing Editor
FRANK DEL OLMO
Assistant
to the Editor

ROBERT N. BRISCO

JANIS HEAPHY

JEFFREY S. KLEIN

R. MARILYN LEE

MICHAEL G. ROSE

JUDITH L. SWEENEY

JANET CLAYTON
Editor of the Editorial Pages

MARK H. WILLES

Chairman, President and CEO

DAVID LAVENTIOL

Editor at Large

96%

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8

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

January 22, 1996

MINORITY REPORT

Re-Bunking Dick

The last time I saw Oliver Stone in public we were together on The Nation Institute's platform at Town Hall in New York, and he was trying to persuade an audience (made up of our special constituency of malcontents, veterans and paranoids) that his theory of the Kennedy assassination was both radical and true. Now here I sit, in the auditorium of that ghastly "Palace of Culture" on the Potomac, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and watch as Stone is introduced by Jack Valenti, the dapper little flack of the Motion Picture Association. Valenti recalls how he "went to war" against Stone over JFK, determined to defend the reputation of his onetime boss, the oafish Lyndon Johnson. Yet, he signals twinkily, this night is to be one of reconciliation and breadth of mind. Stone is growing up, and appreciating complexity. He is man enough to take a square look at the "tortured" figure of Richard Nixon. Stone himself, replying to the introduction, seems to delight in that most dubious of appellations—the title "unpredictable." He desires to represent Nixon as a "Shakespearean" figure, riven by irony and contradiction and thus, inevitably, more human than he is usually portrayed. The unspoken corollary is that a more human Nixon is less deserving of unequivocal condemnation. In our one-dimensional culture this means, Brace yourself, a re-bunking is on the way.

Shakespeare himself was guilty of defaming one great historical figure—another Richard, as it happens. His *Richard III*, or “Crookback Dick,” has long served as the pattern and metaphor for regal villainy, palace coups and the foul clawmarks left on the path to the throne. Not until Josephine Tey published her *Daughter of Time* was any measure of justice done to the slain Richard (most gratifyingly, it put a stake through the heart of that monster of medieval conceit and cruelty, Sir Thomas More). If you want an appreciation of the potency of historical revisionism, read Shakespeare and Tey over the same weekend.

Stone's project of the shadowed and mellowed Nixon is insipid by contrast. This is chiefly for two reasons. First, the Nixon revision has been under way for some time. Clinton made a throaty oration at his graveside. Liberals like Robert Scheer (a consultant on Stone's movie) have proposed a kinder and gentler Dick, and a longer perspective in which to savor his fragrance. Second, we have the *Diaries* of Nixon's chief henchman, H.R. Haldeman, now available on CD-ROM. Those diaries, written in real time by the least impeachable source, contain all the evidence for concluding that Nixon was a dirtier bigot, a more callous war criminal and a more energetic subverter of democracy than anyone had previously dared to guess. So, since we are allegedly in the historical irony business, let's not fail to note that the liberals are being more lenient with Nixon even as his own court supplies a fuller indictment. (This "irony" applies especially to those simple souls who think Stone's film is a work of "sixties radicalism.")

Here are some things that make no appearance in Stone's film,

even though the material was coming on stream even as the movie was being scripted. There is no mention at all of Nixon's secret diplomacy in 1968, when he and Kissinger went behind the back of the Johnson/Humphrey Administration and made a private arrangement with the South Vietnamese junta [see "Minority Report," October 25, 1993, and June 27, 1994]. That agreement subverted the 1968 election and helped prolong the war for four years. It also launched Henry Kissinger on his career of crime. And I thought Stone was interested in

Vietnam. There is no mention of the "Southern strategy," which Nixon adopted for the 1968 campaign and then pursued in office, though it goes a long way to explaining the calamitous resegregation of America. There is no mention of the Cointelpro operation launched by Nixon against legal domestic dissent; indeed, you would think Nixon was a libertarian compared with J. Edgar Hoover.

Great spools of celluloid go to waste in telling us what we already know. Almost the whole of the resignation speech, and next to nothing on the machinations that led to the infamous pardon. A great chunk of the "Checkers" speech, with the usual crap about Pat's "Republican cloth coat," but omitting, as usual, the fact that Nixon claimed his wife was born on St. Patrick's Day—which she was not. Some completely conventional stuff about "the opening" to China and a few seconds on the decision to destroy democracy in Chile, with nothing at all on the criminal dealings that put Nixon on the take from the Shah of Iran, the Greek junta and the Marcos family. There isn't even a tiny bit of light shed on the motive for the Watergate break-in, the aftermath of which is presented as complicating Nixon's efforts at détente with Brezhnev.

There is one worthwhile moment in the film, though you miss it if you blink. Like Stone, I think it is interesting that the famous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap occurs on a tape that is devoted to discussing the Bay of Pigs. And Nixon's aides are heard to whisper that Kennedy got involved in some real bad stuff down there in Cuba, stuff so bad it might have blown back on him. This somewhat tarnishes the Galahad-like image that Stone sought to burnish for J.F.K. in his previous epic. There was too much Vietnam and not enough Cuba in *JFK*; there is too much Cuba and not enough Vietnam in *Nixon*.

In his foreword to the book of the film, Robert Scheer employs the words "tortured" and "tormented" three times in the first three sentences. And these are intended to describe not what Nixon did to democracy but what democracy did to Nixon! It should take more than that to make us cry. Fawn Brodie's psychohistory of the man was more illuminating, about his dwarfish libido and petty sottishness and miserable family, than the MTV jump-cuts we get from the movie. Nixon was a maggot in his private life, all right, but it is masochistic of us to make this an excuse, or even an explanation, for his hideous public career. There's a difference between melodrama and tragedy, and those who have the nerve to cite Shakespeare in their own defense should spend more time studying it. ■

LUBA LUKOVA

January 22, 1996

The Nation.

7

## EDITORIALS

the economic projections of the conservative Center for Policy Analysis, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Grover Norquist's National Taxpayers Union, are now planning an assault on the last—the only—progressive aspect of the entire system. For progressives like Brown to join in this *jihad* in the hopes of constructing something fairer and less corrupt is naïve in the extreme—a genuine example of the “infantile left-wing disorder” that Comrade Lenin professed to detect in his anarchist critics. Just who do they think is going to write the next tax code—Ralph Nader? Richard Gephardt has introduced a genuinely progressive tax reform that is superior to the flat tax in every way and really does go after corporate welfare (though one can't help but wonder where the hell this plan was when Gephardt and company were in the majority).

Jack Kemp has already said that his commission will not recommend a completely flat income tax—just a “flatter” one. In other words, keep the deductions and exchange lower taxes on the super-rich for slightly lower taxes on the super-poor (though Republicans have hardly shown enthusiasm for the earned-income tax credit, which does the bottom part of the job without

screwing with the top). Wanniski says his “blood brother” Kemp cannot be expected to challenge the deductions that are built into the system in what is, after all, an obviously political exercise. Commission member and ex-governor/presidential candidate/ heir Pierre S. “Pete” DuPont IV says he hopes the new tax costs the government revenue. Remember David Stockman, Richard Darman and the “Trojan Horse” tax cut of 1981? Take a guess whose interests are going to be flattened this time around.

*This Just In: Kissinger Tells Truth.* Here's Henry Kissinger on Richard Nixon in a recent *Wall Street Journal*: "Nixon and I nearly got away with creating the impression that we were standing up for the honor and credibility of the United States.... Nixon and yours truly, the old spinmaster, were clearly trying to put one over when we presented our Vietnam policy as an effort to extricate our country honorably from a liberal debacle.... The Nixon Administration's heavy thinking was a sham.... Poor old doltish Nixon...too boozed up to know what he was signing...." (Note: According to the *Journal* editors, Kissinger apparently intended these comments to be "ironic." What was it the Bard said about great truths uttered only in jest?)
ERIC ALTERMAN

## In Fact...

### WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

Last month, in the middle of the budget squabble, corporate America weighed in when ninety-one C.E.O.s of the nation's largest companies signed a two-page newspaper ad urging President Clinton and Congress to agree on a seven-year balanced budget. Many of those corporations benefit from federal programs untouched by the budget cutters. Amoco, Exxon and Chevron profit from a program that permits them to drill for oil in federal waters without paying royalties. ASARCO extracts minerals on public land without reimbursing taxpayers. Abbott Laboratories and Johnson & Johnson enjoy tax breaks tailored for the pharmaceutical industry. Alcoa profits from federally subsidized hydroelectric power. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Dean Witter and The Blackstone Group would reap a windfall from the proposed cut in the capital gains tax. Nations-Bank stands to save $24 million from a special-interest provision in the current budget bill. And so on. After the ad appeared, an outraged Representative George Miller wrote (and forty-four other Democrats signed) a letter to the corporate millionaires. "While it appears you are willing to offer up substantial sacrifice on the part of the nation's poor and elderly, it is not clear what you are willing to put on the table," it read. The letter asked if the firms would pay more taxes—and it noted that if corporations paid the same share of taxes they did in 1954, the deficit would be gone in one year, with no cuts required. It also asked if the companies would stop

squeezing through loopholes created by the Republicans, extend their employees' health benefits (which would ease Medicaid costs) and cease lobbying Congress for favors and contracts.

### CUSTOMS ORDER

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ruled in favor of *The Nation* in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. In 1992—after media reports that Ross Perot had volunteered his services to the government for drug-busting—we submitted a FOIA request to the Customs Bureau for documents related to Perot's offer. Customs refused to release any, claiming it did not even have to deny or confirm that it had relevant documents, because doing so would infringe on Perot's privacy rights. A federal district court supported the Customs Bureau's response. But the appeals court, in a precedent-setting decision, ruled that Customs was out of line and that it could not deny the request on the basis of its neither-confirm-nor-deny argument, long a staple at the FOIA offices of federal agencies. When the records being sought "may shed light on agency conduct," the court said, the agency may not hide behind the privacy rights of the subject. It must instead weigh the public's right to know against the right to individual privacy. The appeals court ordered the district court to reconsider the case.

### CE N'EST PAS UNE BOMBE

In a speech to the New Zealand Press Club, Jacques le Blanc, the French Ambassador, criticized media coverage of the French nuclear tests: "I do not like this word 'bomb.' It is not a bomb, it is a device that is exploding." This reminds us of the time a v.p. for Metropolitan Edison, answering reporters' questions about the crisis at Three Mile Island, conceded there could be a "spontaneous energetic disassembly" of the nuclear reactor.

### TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE

The best line in Oliver Stone's *Nixon? When the President turns to Kissinger (portrayed as a sniveling, sycophantic egotist) and says, "You are my equal in many ways." How's that for a compliment? One of the great mysteries of the twentieth century is how Kissinger has escaped shame. His partnership with Nixon in such projects as the secret illegal bombing of Cambodia has never hindered his professional or social life. Right before *Nixon* opened, the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation had the former Secretary of State present its annual humanitarian award to Lady Di. In a better world, instead of the hugs and smiles, the plaque would have disintegrated at Kissinger's touch. And at a recent meeting of the dreaded Trilateral Commission, Kissinger was asked to assess Newt Gingrich. The "most creative politician in America since Richard Nixon," he said. Takes one to know one.

Letters to the Editor

WALL ST. JOURNAL 1/23/96

# The Betrayal of South Vietnam

Henry Kissinger did not like television's recent portrayal of his efforts to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War (Letters to the Editor, Dec. 22). He was at emotional pain to portray himself as completely in step with the Vietnam policy of President Nixon. Yet the serious accusation made by the TV program about Mr. Kissinger's negotiation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords was not his up-staging Nixon, but his betrayal of South Vietnam and the 58,000 American soldiers who had died to keep that small country free.

The peace agreement negotiated and fully accepted by Mr. Kissinger in October 1972 allowed North Vietnam to keep its army in the South. This provision, not agreed to in advance by Saigon's President Thieu, provided the U.S. with a decent interval before Hanoi's conquest of South Vietnam, but no peace with honor.

Mr. Kissinger's letter overlooked this criticism of his negotiating skills. He got off lightly in television's history of his ending of the Vietnam War. The truth is more condemning of his machinations. Once, as a colleague of the late Ellsworth Bunker, American ambassador in Saigon from 1967 to 1973, I had occasion to read all of Mr. Kissinger's secret correspondence to Bunker detailing Mr. Kissinger's negotiations with Hanoi. I had a proper security clearance and the documents were given to me by the State Department. A draft manuscript of Bunker's role in Vietnam was written, including the negotiations, and given clearance for publication by the State Department.

The still secret communications prove that Mr. Kissinger decided to let Hanoi leave its divisions inside South Vietnam in early May 1971, long before the climactic October 1972 negotiating sessions that produced the basic shape of the peace accords. Mr. Kissinger took his decision just after the May Day protests when Washington was inundated with demonstrators (many of whom were unconstitutionally arrested), the White House was surrounded by school buses as a barricade against the mob and Nixon's senior staff had lost its cool.

Previously, Mr. Kissinger's secret negotiations with Hanoi had achieved only impasse. Hanoi would not budge under his blandishments. He therefore asked Ambassador Bunker to propose a new approach to the negotiations. He wanted to try out ideas with Hanoi before discussing them with South Vietnam's President Thieu. One such proposal "modified" Bunker's requirement that North Vietnamese forces leave South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to prescribe only that the Indochinese countries discuss this topic among themselves. The U.S. would no longer insist on North Vietnamese withdrawal.

In his memoirs of 1979, Mr. Kissinger proudly wrote of his "modification" that: "We gave up the demand for mutual withdrawal... Misled by Mr. Kissinger's vagueness, Bunker then told President Thieu that, under Mr. Kissinger's new proposals, all foreign troops would be out of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia after U.S. troops had withdrawn. Bunker reported to Mr. Kissinger that he had so advised Thieu, but Bunker's misunderstanding of the proposal was not corrected by Mr. Kissinger. Not until October 1972 would Bunker learn that Mr. Kissinger would not insist on North Vietnam's withdrawal from the South as part of a final peace agreement.

In 1972 Hanoi sent its entire army to invade South Vietnam. The invasion was defeated by South Vietnamese ground forces with much help from American airpower, but then all Hanoi's units stayed on in the South as permitted by Mr. Kissinger's "modification" of Bunker's plan.

On May 31, 1971, Mr. Kissinger presented his plan to the North Vietnamese. His new proposal brought movement in the negotiations for the first time. Hanoi now agreed to accept the continued presence of the Saigon government in South Vietnam. Having secured the means to kill off its Vietnamese rival after the Americans had gone home, Hanoi was willing to give Mr. Kissinger his "decent interval" before the killing would occur.

In his memoirs Mr. Kissinger claims great credit for this May 31 proposal. He claims that it put forth the essential shape of the final peace agreement. Indeed it had. Hanoi recognized it for the sell-out of South Vietnam that it was and pocketed Mr. Kissinger's concession on troops while seeking even more concessions on the political side.

Several years ago, I asked President Nixon if he had ever discussed Bunker's two-step approach to ending the war with Mr. Kissinger and did he know of Mr. Kissinger's modification of Bunker's proposal. Nixon looked puzzled and said, "No." I asked if he remembered such a proposal from Bunker. He said, "No. What difference would it have made?" When I explained, he withdrew into himself and changed the subject of our conversation.

From May 1971 until he had finalized a peace agreement with Hanoi, Mr. Kissinger never disclosed to Thieu the implications of the May 1971 "modification" of Bunker's proposal. Not until he read Mr. Kissinger's peace agreement in October 1972 did Thieu know that the U.S. had aborted South Vietnam's chances of long-term survival. The origin of Mr. Kissinger's disdain for Thieu and the South Vietnamese lay in his understanding of the Hanoi Communists as the more authentic and important Vietnamese leaders. Mr. Kissinger had not believed in Nixon's policy of Vietnamization, which assumed that South Vietnam was viable and valuable. Also, Mr. Kissinger, far more than Nixon, wanted to negotiate a deal with Hanoi.

Mr. Kissinger went so far as to argue that the issue of separate legal statuses for North and South Vietnam was "a theological issue," which would be a red flag for Hanoi and disrupt progress toward an agreement. This disrespect for our allies had been engendered by Mr. Kissinger's mentor on Vietnamese affairs, Jean Sainteny. Sainteny, oddly enough, had been the operative sent to Vietnam in 1945 by De Gaulle to reimpose French colonial rule on the Vietnamese after the Japanese had overthrown the French administration earlier that year. Sainteny accomplished his mission through an alliance with Ho Chi Minh, supporting him against all other Vietnamese leaders. Ho was the only Vietnamese leader who would negotiate with the French for their return to Vietnam.

Sainteny and his Free French associates, therefore, created the image of Ho Chi Minh as the quintessential Vietnamese patriot and the sole Vietnamese' leader worthy of respect in order to further French colonial interests.

Mr. Kissinger, blinded by this ploy of colonial intrigue, never had faith in the non-Communist Vietnamese and consigned them to a harsh destiny, one he hammered out in Paris behind their backs in October 1972.

STEPHEN B. YOUNG

Minneapolis

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL MONDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1995

Battle of the White House Egos

By ROBERT GOLDBERG

For those who can't resist picking the scab of the Vietnam war years once again, "Kissinger and Nixon" (TNT, Wednesday, 9-11 p.m. EST) has something to offend all points on the political spectrum. Conservatives will despise its take on Richard Nixon—the squinty, sneaky, five-o'clock shadow Dick; liberals will hate its take on Henry Kissinger—a hero struggling nobly for peace. Historical accuracy? One should never confuse history with drama.

As Oliver Stone could tell you, there is something inherently dramatic about the life of President Nixon. Here is a Shake-

Television

"Kissinger and Nixon"

spearean character, powerful and petty—our own American Richard. And at his side, Henry the K. When last we left them, they were on their knees together in the Oval Office, weeping and praying and who knows what else.

"Kissinger and Nixon" frames the story differently, more tightly. Here, Dr. Kissinger is at the center, and the focus does not stray over the years to include the whole saga of the Indochina war or the Wartergate coverup. Instead, the film recounts the tale of six months, from the summer of 1972 to early 1973—six months in the secret Vietnam negotiations.

And if the framing seems limited (especially seen against the three-hour Stone feature film "Nixon"), there is an intelligence to this compact scope, for under director Daniel Petrie and writer Lionel Chetwynd, "Kissinger and Nixon" offers a tight, polished drama with a crackling pace.

Above all, this film traces the story of two massive egos in conflict. As seen here, the president and his national security adviser may share the same ideology, but it's clear they don't understand each other, don't trust each other and certainly don't like each other. "I can't bring North Vietnam to the table and keep this madman in the Oval Office quiet if every ambitious government hack reports my comings and goings to him," Kissinger fumes. In the Nixon White House, the real enemies

aren't halfway across the world; they're just down the hall. This film is at its most compelling following the Machiavellian intrigues and back-corridor machinations. Here, you sense, is the way politics really happens—not via carefully crafted position papers, but through the sheer force of devious personalities.

In the summer of 1972, as the election approaches, overtures from North Vietnam lead to a reopening of the Paris peace talks. Nixon (Beau Bridges) thinks in terms of football, and doesn't want to settle for a loss or a tie—especially just before the election: "The American people ... want to see us prevail. This is sudden-death overtime; and they want to see us score the winner!" Kissinger (Ron Silver) believes that the timing offers a real chance for peace. But Nixon would rather get re-elected, with a "brand new first and 10," and then conclude the war himself. Both men want their piece of the glory.

Caught in between is Gen. Alexander Haig (Matt Frewer, in a performance more subtle and tortured than the character may warrant). Both of his bosses have offered him a four-star promotion to lure him over, and he walks the fine line between them, admiring Kissinger but spying on him for the Oval Office.

The good doctor will shuttle back and forth from Paris to Saigon, from Le Duc Tho (George Takei, "Star Trek"'s Sulu, with a strange accent) to President Thieu (Henry Chan) to his boss back home.

And, according to this version, he will almost single-handedly patch a peace together with Scotch tape and string, by lying a little bit to everyone, and by masterfully manipulating all the players through the media. "I will not have this snatched from me!" he rants to his aides. "I will bring peace." But the accords are fragile. Soon enough the president is bombing again. And it looks as if the conflict may drag on for another decade—until the very internal politicking that imperiled Kissinger suddenly offers him his opportunity. The delicious irony is that as much as the anti-Semitic president and his Jewish adviser don't like each other, they will end up linked on Time's cover as "Men of the Year," and joined forever at the hip in the history books.

Scene by scene, "Kissinger and Nixon" is powerfully crafted. Yet the overall plotting is not as strong as it should be. Simplistically streamlined, it never really explains what's changed from moment to moment—exactly how Kissinger has pulled off the negotiations, or what Nixon

was trying to achieve in the talks, or why Haig changes sides from moment to moment like a ping pong ball.

But what the film does deliver, besides taut pacing, is a vivid sense of character. Under the industrial strength make-up, and with extremely apt vocal impressions, both Mr. Silver and Mr. Bridges give eerily realistic renditions—the slow-moving, guttural Kissinger and the edgy, nervous Nixon, both awkward in their own skins.

Mr. Silver's Kissinger is an especially intriguing, understated performance. Mr. Bridges' Nixon relies on the mannerisms we've seen before, and he's not helped when the script goes over the top. In all, his is a vivid but one-note performance—the real Nixon was a character more dangerous and more intelligent.

The subtlest point of "Kissinger and Nixon" is that in this clash of opposites, both men played the game the same way—with an eye on the audience. It seems as if, to use a Nixonian metaphor, the point wasn't to score, but to win over the fans in the bleachers. Bringing home the peace was good, but getting the accolades from the press or the Nobel committee; that was much better. Finally, they weren't so different, these two performers, both eagerly awaiting the next morning's reviews.

But in the end, as "Kissinger and Nixon" makes clear, only one of them really knew how to play the larger game, for posterity. With the leaks, the press conferences, the cultivating of the media, Kissinger emerges as one of the first great modern spin doctors. And, 20 years later, if this film is any indication, he was pretty successful at it. Who says you can't rewrite history? You just do it one scene at a time.

LEVEL 1 - 1 OF 1 STORY

Copyright 1995 The Washington Post
The Washington Post

December 09, 1995, Saturday, Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C01

LENGTH: 684 words

HEADLINE: 'Kissinger and Nixon': A Powerful Drama

BYLINE: Lloyd Grove, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:

With Hollywood making more hay this month out of Richard Milhous Nixon -- the Richard III of American politics -- TNT's "Kissinger and Nixon" (premiering tomorrow night at 8) brings to life an equally seductive personality: Henry Alfred Kissinger, the president's Iago-like national security adviser.

In its spare and polished fashion, this two-hour movie has the heft and breadth of Shakespeare, illuminating the bruised humanity behind exalted events on the world stage. Which is to say, it's just terrific.

Shrewdly adapted by screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd from Walter Isaacson's acclaimed biography of Kissinger, the film focuses on a five-month period in late 1972 when the United States was painfully disengaging itself from the trap of Vietnam while Nixon bent every effort (and several laws) to win reelection in a landslide.

The drama is animated by the artful interplay between two insecure and powerful egomaniacs -- both displaying a slippery cunning that makes Machiavelli look like a piker -- as Nixon and his nominal subordinate vie for glory in the quest for "peace with honor."

Ron Silver as Kissinger and Beau Bridges as Nixon wear enough makeup and body padding to be in a Duracell battery commercial. But after stopping to appreciate the cosmetic artistry that has morphed these actors into near-doubles of their characters, you're riveted by their acting.

"My Jew boy! Where the hell's my Jew boy?" we find Nixon shouting at the start of movie -- hugely irritated at the discovery that Kissinger has been secretly talking to the North Vietnamese without presidential permission. "I don't trust him -- an elitist suck up," the president mutters about his brilliant aide.

Resisting the impulse to caricature, Bridges nevertheless takes full possession of a Nixon we somehow recognize: stoop-shouldered and graceless, his hands flapping clownishly, his chest heaving with paranoid resentments, and his narrowing eyes shining with a sharp and brutal intelligence as he smiles his sour smile. In nearly every scene, Nixon is sipping from a tumbler of bourbon. As Bridges plays him, he's a creature of perverted nobility -- a performance that should give Anthony Hopkins something to think about.

"Mr. President, I would never keep anything from you!" Kissinger protests. "I suppose not," Nixon sighs, though it's clear he knows otherwise.

The Washington Post, December 09, 1995

As the German-accented professor, Silver carries himself with ponderous gravity, composing the jowly face into a wall of fleshy sincerity as he utters one whopper after another. This Kissinger flatters and accepts flattery like breathing out and breathing in.

But Silver's performance is no sendup either. For all the preening vanity and stormy tantrums, it's clear from his portrayal that Kissinger wants to do good. The Kissingerian voice, meanwhile, is spot-on: Close your eyes and you think it's "Nightline."

The screenplay chronicles Kissinger's comings and goings as he negotiates the American troop pullout with North Vietnamese adviser Le Duc Tho (played by George Takei of "Star Trek" fame), patronizes South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu (an empathetic portrayal by Henry Chan), rages against leaks in the New York Times while having "deep-background" dinners with Scotty Reston, and tries to outwit the deputy national security adviser, Alexander Haig (Matt Frewer), whom Nixon has ordered to spy on the professor and report back to the Oval Office.

While the action is tautly directed by Daniel Petrie, following the zigzagging plot requires energy and attention. But that's a welcome departure from the usual television fare -- what comedian Fred Allen called "chewing gum for the eyes."

Never insulting the viewer's intelligence, this movie even has Kissinger comparing his symbiosis with Nixon to "Metternich's collaboration with Napoleon: to cooperate without losing one's soul, to assist without sacrificing one's individuality." It makes for some devilishly devious interpersonal relations that in the end produce enlightenment and entertainment -- a rare combination in any medium.

GRAPHIC: Photo, Profiles in power: Beau Bridges as President Nixon and Ron Silver as Henry Kissinger in TNT's intelligent drama.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: December 09, 1995

TELEVISION JOHN LEONARD

New York Magazine
# The Devil and Dr. K

TNT's remarkable look at the
Paris peace talks portrays Nixon
as the heavy and Kissinger as the
megalomaniacal toady.

IN THE 1,521 PAGES OF THE FIRST VOLUME OF HIS MEMOIRS, *White House Years*, Henry Kissinger admitted to a single sleepless night during his four years as national-security adviser to Richard Nixon—on the eve of a hush-hush mission to China. Some of us think he should have tossed and turned more often. On television in 1983, I asked one of Dr. K's biographers, Seymour Hersh, about the Great Man's sleeping habits. Said Hersh, who holds a grudge: “I think generally when the rest of us go to bed at night, we do, you know, Bambi or lambs or whatever we dream about. I really do think Henry Kissinger has to spend his evenings counting maimed and burned Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Bangladesh, and Chilean babies.”

For the remarkable cable-TV movie *Kissinger and Nixon* (Sunday, December 10, and other dates; 8 to 10 P.M.; TNT), co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd has adapted Walter Isaacson's biography instead of Seymour Hersh's. Thus the Dr. K we get is less a war criminal than a megalomaniacal sycophant. And he's the *hero* of these two hours devoted to a behind-the-scenes look at the 1972 negotiations to disengage America from Vietnam. The villain is Nixon, a sozzled lout full of football metaphors (“sudden death in overtime!”) and anti-Semitic rant (“Where the hell's my Jewboy?”). These outsize Tweedles, Dum and Dee, when they aren't lying to each other, or wiretapping their many imagined enemies, or leaking to awestruck newspaper columnists like “Scotty” Reston of the *Times*, suck up so much air in their greediness for goodies—bourbon, pretzels, limos, whirlybirds, re-election, the Nobel Prize for “back-channeling” to a cease-fire—that history itself can’t breathe.

And what astonishing performances director Dan Petrie manages to elicit from Ron Silver as Kissinger and Beau Bridges as Nixon. They sound so precisely like the tapes in our heads that there's an eerie echo, a symbolic styling of gutturals and slur. They are equally confabulists, in the psychiatric sense of believing the falsifications they've fashioned to cover gaps in their own memories. They are uncomfortable in their bodies, as if their ill-fitting suits had been dropped on them like tarps; as if, in a rush to purchase off-the-rack identities, they had put on inauthentic selves. They are so heavily made up to resemble cartoon images of the figures they impersonate that they might as well be wearing rubber masks. And yet the effect is oddly puppetlike, Japanese No theater done American-style—Bismarck as a Pillsbury Doughboy or Michelin Tire Man; Lincoln as a Scarecrow, out of either L. Frank Baum or Günter Grass.

No wonder Le Duc Tho is impatient with them. Played by George Takei, he's accustomed to a better class of captain, on the bridge of the starship *Enterprise*. And no won-

Eerie echoes: Ron Silver (above) and Beau Bridges sound just like the Kissinger and Nixon we loved to hate.

Photographs by B. Carriere/TNT.

DECEMBER 11, 1995 NEW YORK 83

der Al Haig (played by Matt Frewer) shuttles between them with a twitchy grin, reporting on each to the other and bootlicking both. And no wonder Petrie's so anxious to get out of the Oval Office, to Paris or Saigon. He can't breathe in this bunker, either. Imagine the irony of Watergate: If Haldeman (Ron White) has to go, then Henry gets to stay, despite being Jewish and despite being Harvard. If not for the bungling Plumbers, Dr. K would never have become our secretary of State; nor a

TELEVISION

media heavy, advising Deng Xiaoping to clean up all those messy students in Tiananmen Square; nor the star of a TV commercial for the very *Times* on which he used to leak. And I might never have reviewed the memoirs in which he excused himself for Chile by complaining about "a fluke of the

Chilean political system" that allowed the election of Allende as president by a plurality instead of a majority—the same fluke that also elected thirteen American presidents, including Nixon in 1968.

But like Seymour Hersh (and William Shawcross), I, too, hold a grudge: because of Chile, and the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the 19,000 Americans who died in Vietnam after the 1968 elections. *I am not to be trusted.* When Michael Korda told us several years ago,

from his command post at a power table in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, that Simon & Schuster's big new Kissinger book will "do for diplomacy what Carl Sagan did for astronomy," my first thought was much less thrilling: When Carl Sagan got done with astronomy, after all, astronomy was just the same. I mean, astronomy

goes on doing whatever it does—red dwarfs and black holes and stuff— whether Sagan is around or not. We can't really say the same about diplomacy and Kissinger, can we? And after the *Times Book Review* panned *Diplomacy*, it gave Dr. K a page of his

own to complain at length, as if he were Norman Mailer.

I am also a connoisseur of Kissingers, from Theodore Bikel in the ABC TV-movie version of Woodward and Bernstein's *The Final Days* to Steve Mellor Off Broadway in Russell Lees's *Nixon's Nixon* to Paul Sorvino in Oliver Stone's forthcoming biopic, with Anthony Hopkins as the Fighting Quaker. (We are told that Stone's first choice for Nixon was Tom Hanks, and, for Henry, ah, John Turturro. Be grateful for small favors. Gluttons will want to consult

*Nixon: A Film*, to be published later this month by Disney's Hyperion, with the whole misbegotten screenplay, plus essays by John Dean and Howard Hunt!) I'm sorry I missed the opera about China. On the other hand, if you read or saw *The Final Days*, it might have occurred to you to wonder while you contemplated Dick and

Henry on their knees in the White House bunker, as Dick cried and as Dick prayed... who was Woodward and Bernstein's source for this embarrassing scene? Who leaked the weeping to our dynamic duo from the

*Washington Post*? Certainly not Dick, who switched to MCI in 1989 to protest AT&T's sponsorship of the TV movie. Not Al Haig, nor Scotty Reston, nor even true-blue Julie, none of whom was there...

Put together Ron Silver and Beau Bridges and all the other Kissingers and Nixons, on stage and screen, in memoirs and in grand-jury stenographic minutes, and see if you aren't reminded of the old English proverb: "They agree like bells; they want nothing but hanging."

Whether it's a joint, bone or muscle problem, we'll make sure your story continues.

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84 NEW YORK DECEMBER 11, 1995

THE NEW YORK TIMES

EDITORIALS/LETTERS

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1995

# 'Kissinger and Nixon' Docudrama Assaulted Truth and History

To the Editor:

The "Kissinger and Nixon" docudrama broadcast this week by TNT found me, as a direct participant in those times', riveted to my seat. I had completely forgotten that President Nixon was a lush, nor had I realized what a cad I was or how brilliantly Henry A. Kissinger, then the national security adviser, was undercut by my machinations.

At the rate the producers had me rising, four stars were hardly a start; a few more knives in Mr. Kissinger's back and President Nixon might have made me Vice President!

More seriously, the only drama in this so-called docudrama was its assault on the truth. President Nixon had his critics, but no one ever alleged drinking on the job nor did he ever drink during business hours. To my knowledge, the President was at worst a modest social drinker.

No sympathy or even understanding for the South Vietnamese cause is evident in the production, while the "case" of the North Vietnamese is treated with the greatest sympathy despite irrefutable evidence of their aggressive and tyrannical policies.

The United States is described as the relentless aggressor. All of the memoirs, studies and other analyses of the Vietnam war are ignored in order to do a fast hatchet job.

It is as if the more virulent antiwar

protesters' views of events circa 1970 had been frozen, to be thawed 25 years later.

All this came at the expense of respect for the ideals of public service. The thought that Americans can serve their country without sacrificing its interests on the altar of ego and ambition is again discredited by historic revisionism. Americans and especially our youth deserve better even of their popular entertainment.

ALEXANDER M. HAIG JR.

Washington, Dec. 13, 1995

The writer was an aide and chief of staff to President Nixon.

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

OPINION

# Nixon, Stone—And Me

An old Nixon hand on what Hollywood got wrong

The real thing: Was Nixon and Ehrlichman's White House as bizarre as Stone thinks?

By JOHN EHRLICHMAN

AS A LONGTIME NIXON INTIMATE, I was surprised when I saw Oliver Stone's "Nixon": it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. After three hours of popcorn and pop history, even I was ready to believe that Anthony Hopkins had tried to assassinate Fidel Castro. But as an explanation of Richard Nixon, the movie flunks. In my 15 years of ever-closer association with the real Nixon, I never heard a hint that he might have been involved in such a Castro plot—or that he was guiltily obsessed with JFK's murder. Nor was he the drunk Hopkins plays. And the film seriously distorts the day-to-day workings of the Nixon White House.

The movie is accompanied by a thick tie-in book—including an annotated text of the 127-scene screenplay. In it are “footnotes” purporting to provide some factual basis for what transpires on screen. One example: the Haldeman character reminds Nixon that the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was presented for approval by Haldeman and consented to in advance by Nixon. I was certainly interested in footnote No. 32, the citation for this scene, because I was the one convicted and jailed for allegedly approving all of that.

Alas, No. 32 cites books by Nixon, Haldeman and journalist Fred Emery that don't actually support Stone's version. (So that's not exactly the kind of evidence that might have helped me when I needed it.) Footnote No. 142 says I had a big part in the Ellsberg break-in, citing Gordon Liddy—whom I had never met, seen or talked to.

Things that did not really happen are cited as “composites,” which apparently means “We made it up.” Stone has Nixon dragging the chains of JFK’s assassination with him. I saw no sign of this. The only time I recall Nixon raising the subject was the day Bobby Kennedy announced for president in 1968. Nixon and I were in a hotel in Oregon, watching television. Nixon shook his head. “I was in Dallas just before Jack was shot,” he said. “And that was bad. But this”—he motioned toward the TV—“is going to unleash wild forces that can only be worse for the country.”

In the movie, my character dissects Nixon, blaming the president's psychosis on his failure to make his college football team. Stone also has me asking Haldeman about Nixon's "thing" regarding the Bay of Pigs. Haldeman explains that the fixation is connected to JFK's murder. He and I said nothing of the kind, then or ever.

Stone can't have it both ways. He says the movie is not “history,” but his book is tricked up to appear to be a scholarly work. There is a bibliography of 100 books and articles; some, however, are dramatically uninformed, so it was easy to find a citation for almost any proposition.

Hopkins plays his role convincingly. But his Nixon is not the one I knew from 1959 to 1973. The script usually requires Hopkins to have a drink of Scotch in his hand. Once, in 1967, I talked to Nixon about drinking because I thought he was dangerously susceptible to liquor. When I'd been around him in the early '60s, he had been drunk a couple of times. He was out of office in those days, and was free to do as he wished. But, I told him, if he ran in 1968 and wanted me to work for him, he would have to assure me that he would control his drinking. He promised me he would, and he did. In the five years I was with President Nixon, I never saw him drink in any of his offices, and only rarely elsewhere.

**Ringing false:** While I am treated somewhat better, the film badly depicts the Haldeman I knew so well. The character is a pale figure, a mere foil to Nixon. That misunderstands the Nixon-Haldeman relationship, but an assertive chief of staff—which Haldeman was—would not jibe with the Stone thesis that Nixon was the chief source of everything taking place in his White House.

The film rings false in other ways. Haldeman is shown downing liquor; he never drank anything stronger than beer, and seldom that. In 15 years with Pat and Dick Nixon, in extended private times cruising the San Juan Islands, in their New York apartment and sitting up front on Air Force One, I never once heard him call Pat “Buddy.” In the film that’s all he calls her.

Alexander Butterfield and John Dean, who advised Stone on the movie, were hired to catch such details, but how would Dean know? He probably saw Nixon in person fewer than 15 times over three years. Butterfield, Nixon's office gofer, did not have a close relationship with the president. And John Sears, another Stone consultant, left the White House after a brief tenure.

History has suffered a serious compression fracture. If the film were any guide, nothing ever happened around Nixon except dark conspiracy and heavy drinking. There was no effort at welfare reform, environmental protection or budget-balancing (Nixon was the last president to come close to doing so). There were a few summits (dirty jokes with Mao, talking politics with Brezhnev) but the rest was unrelieved wrongdoing. I fear this history *manqué* may become a cultural Cliffs Notes to the Nixon era. That would be a shame.

EHRLICHMAN, Nixon's top aide for domestic affairs from '69 to '73, is a writer in Atlanta.

44 NEWSWEEK JANUARY 8, 1996

WHITE HOUSE

# A Churning Scandal

## How another old Clinton insider tried to contain Whitewater—the story that won't go away

BY MARK HOSENBALL
AND MICHAEL ISIKOFF

AS BILL AND HILLARY Clinton were preparing to leave Little Rock for Washington in December 1992, their lawyer, Vince Foster, had a small but important item on his list of things to do: get theFACTS out of Whitewater. The company was all but defunct and theFACTS' shares were worthless. But their long involvement with James McDougal, the mercurial wheeler-dealer who was ousted as chairman of his failing Arkansas savings and loan in 1986, had already attracted the attention of investigative reporters and federal banking regulators: Whitewater was a political liability. James Blair, a prominent Arkansas lawyer who was part of a "defensive research team" to fend off Whitewater allegations for the Clinton campaign, came up with a simple idea. Why not close the books on Whitewater by getting McDougal to buy out theFACTS' interest?

"I didn't think the FACTS should go to Washington tied in to McDougal," Blair told NEWSWEEK last week. Blair, the general counsel for Tyson

Foods, the giant Arkansas chicken firm, is one of Bill and Hillary's best friends. He is the man who helped Hillary Clinton make a killing in the cattle-futures market in 1979. As he told NEWSWEEK, Blair had tried once before to help contain the McDougal problem. That was in the winter of '92, when Clinton's campaign was underway and McDougal was making damaging comments to the press. Blair paid him a call. "Shut up," Blair says he told McDougal, adding that he could endanger the campaign.

But this time there was a problem. McDougal, who had escaped conviction in the demise of his S&L, was apparently broke. So Blair loaned McDougal the money—$1,000—to buy theFACTS' shares. On Dec. 22, 1992, with Vince Foster handling the transaction, the deal was

done. Blair says he never told theFACTS about lending McDougal the money. He also says McDougal never paid him back.

Blair's loan, never before disclosed publicly, is one more sign of the Little Rock crowd's strange sensitivity about the scandal that will not die. Aides to Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, the GOP's point man on the Whitewater affair, say theFACTS may have violated financial-disclosure laws by failing to report Blair's $1,000 loan as a gift to them. "This was really Blair giving a gift to theFACTS," one D'Amato staffer said. But David Kendall, theFACTS' lawyer, says that theFACTS disclosed the sale and that D'Amato's staff is wrong. "The money came from McDougal," Kendall said. "Legally, there's no issue."

But the matter gets curiouser. Notes tak-

en during a meeting in Kendall's office on Nov. 5, 1993, contain cryptic references to Blair. One of the notes, taken by the then White House lawyer William Kennedy, says, "Blair could have knowledge. Could be source of money to allow McD to purchase stock." The timing is significant: Whitewater had just exploded on the front pages, and Clinton's legal advisers were trying to get up to speed. One person

who could have helped was Foster—but Foster had committed suicide four months earlier. To judge by evidence D'Amato's committee has already gathered, his death threw the Clintonites into something close to panic. D'Amato's theory, still unproven, is that they feared damaging disclosures from Foster's files on Whitewater—and potentially even more embarrassing details about Hillary Clinton's legal work as a partner in the Rose Law Firm for Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, McDougal's failed thrift.

Indeed, D'Amato's committee has recently uncovered more evidence about Mrs. Clinton's relationship with Madison. Hillary Clinton represented Madison before state regulators appointed by her husband. She has stated under oath that her involvement with Madison as a client was "minimal." But newly discovered notes taken in 1992 by Susan Thomases, Mrs. Clinton's confidante, state that Mrs. Clinton had "numerous conferences" with McDougal and another Madison executive. Even more puzzling, the Rose Law Firm's billing records—records that could clear up the confusion—have vanished. (The

firm's managing partner says any removal of files was unauthorized.)

During the '92 campaign—and since—Clinton's aides have attempted to downplay the connection between Bill, Hillary and Jim. David Kendall dismisses this line of inquiry as "the same tired, tedious charges." Still, the emerging record suggests that theFACTS' friends were worried about something—and the behavior of the First Couple's advisers, both before and after Foster's suicide, looks like a bundled cover-up. Did Madison benefit from the fact that its lawyer was the governor's wife? Did anyone, then or later, act to conceal evidence of impropriety? Realists on D'Amato's staff say we may never know the answers—but the appearance of a cover-up is what keeps the story alive. ■

SCOTT APPLEWHITE—AP

Down home: Just after the '92 election, Foster and Blair (right) tried to help extricate theFACTS from the Whitewater web

JANUARY 8, 1996 NEWSWEEK 43

FROM UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ON THE RIGHT by William F. Buckley Jr.
HATE KISSINGER

DATED: 12/12/95

If you are easily conned, you will believe 1) that Nixon (in 1972) faced a re-election challenge that made it necessary to end the Vietnam War on whatever terms; 2) that Henry Kissinger, serving as national security adviser, wished to conclude the war primarily in order to win the Nobel Peace Prize; and 3) that oscillations by the North Vietnamese resulted in the betrayal of President Thieu of South Vietnam, the ascendancy of Henry Kissinger in public esteem, and an indefensible bombing by the United States of North Vietnam, done by Nixon ((ITAL)) after ((ITAL)) the election, (he won 49 states), explainable only in terms of Nixonite grandiosity.

What's wrong with the above is that the terms Nixon gave the enemy, through Henry Kissinger, were identical to those that had been confidentially stipulated in May 1971, and publicized by Nixon in January 1972. They were: North Vietnam had to 1) cease further infiltration of the south, 2) return U.S. prisoners, and 3) acknowledge the de facto authority of the South Vietnamese government.

In October, Le Duc Tho capitulated. President Thieu asked for more concrete guarantees than Nixon thought he could give him; the North Vietnamese did not discontinue support for the infiltrators so Nixon launched the Christmas bombing. It was compared by his critics to Dresden and Hiroshima (in fact, casualties were minimal). Hanoi crumbled, the peace treaty was signed, and Nixon gave a written confidential guarantee to come to the aid of the South if Hanoi returned to aggression. What later happened was the emasculation of Nixon's authority owing to Watergate and to an anti-war fever that caused Congress to deny any further funds for military activity in Indochina.

BUCKLEY

12/12/95

2

The TNT "original" manages to create a two-hour horror story by the simple device of manipulating history to serve its ends. What ((ITAL)) were ((ITAL)) the producer's ends?

Well, primarily to entertain, one guesses. Yet in my lifetime I have not seen as much publicity given to any television episode. The TNT Original is scheduled to play six times in the ensuing 10 days. The conventional explanation is that TNT seeks money to come in from a hypnotized public. If Oliver Stone could do to the assassination of John F. Kennedy what he did and make money out of it and cause half the American people to believe that JFK's murder was covered up by the FBI, the president, the CIA, and the courts -- why not play with the proposition that Nixon was an incompetent in foreign affairs, concerned only with his re-election, and that Kissinger was a feckless and disloyal courtier concerned only with his advancement?

Now if you have not seen it, brace yourself. Nixon is only in one scene spotted without a glass of whiskey in his hand. The Oval Office, as a commentator for The New York Times observed, is made to appear like one continuous cocktail party. Nixon feverishly dislikes and distrusts his national security adviser, whom he refers to as his "Jewboy." (Why did he promote him to secretary of state a year later?) The "Jewboy" is seen conspiring against Nixon, bullying his staff, and scheming to betray Saigon.

The actors do perfectly well the job assigned to them, which is to say that Nixon is made more or less to look and sound like Nixon, and Kissinger like Kissinger. The problem is: No one who has had any experience of Kissinger could validate the portrait given. And, as a matter of fact, loony though Richard Nixon was capable of being, even he is not recognizable to anyone of balanced judgment.

What hurts isn't really the scramble of political history: the TNT folk can't drown out what really happened (and what they know really happened). What offends is the defamatory gluttony of the producers.

BUCKLEY

12/12/95

3

What can be the motive for portraying Henry Kissinger
as a Rasputin loose in the White House? The ready answer is
that the hobgoblinization of historical figures appeals and
is a great theatrical draw. But the enormity of the TNT
travesty suggests a banked hostility not readily explained.
This movie original is for the most part too boring to
attract the kind of attention given to Oswald shooting, or
not shooting, JFK. But it pulsates with a personal hostility
that provokes genuine curiosity.

Why did the producers advertise their show as though it
were "Gone With the Wind"? Is there no defense against
mutational mischaracterizations of living individuals,
portrayed in fictitious situations, words stuck in their
mouths to suit the ideological twitches of the producer?

There is no weapon against the abuse of history, or of
the First Amendment. But it helps to ventilate the contempt
it gives rise to, should give rise to.

COPYRIGHT 1995 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
4900 Main St., Kansas City, Mo. 64112; (816) 932-6600

'I am not a crook': A fall of Shakespearean dimensions

PHOTOS BY SIDNEY BALDWIN

They lionize that traitor Ellsberg for steal-
ing secrets, but they jump all over me 'cause
it's Nixon . . . They've always hated Nixon."

The question is, how will we feel about
the man after seeing "Nixon," a 3¼-hour
epic biography of our most controversial,
even despised, president—made by our
most controversial (and, in some quarters,
despised) filmmaker, Oliver Stone? It's a
combustible combination. "You say Nixon
and Oliver Stone in the same breath and
people expect to go to a crucifixion,"
says Bill Brown, Stone's post-production
assistant.

There were good reasons to have trep-
dations. This, after all, is the man who
in "JFK" perpetrated a wild and, to most
historians, dangerously woolly conspiracy
theory about the Kennedy assassination.
Could we trust history from the man who
transformed the dubious Jim Garrison into
a Capraesque hero? Who, in "The Doors,"
located the soul of the '60s in the marginally
talented Jim Morrison? Would he turn the
Nixon saga into a "Natural Born Killers"
orgy of expressionistic excess? Deep within
Stone is a Manichaean mind-set that has
always needed to divide the world into
good guys and villains. It's there in the alle-
gorical standoff between Willem Dafoe and
Tom Berenger in "Platoon"; in his demon-
ization of Clay Shaw in "JFK." If he was
willing to idealize Kennedy as the pure,
shining hope of recent American history,

wouldn't it be inevitable that Nixon, his
bitter foe, must emerge in Stone's Holly-
wood dialectic as the Prince of Darkness?

Prepare for a surprise. On the verge of
50, Oliver Stone has discovered complex-
ity, ambiguity and even a measure of re-
straint. He is still a filmmaker who paints in
broad and forceful strokes, but in "Nixon"
he puts his considerable talents in the serv-
ice of a character study of our 37th presi-
dent that aims for, and often achieves, the
dimensions of classical tragedy. This is
no whitewash of Nixon. He's there, played
by Anthony Hopkins, with all his malevo-

Blackmail: Stone invented this scene with Hunt (left) and Dean

lence, his paranoia and his ruthlessness in-
tact. His loyalists and his family won't like
this portrait. But his bitterest enemies may
not like it, either, for it forces the viewer
to acknowledge the twisted humanity of
the man. Stone's Nixon is appalling and
strangely moving, a man whose private and
public demons bring him down with an al-
most Shakespearean thud.

This "Nixon" effectively undermines the
work Nixon himself accomplished during
his long last years, during which he success-
fully set about rehabilitating his image. The
dignified elder statesman eulogized so ful-

somely at his funeral in
Yorba Linda, Calif., does not
figure in Stone's picture. Re-
opening old wounds, we're
forced to confront the man
who did more than anyone to
undermine the nation's re-
spect for the presidential of-
fice. What's going to startle
audiences is the intimacy of
the gaze: the vivid theatrical-
ity of the scenes puts us liter-
ally cheek by jowl with the
man, eavesdropping on his
bedroom conversations with
Pat, watching him crumble in
the face of her threat of di-
vorce. It's a strange sensa-
tion getting this up-close and
personal with our most deep-

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NEWSWEEK DECEMBER 11, 1995

THE ARTS

ly impersonal president. It is one kind of shock to read about Nixon's desperate behavior in "The Final Days"; it's another to actually see him burst into sobs next to Henry Kissinger when he resigned, praying on the Lincoln Sitting Room floor. History and voyeurism collide in a powerfully unsettling way. That, more than anything else, is what's going to prove controversial about this movie, not the red herring of whether Stone has monkeyed with the facts.

"Nixon" begins with the Watergate plumbers and ends with the president's resignation. But it swings with brilliant audacity back and forth in time, searching in Nixon's Whittier, Calif., childhood and the broad sweep of his political career for clues to the paradoxical nature of his tenuous ambition and self-destructive flaws.

A key building block in Stone's psychological profile is Nixon's well-documented obsession with Jack and Bobby Kennedy, whose charisma and silver-spoon success stirred up his most dangerous insecurities, his outsider's paranoia about the Eastern establishment. Then, with savage irony, their deaths pave the way for his successful 1968 campaign. Near the end of the movie, his presidency in ruins, a haggard, beaten Nixon stands before a looming oil portrait of John F. Kennedy. It's the JFK of Camelot: at ease, upper-class handsome. Looking up at his old foe, Stone's defeated Nixon has his epiphany about the American people who seem so eager to cast him aside: "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are."

Stone's screenplay, written with Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, draws a link between Nixon's

Kenedy fixation and his own tragic family dynamic. It was the early deaths of two brothers, 7-year-old Arthur and the Kennedyesque Harold, who died of TB at 23, that allowed Richard's parents to invest their meager savings, and their hopes, in the education of the future president.

The Nixon of the final days is haunted by the fact that death has purchased his rise to power. Remembering the sight of Bobby's fallen body on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, he tells Haldeman (James Woods) that at that moment "I knew I'd be president. Death paved the way, didn't it? Vietnam. The Kennedys. It cleared a path

through the wilderness for me. Over the bodies. Four bodies ..."

These scenes are obviously a dramatist's invention, but like most of "Nixon," they emerge from well-documented research. Perhaps stung by the criticisms of "JFK," Stone seldom wanders into pure fabrication. There's an encounter on a Washington bridge between John Dean (David Hyde Pierce) and the plumber E. Howard Hunt (Ed Harris), who's blackmailing the White House, that never took place. (Stone

justifies it by saying it's a scene Nixon would have imagined happening.) There is a gaggle of rich, sinister, right-wing zealots gathered on a ranch in Texas, who seem to have wandered in off the set of "JFK," hinting darkly of Stone's signature conspiracies. ("Old habits die hard," laments "Nixon" production designer Victor Kempster, a veteran of four Stone films.) Most controversial will be Stone's theory of Nixon's involvement in the plot to assassinate Castro (page 68).

But none of these speculations is crucial to the film's power. Stone is smart enough to know that with this story the facts are

melodramatic enough without a Hollywood assist. What writer could have imagined Nixon's bizarre impromptu encounter session with young antiwar protesters at the Lincoln Memorial? Who could have invented his persecution of suspected spy Alger Hiss? The Checkers speech. His infamous "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" concession speech when he lost the California governor's race in 1962. The cloak-and-dagger fiascoes of the Watergate cover-up. It's all here,

with cameo appearances by everyone from Martha Mitchell (Madeline Kahn) to J. Edgar Hoover (Bob Hoskins).

STONE SEEMS INTENT on colonizing our memories of the '60s and '70s in America. For better or worse, his vision of Vietnam in "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" — as a battlefield where American innocence was led to the slaughterhouse — reshaped our vision of the war and our attitude about its vets. If Stone were a less powerful filmmaker, he'd be less hated: the visceral impact of "JFK" so effortlessly overrides doubt that his myths lodge like stones of truth in the popular imagination, resetting the terms of the debate. Stone looms so large on the pop-cultural landscape in part because he's filling a vacuum: when Hollywood pretends to be political, it's more likely to offer the fluffy liberal pipe dreams of "The American President" or the cheerleader's notion of history served up in "Apollo 13." Next to the polite do-goodism of most social-issue filmmakers, Stone's nearly messianic passion is singularly compelling.

But the Stone who made "Nixon" is no demagogue. The propagandist has been replaced by a bold portraitist. And ultimately the ambitious edifice of "Nixon" rests on the shoulders of the model who sits in for Nixon—the actor. It is the emotional coloration of Anthony Hopkins, not Richard Nixon, that we carry away. The Welsh actor would hardly seem the choice to play the jowly, ski-sloped Quaker from Whittier. He doesn't look like him, he isn't built like him, he doesn't sound like him. But once the initial period of adjustment is overcome, Hopkins is Nixon. It's not imitation, it's alchemy. Hopkins grants us access to Nixon's wounded soul, in a way that probably the

Pat Nixon

She once said: 'If I were dying, I wouldn't tell anybody.' She had no self-pity.

So I approached every scene with strength — always fighting.

—Joan Allen

H. R. Haldeman

He had honorable intentions, but he was one tough s.o.b. Tough from his job and an s.o.b. from being tough too long.

John Dean

What scares me most about John is that I can see myself making the same mistakes he did had I been in his position.

—David Hyde Pierce

SIDNEY BALDWIN (J.) NEWSWEEK, UPI/RETTIMANN, UPI

DECEMBER 11, 1995 NEWSWEEK 67

[L-C]

THE ARTS

real man never could. He captures the physical awkwardness, the staccato rages, the chilling emotional repression and bad-salesman's bluster. It's a daredevil performance that at times teeters on the edge of buffoonery without ever falling over. As the real John Dean observes: "Nixon is a colder personality, much colder. And Hopkins humanizes him by being Tony Hopkins, who is not a cold person." It's Hopkins who sets the movie's emotional body temperature.

And it's Joan Allen's taut and uncanny Pat Nixon who partners him in some of the movie's finest scenes. The object of much scorn during her lifetime—she was Plastic Pat, the definition of uptight—the long-suffering wife gets her due in Allen's movingly brittle performance, which even seems to capture the exact tension of her neck muscles as she sits, with strained composure, listening to her husband's shameless Checkers speech.

THE BENCH OF ACTING TALENT here is broad and deep. Paul Sorvino's Machiavellian, publicity-hungry Kissinger will be the subject of much amusement in Washington power circles. He's the one actor to attempt an impersonation, and he gets the sepulchral Germanic rumble of the man to a T. The ferocity of Woods's rabidly loyal Haldeman plays off J. T. Walsh's softer, more subdued Ehrlichman, who surprisingly comes across as the moral conscience of the president's inner circle—a choice Stone says he made more for dramatic balance than out of historical research. (Or was it because Ehrlichman threatened to sue?) Hyde Pierce, from television's "Frasier," is dead-on as the natty John Dean, wriggling out of his role as the Watergate scapegoat-of-choice; and Mary Steenburgen is Nixon's sainted mother, who even appears—confirming the tragedy's Shakespearean ambitions—as an aparition to Nixon at the height of his impeachment-induced derangement.

Though Stone grew up a young Republican who early on supported Nixon, he turned violently against him after he served in Vietnam, never forgiving Nixon for prolonging and expanding the fighting. "Nixon" represents his emotional détente, a hard-won effort to discover compassion for the enemy. It's not a movie that's going to change anyone's politics, right or left, but it comes at an interesting moment in our national temper. In the Washington of Clinton and Gingrich, Dole and Buchanan, gearing up for a campaign mud bath, the demonization of one's political foes has reached an epic frenzy. The tragic intimacy of "Nixon" suggests a deeper, more humane way of regarding our leaders. Who would have thought Oliver Stone's "Nix-

# Whose Obsession Is It, Anyway?

Oliver Stone can't resist linking Nixon to JFK's assassination. But he's wrong. By Evan Thomas

OCU-DRAMAS BY AND LARGE MAKE a hash of history. Ambiguity and nuance are routinely sacrificed for dramatic pacing. But like it or not, movies and TV are the only way many Americans learn about the past. So, though purists may squirm, traditional notions of historical accuracy may have to be replaced by a cruder standard: does the film get the basic truth right, even if some (or most) of the facts are wrong?

Oliver Stone's 1991 movie, "JFK," flunked even this test. Stone's apparent thesis, that LBJ, the Pentagon and the CIA somehow conspired to kill President Kennedy, would be laughable if so many people didn't believe it (polls show that half of the country believes that the CIA played a role in killing Kennedy). "Nixon," on the other hand, is a much more credible effort. Richard Nixon was a Shakespearean tragedy. Stone had no need to embellish the drama. For the most part, he sticks to the known record, making good use of the White House tapes of Watergate fame for the dialogue. Made defensive by historians and journalists who derided the inaccuracy of "JFK," Stone has published an annotated script of his historical sources, most of them mainstream biographies and histories of the period, even before the movie arrives on the screen.

Still, Stone can't escape his favorite conspiracy theory. His Nixon is haunted by his supposed role in plots against Fidel Castro in the early 1960s—plots that somehow got out of control and killed John F. Kennedy. This ghost is not the only one spooking Nixon; he suffers in the movie, as he did in real life, from hubris, inner rage and profound insecurity. But his involvement in the assassination plots is made out to be Nixon's darkest secret. It is what Alfred Hitchcock called a "macguffin," a central plot-moving device. "It might as well have been 'Rosebud'," Stone told NEWSWEEK, referring to the psychological clue that drove Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane."

In one of the opening scenes of "Nixon," the president is talking to his aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, trying to

figure out how to cover up White House involvement in the Watergate break-in. Nixon is visibly shaken to learn that one of the White House "plumbers" arrested at the Watergate is E. Howard Hunt. "On the list of horribles, I know what he is," Nixon mutters. In a later scene he explains that Hunt is a former CIA man who worked on the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. The plot. Nixon says, originated in the Eisenhower White House when Nixon was vice president. The CIA hired the Mafia to kill

What did he know as vice president?
With Ike

68 NEWSWEEK DECEMBER 11, 1995

[L.C.]

Castro, but as Haldeman later explains to Ehrlichman, "in some crazy way it got turned on Kennedy." Nixon doesn't know exactly why or how Kennedy was killed, but he is obsessed with his own role in creating the original assassination machinery to get Castro—"Track 2," he calls it ("Track 1" was the CIA's failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs). Nixon refers to Track 2 as a "beast" that got out of control. (It is also the name of Stone's production company.) In an early version of Stone's script, Nixon hallucinates about "The Beast," "an image of evil that will recur

gest that Nixon had anything at all—even indirectly—to do with Kennedy's death.

Legitimate historians have wondered about Nixon's role in the assassination plots against Castro, but no one has offered evidence directly linking Nixon. Stone cites two sources. One is H. R. Haldeman, who wrote in his 1978 memoir, "The Ends of Power," that during Watergate he suspected that Nixon was obsessed with a CIA plot that somehow led to the assassination of JFK. But Haldeman later disavowed this version, telling journalist Chris Matthews that his ghostwriter, Jo-

not, although he probably knew about their existence.

The man who conceived of and actually ran the CIA's assassination plots, Richard Bissell, told NEWSWEEK that Nixon played no role. During the course of several interviews before his death in 1994, Bissell recalled briefing Nixon in 1960 about some of the agency's psychological-warfare plans against Castro, but the CIA's former chief of covert action says he never discussed the assassination plots with anyone at the White House. It was Bissell, a supremely self-assured operator who routinely acted with only the gauziest authority from the White House, who had the idea of hiring the Mafia. Bissell wanted the mob to stage a gangland-style execution of the Cuban leader. Bissell said he is "certain" that his boss, CIA Director Allen Dulles, did not tell anyone in the White House about the Mafia plot. In that earlier era, policymakers did not want to know too much about what the CIA was up to.

**'Psywar' campaign:** The CIA's own still-classified secret history of the Bay of Pigs, which I was permitted to examine for my book on the early days of the CIA, "The Very Best Men," also examines Nixon's role. The CIA history records that Bissell briefed Nixon on a "psywar" campaign to embarrass Castro in March 1960 (by such actions as trying to make his beard fall out). But it concludes that Nixon was not involved in the assassination plots. Bissell did not even come up with the idea of hiring the Mafia to kill Castro until September 1960, by which time Nixon was preoccupied with his election campaign against JFK.

It is impossible, of course, to absolutely dispose of Stone's elaborate theory linking Nixon, the CIA, the mob and the Kennedy assassination. Nixon did eventually learn of the assassination plots, possibly after he became president, and it's true that the White House tapes recorded him saying that an investigation of the CIA's role in the Bay of Pigs could produce a larger scandal. "You open up that scab and you uncover a lot of pus," said Nixon. But in the movie, Stone conveniently cuts out what else Nixon said: that the CIA plots "have nothing to do with ourselves."

In an interview with NEWSWEEK last week, Stone conceded that he is "speculating" about Track 2. He even said that the actual facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination didn't matter—that the larger truth is that Nixon was concealing something that made him gradually self-destruct. Maybe so. But it seems more likely that Stone is projecting his own demons onto Nixon. There is no particular reason to believe that Nixon was obsessed with JFK's assassination. But Oliver Stone certainly is.

throughout the film," according to the staging instructions. Mercifully, this operatic touch was dropped from the final film.

The theory that Nixon was obsessed with Track 2 is a provocative one, but there is no strong evidence to support his early knowledge of the CIA's assassination plots. It is possible, as historian Fawn Brodie suggests, that Nixon suffered from some kind of "survivor's guilt" over the deaths of the two Kennedys, whom he envied and resented. But Stone is really reaching to sug-

seph DiMona, had simply invented it. (The book was drafted by DiMona while Haldeman was in prison for his Watergate crimes.) Stone's other source is E. Howard Hunt, who wrote in his memoirs that Nixon played some kind of supervisory role in CIA operations aimed at overthrowing Castro. But even Hunt, a fabulist who has written some 50 spy novels, does not suggest that Nixon played any role in the assassination plots. Stone makes Hunt out to be involved in the plots: in fact he was

**Martha Mitchell**
She was a dare-devil—defiant, wild and outspoken. But her husband, her children—everyone—turned against her. —Madeline Kahn

**Henry Kissinger**
He said the script made him look like 'a major slimeball,' but he liked it—he thought it accurately represented Nixon. —Paul Sorvino

**J. Edgar Hoover**
The whole basis of my portrayal was self-loathing. He hated himself so much that he thought the world must be as bad as he. —Bob Hoskins

DECEMBER 11, 1995 NEWSWEEK 69

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on" would end up a healing gesture?

A year ago, over the Thanksgiving holidays, the legendary director Billy Wilder encountered Stone at a dinner and asked him what his next project was going to be. When told, the owlish veteran frowned. "Oliver, please," he teased. "Nixon. Nixon. Nobody likes Nixon. Why would you do Nixon?" It was a skepticism shared by many in Hollywood. Indeed, "Nixon" almost didn't get made.

Stone had been developing two other projects that ultimately collapsed—the musical "Evita" and a movie about Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. On the back burner he was developing a Nixon project with the writing team of Rivele and Wilkinson. The turning point came with Nixon's death in April 1994: suddenly he knew this would be his top priority. At his Telluride, Colo., home, Stone immersed himself in research, with the help of Eric Hamburg, a former Washington congressional aide. Hamburg's office overflowed with Nixoniana, from wacko tracts like Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin's "Silent Coup: The Removal of a President" (which postulates that the search for a call-girl ring brought

down the Nixon presidency) to a slew of reputable histories.

And Stone sought out the real characters who would people his movie. Last March he flew to Washington with Hamburg, Hopkins and Woods to talk to power brokers who knew Nixon—from lawyer Leonard Garment to Elliot Richardson and Robert McNamara. (Richardson, who resigned as Nixon's attorney general in the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre," told Stone that Nixon "had greatness within his grasp, but he had the defects of his qualities"—a lovey line given to Kissinger in the film.) Alexander Butterfield and John Dean were hired by Stone to fact-check Nixon's manerisms and White House arcana. (Both make cameo appearances in the film.) But some public figures were worried about how they would appear. Former CIA director Richard Helms had a lawyer write Stone. Though scenes with Helms, as played by Sam Waterston, were filmed, none made the final cut. Stone insists it's because the film was too long.

Getting it financed, however, proved daunting. Warner Bros., which released Stone's last three movies, "saw it," said

Stone, "as a bunch of unattractive older white men sitting around in suits, with a lot of dialogue and not enough action." Nor were they ecstatic about a Welshman playing an American president. For obvious reasons, they would have preferred the other two names on Stone's original list—Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson. (Try running those versions through your mind.)

It was seeing Hopkins in "The Remains of the Day" and "Shadowlands" that intrigued Stone. "The isolation of Tony is what struck me. The loneliness. I felt that was the quality that always marked Nixon. He played repression perfectly in 'Remains of the Day,' and there was a lot of Nixon in that, too."

Stone was still looking for money a week before shooting was to begin, when he cut a deal with Andrew Vajna's Cinergi and Disney's Hollywood Pictures to supply the $43 million budget (about the average cost of a big studio film these days). One way Stone saved money was to lease the sets of the White House from "The American President," though they were modified to bring them down to real scale.

Several of the actors spoke with the men they were playing. Alexander Haig was

Tough Guys Do Talk

Stone on his father and Nixon. And those still-secret tapes.

WHILE WORKING ON "Nixon," Oliver Stone talked several times to NEWSWEEK about the movie. Excerpts:

**On Stone's late father, Louis, to whom "Nixon" is dedicated:**

I've deepened my awareness of why [Nixon] lied, why he had to be the way he was. [I know] because of my father and that generation of men who hid these things, who repressed many of these feelings that we, a newer generation, let out. In a secret way, ["Nixon"] is a study of my father, too. Nixon was tough. Because he had been deprived in his youth of something fundamental, like—call it love. He felt this inadequacy, this terror... of having to always be the good boy... the truth teller... the achiever. It was second nature to him; that he had to be tough. I miss those old

MICHAEL GRECO—STOCK

This time he's not in your face: The director is only being refined for the sake of communicating the message

guys, those tough guys. I do.

**On Stone's 1994 "Natural Born Killers":**

"NBK" was over the top, but, I hope, in a positive sense. Opera. Put it in your face: this

is society now. Exaggerated but definitely on purpose. In "Nixon," I'm not trying to be refined for the sake of being refined; it's just for the sake of communicating the message.

"NBK" was part of the cul-

ture then: stupid ice skaters fighting; the woman cutting off the guy's penis and being declared innocent. "NBK" was about a slice of that time. Hyperbolic. Almost clumsily done. It was overkill.

**On the film "All The President's Men":**

At first, I thought, Right on! Only later did I find out it was all bull— and that The Washington Post is completely glamorized. In our film, what brings [Nixon] down is the inexorable machinery set in progress... Dean, Butterfield, Ervin, Sirica, Cox, Richardson. He was inevitably going to come down. [Woodward and Bernstein] were part of the machinery. They kept the fires smoldering, but the fires would have continued on.

At the end of "Nixon," a voice (Stone's own) comes on: "Nixon fought successfully to protect his tapes... Out of 4,000 hours, only 60 hours have been made public." The tapes remain very much on Stone's mind:

A picture's a picture. But what about the f---ing tapes? We [taxpayers] paid for them.

70 NEWSWEEK DECEMBER 11, 1995

THE ARTS

"charming, with a great sense of humor," says Powers Boothe. "Of the eight presidents he had served, he said Nixon was by far the brightest." Hyde Pierce was in the awkward position of playing a man, John Dean, who was often on the set. "Oliver very thoughtfully didn't have John around when I was shooting the major scenes. That would have been tremendously intimidating. Dean never gave me a review. He did tell me once that the knot in my tie was a bit too large. When they'd asked Dean who he wanted to play him, he said Kevin Costner."

Sorvino tried out his accent on Kissinger. "I did the voice for him and he said, 'You're good'." J. T. Walsh decided not to contact Ehrlichman. "He was a little testy, and he was threatening to sue." Ehrlichman had seen an early version of the script, and wasn't happy. "Twenty-five pages were bootlegged to me," he explains. "I thought it was awful. It put my character into plot situations that never occurred—and very much to my disadvantage." When told that in the film he emerges as the conscience of the White House, Ehrlichman was surprised—that wasn't in the script he'd read.

HALDEMAN'S no longer alive, but Woods did some historical eavesdropping. "We had access to the real tapes that weren't even available to the public, I won't tell you how, and when you hear Haldeman commiserating in the demise of trusted friends, the coldbloodedness reminds you of those gangster movies where the Mafia kingpins sit around and discuss the impending demise of the arch enemy."

Hopkins endured a tumultuous drama of his own during the making of "Nixon." The part was huge—"This is more lines than 'King Lear'," he wailed to Stone—and the burden of playing an American president whose mannerisms were known to all weighed heavily on him. From day one he harbored a fear that he couldn't pull it off. Stone recalls an elevator ride on the way to lunch with Hopkins and Sorvino, a wicked vocal mimic. "How am I doing?" Hopkins asks Sorvino. "Not well." "What do you mean?" "Uh, it's your accent," Sorvino says. "You're doing it all wrong. This is the

way you should be doing Nixon." And Sorvino launches into an operatic Nixon routine. "By the end of the lunch," Stone says, "Tony's practically sweating bullets. He's thinking about the first plane back to London. Comes back up here. 'Oliver, I can't go on. I'm sorry, I have to leave'." Now Stone is sweating bullets, envisioning his $43 million production going up in smoke. Stone sits his demoralized star down for a pep talk. "This is like the infantry. You don't look at the whole picture.

### John Mitchell

Mitchell was a baaad guy. He was an ass-kisser and an ass—, He was a dangerous man who did the country wrong.
—E.G. Marshall

### Alexander Haig

He dressed in suits of the latest style. His hair was perfect, he was tan. He's a very vain guy and he's proud of himself. —Powers Boothe

### John Ehrlichman

He was a foil to the slavish adoration of Nixon, with this meek moral voice that would ask the questions no one else asked.
—J. T. Walsh

It looks like too much. Get through that line. You slog it out, and then you get confidence."

Hopkins stayed, ultimately settling inside Nixon's skin. His method is fanatical. "I brainwash myself with a scene," Hopkins explains, going through each one 200 times. By the last day of shooting—on a boat off Long Beach, Calif.—Hopkins was in a jesting mood. As some of his colleagues took a water taxi back to shore, he rushed to the railing and cried in mock agony, "Help me! Get me off this f—ing movie!"

But he had one more scene to perform for Stone, one that would tell a lot about

Stone's approach to his incendiary material. The scene was a macho dinner for Nixon's inner circle on the presidential yacht; the menu was New York strip steak and red wine. Nixon and his men—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ron Ziegler, Kissinger and Mitchell—are discussing the rioting at Kent State that followed the invasion of Cambodia. "Dead kids! How the hell did we ever give the Democrats a weapon like this?"

But Nixon hangs tough. "I mean, if Cambodia doesn't work, we'll bomb Hanoi if we

have to." Nixon looks down at his steak. It is oozing blood. "Goddamn it! Who the hell cooked this steak?" Then, to his valet: "Manolo, there's blood all over my plate." He throws down his knife and fork and backs away, tossing his napkin into a growing pool of blood.

Stone shot the ending to the scene a half-dozen times on that cool night in July. The director of "Natural Born Killers" had to decide how hard to hit the emblematic blood. He tried a broad spectrum of sanitary possibilities: from a dainty dribble to over-the-top, with blood splattering from plate to tablecloth in symbolic condemnation of Nixon's Vietnam excesses. "Pour it on!" the director exclaimed. But when he made his final cut, four months later, he went for restraint: blood oozes noticeably but not egregiously onto the presidential china.

Has our most outrageous cinematic provocateur really calmed down? Robert Richardson, his gifted cinematographer, thinks so: "Oliver is moving toward something that is more at peace." Perhaps. Or maybe it just depends on his mood. Another day on the set he was his old feisty self, railing about the popular "Apollo 13." "An homage to bull—

patriotism," he muttered. "The f—ing critics, they all loved it. I can't make movies anymore, I guess."

Beleaguered, defensive, put-upon, here was one of the most successful and acclaimed directors in Hollywood casting himself in the role of endangered outsider. And sounding perilously like the man he was making a movie about. You won't have Stone to kick around anymore. And maybe, finally, that's why "Nixon" is as strong and surprising and empathetic as it is, because Stone has made the imaginative leap any true artist must: he's seen himself in Nixon.

With YAHLIN CHANG

72 NEWSWEEK DECEMBER 11, 1995

SIDNEY BALDWIN (s), P. F. LAFFONT — SYGMA, NO CREDIT, NEWSWEEK

[LC]

12-20-93 10:20AM

10 AHI

1002

[LC]

New York Times, 19 December 1995

# Nixon Family Protests Film's View of President

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 18 — Two days before the release of Oliver Stone's film "Nixon," the former President's family issued an angry statement today calling portions of the movie "reprehensible" and saying it was maliciously designed to "defame and degrade President and Mrs. Nixon's memories in the mind of the American public."

The statement, released by the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif., said that Mr. Stone's movie was nothing less than a "character assassination" of the 37th President.

The announcement, issued on behalf of "the Nixon family" and the library and birthplace foundation, said the objections were based on a reading of the screenplay that has been published by Hyperion, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company. Disney is also releasing the film.

It is the first comment by Nixon's daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Ju-dle Nixon Eisenhower, and their husbands about a film that is already generating dispute because of its depiction of the former President, who died in April 1994. Today's statement seemed intended in part to end any speculation about the family's views.

Although Mr. Stone has said that the film portrays Nixon as a tragic figure, it also presents an unsparing picture of a tormented personality who enjoyed drinking and whose relations with his wife were strained.

The film also asserts that as Vice President under Eisenhower, Nixon played a role in Government efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba. Perhaps the most controversial element of the film is its suggestion that Nixon took part in planning a Castro assassination attempt that unwittingly fed forces that later brought the assassination of President Kennedy.

In contrast to Mr. Stone's 1991 movie "J.F.K.," which caused a fur-vor in by asserting that President Johnson and others were involved in the Kennedy assassination, the new film makes no such assertion about Nixon. Neither the Johnson family nor the Kennedy family made any official comment on "J.F.K.," al-though numerous historians, journalists and former Government officials

have attacked Mr. Stone's account of history.

In the statement, the family said that Mr. Stone had waited until Nixon and his wife, Patricia, were dead to make his film, "expressly to prevent their asserting their rights under the law."

The statement also asserts that Mr. Stone and his collaborators, Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkin-son and Eric Hamburg, "concocted imaginary scenes of the Nixons' pri-vate life, Richard Nixon's family life as a boy and a young man and his public life that are calculated solely and maliciously to defame and de-grade President and Mrs. Nixon's memories in the mind of the Amer-i-can public."

It added: "The published script also contains passages which state erroneously and maliciously that Richard Nixon was responsible for United States Government plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and which state erroneously and maliciously that he believed the apparatus he is alleged to have created for that purpose was ultimately turned against John F. Kennedy."

The contention that Nixon "had any knowledge of, and indirect moral and operational responsibility in, the murder of the 35th President of the United States is so reprehensible that it should render wholly illegiti-mate any text of narrative in which it is contained," the statement said.

In referring to "the Nixon fam-ily," said Kevin Cartwright, a spokesman for the Nixon foundation, the statement meant Mrs. Cox and Mrs. Eisenhower and their hus-bands.

He said the former President's daughters had not seen the film and were basing their criticisms on a reading of the published script.

In a statement responding to the criticism yesterday, Mr. Stone de-nied any malicious intent. "While I understand the distress that any ef-fort to examine the life of Richard Nixon might create for his family, our purpose in making the film 'Nix-on,' was neither malicious nor de-famatory," he said.

The aim of the film, he said, was to attempt "a fuller understanding of the life and career of Richard Nixon — the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies, and the legacy he left his nation and the world."

The Walt Disney Company refused to comment on the dispute.

The New York Times

Arts & Leisure

Section 2

Sunday, December 17, 1995

Nixon Revisited by Way of the Creative Camera

By RICHARD REEVES

A
MONTH OR SO AFTER the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the third year of his Presidency, a young White House assistant named Richard Goodin tried to console Robert Kennedy by saying: "Julias Caesar is an immortal, and he was only an actor. I'm for a little more than three years."

"Yes," Bobby said, "but it helps if you have Shakespeare to write about you."

That's certainly true, but taking no chances on the future, Caesar wrote about himself first. John Kennedy intended to do the same after his Presidency, emulating his hero, Winston Churchill. The 35th President never got the chance, but his memory and memories of how far

How can one go
with the defense

'Hey, it's only
a movie'?

were well served by two talented assistants: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen did their best to immortalize their fallen leader.

But it was not the historian, Schlesinger, or the alter ego, Sorensen, who cast the image of Kennedy that still thrills the world. It was his widow, Jacqueline, telling a friendly writer, Theodore H. White: "At night before we'd go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records. The lines he loved to bear were: 'Don't let me be forget, that there once was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.' There'll be great Presidents again, but there'll never be another Camelot again."

Kennedy's competitor, the 37th President, Richard M. Nixon, did get the chance to make the Churchillian effort to define himself and his deeds in six books written after his resignation in 1974. Both Presidents tape-recorded White House days as material for their memoirs, knowing that one day they would be commending in the marketplace of history with both friends and enemies. Historian on Page 41

Richard Reeves, a former New York Times reporter, is the author, most recently, of "President Kennedy: Profile of Power." He covered the White House during the Administration of Richard M. Nixon and is writing a book about Nixon's Presidency.

David Kellman/Congress Photos Entertainment

Anthony Nixon as the 37th President in Oliver Stone's new film "Nixon"—An often-sympathetic portrayal of a heavy drinker holed up in a dark castle called the White House and at war with an undefined "beast."

PRESIDENTS 101

Oliver Stone has resumed his cinematic survey of American leaders, and his sources for Richard M. Nixon include Shakespeare and Orona Welles as well as an assortment of history books. 11

Ronald Burtin

Lucian Freud in 1982—Prominent artist, private man.

Through the Eyes of Lucian Freud

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

LONDON

IT IS PAST MIDNIGHT, AND LUCIAN FREUD is walking through London's National Gallery, his steps reverberating in the vast, empty rooms.

Having the great museum to himself is a privilege that comes from being England's most prominent artist, a painter who has created some of the most potent and unflinching images of the human body in the late 20th century. Add to this distinction his near obsolescence with privacy, and a schedule in which he paints each day until late into the evening. And here he is in the gallery in the middle of the night, with all the lights on and the run of the place.

"I use the gallery as if it were a doctor," he says. He has been visiting it almost since he moved to England from Berlin as a boy in 1933. "I come for ideas and help — to look at situations within paintings, rather than paintings. Often these situations have to do with arms and legs, so the medical analogy is actually right.

On a late-night stroll in the
National Gallery, an English
master reflects on bodies
and minds, art and artists.

"Do you know the old story about the strip cartoon writer who goes on holiday?" Mr. Freud asks. "He leaves his hero chained up at the bottom of the sea with an enormous shark advancing from the left and a huge octopus approaching. And the man who takes over the job can't figure out how to get the hero out of danger, and after several sleepless nights, he finally sends a telegram to the writer asking him what to do. And the telegram comes back: 'With one tremendous bound the hero is free.' Well, when I come here I'm also looking for ways to get myself out of troubles that are self-made."

Mr. Freud sometimes speaks in a near whisper that compels you to lean in to hear him. He has a

distinctive way of sitting in a room that is half discreet, half insolent. His speech, which has a little lisping, also retains a slight German accent. He turned 73 this month and looks remarkably fit. A slight man, he has a birdlike face, short tousled hair and an intense wide-eyed stare that can be startling at first. That stare, and the long scarf that he ties around his neck, are among his familiar features. Another is his whip-pet, Pluto, who joins him even when he goes to lunch at a riverside restaurant; Pluto plays by the Thames while Mr. Freud acts. Yet another of Mr. Freud's traits is how he drives: manically careering around London in his Bentley, with Pluto hanging on in the back seat.

Mr. Freud spends most of his time in the tumble-down attic rooms of his studio, at the top of a walk-up in gentile Holland Park, just west of Kensington Gardens. The bell is unmarked, and Mr. Freud is so scrupulous about guarding his privacy that not even close friends have his phone number. He rarely leaves London; his two-day trip to New York to see his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in 1993 was his only visit to the city since 1953. He lived on

*Continued on Page 43*

THEATER

 Lustful, priestly,
fatherly, motherly:
on many stages,
the many guises
of manly.

By MARGO JEFFERSON 4

John S. Kellman/Alamy Stock Photo

Christa Kirby, left, Everett Quinton and
Cory Lippio in "Murder at Minsing
Mansion"—Masculine diversity.

THEATER

Living on sweets, Broadway is undernourished, says Arthur Laurents. 4

DANCE

Such scandalous Swedes, and naturally the toast of Paris. 6

FILM

In a big-movie season, some little ones to see. Plus, laughable sex. 11

CLASSICAL MUSIC

A reviewer turns his pen on the audience. (It isn't a rave.) 32

POP MUSIC

Who should own the outtakes? Bootleggers say you should. 34

TELEVISION

After Dan, after Peter, after Tom, then what? 37

ARCHITECTURE

Why New York's Municipal Art Society should matter. 44

The Arts

The New York Times

5/30/95

# Stone's Nixon Is a Blend Of Demonic And Tragic

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

HOLLYWOOD, May 29 — As the movie cameras rolled and the director Oliver Stone watched intensely, Richard M. Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins, responded to the first news of the Watergate break-in. The setting was a staff meeting in the President's hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, next to the White House.

"I don't have time for all this," he said impatiently, looking at his watch and turning to his aide, Bob Haldeman (James Woods). "Just handle it, Bob! Keep it out of the White House. What else? Kissinger's waiting; he's throwing a tantrum, threatening to quit again if I don't see him." Mr. Hopkins sighed.

Moments later, Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Stone conferred quietly over the scene, which takes place in the first few minutes of "Nixon," a sweeping drama, now being filmed, about one of the more enigmatic and extraordinary politicians of the century. The $42 million film is to be released by the Walt Disney Company later in the year or early in 1996.

The fact that Mr. Stone, a Hollywood-style radical and the town's bad boy, is turning his focus on Nixon may lead some to assume that the film is a demonic portrait of the nation's 37th President. After all, Mr. Stone has relished his role as an anti-Vietnam War and anti-Government film maker in such works as "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July." His most celebrated and infamous film was "J.F.K.," in which he raised the possibility that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy resulted from a conspiracy at the highest Government levels.

Surprisingly, "Nixon" seems another matter. A reading of the closely guarded script, and conversations with Mr. Stone and some of the actors, suggests that the film seeks to portray Nixon in a variety of ways: demonic but also tragic, obsessed with his past, vulnerable and charismatic, frightened and hard.

Bart Bartholomew for The New York Times

Joan Allen as Pat Nixon and Anthony Hopkins as the President in Oliver Stone's "Nixon."

"He's a classic tragic character, probably the most dominant politician in America in the last half-century after Roosevelt," said Mr. Stone, walking around a movie set that includes strikingly accurate replicas of the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and other White House sites. "The toughness that it took for him to rise to the top as an outsider and take the knocks were the very qualities that made him cynical and bitter and defeated him." He added: "Actually, Nixon has always reminded me of my father. My

father was a big Nixon supporter and so was I. I went to Trinity in New York and I had fights because I was a Nixon supporter."

The birth of the film was a difficult one. Mr. Stone broke up acrimoniously with his longtime producer, Arnon Milchan, an Israeli-born businessman, largely over the cost of the movie. And Warner Brothers, which has released Mr. Stone's recent movies, was plainly reluctant to take on the project after the public and critical

*Continued on Page C14*

THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, MAY 30, 1995

famous theory of relativity, has Betty (Ms. Maddow) battling a clock that leaps over hours when unwatched and makes faces at her when looked at. She also has to fend off the distractions of two aunts (Tina Shepard and Dale Soules) and a cousin (Paul Zimet) as she tries to meet the deadline for turning in a new song she is trying to compose.

As usual with the Talking Band, all the spoken patter has the beat of song and the logical discontinuities of most lyrics, and almost every object in Betty's brilliantly colored house, designed by the popular puppeteer Janie Geiser, becomes a musical instrument. Betty's relatives have all had comically tragic lives frozen in time, which they reveal in weird conversations counted off to the underlying tempos of — what else? — Haydn's "Clock" Symphony, No. 101. This confessional therapy works well enough for at least one of them, who breaks out of time altogether and disappears into her handbag.

Brian Jucha, the director, keeps the action moving in a kind of broken rhythm that might have greatly amused Haydn, who loved a musical joke. In the end it is clear that Betty's song is the play, finished in exactly one hour. D. J. R. BRUCKNER

DANCE

Choreography That Takes Dancers on a Hike

Solomons Company
Merce Cunningham Studio

Gus Solomons Jr. sent four men rushing through space on Friday night when the Solomons Company/Dance performed. But he was most choreographically eloquent in a solo in which he scarcely moved.

In "G... Minor," Mr. Solomons wore dangling earrings and a red robe that a press release said had once belonged to Agnes de Mille. But he did not look especially feminine. Rather, he appeared to be portraying some ageless being who transcended all conventional notions of gender. Seated in a chair, he did little more than make a few gestures to music by Bach played by the Walter Thompson Ensemble. Sometimes his movements were delicate; other gestures were so forceful that one knew that this impressively robed and sexually ambiguous figure with a shaved head must be a sage, prophet

Chamberlain, Nicholas Leichter and Elmar Streeter was certainly strenuous.

The men plunged ahead, paused as if teetering on cliff edges, then jumped to some secure new place. "Fatstick" occasionally suffered from a sameness of choreographic texture. Yet its heartiness successfully evoked a wilderness hike.

JACK ANDERSON

A Premiere on Malcolm X And a Retrospective

Rod Rodgers Dance Company
La Mama Annex

Rod Rodgers and his dance company have been at work for 26 years. Mr. Rodgers's careerlong themes and distinctive choreographic style were suggested in a retrospective program on Sunday night that included a premiere inspired by the

Gaudin in a stylized Asian-theater mask, weaves through the piece delicately striking and shaking percussion instruments. The result is a satisfying merger of thought and action.

But the compilation of slides and taped excerpts of speeches by Malcolm X in Mr. Rodgers's new "Quest," set to music by Hassan Hakmoun and Adam Rudolph, has a gutsy intelligence and eloquence that are missing from the choreography. The dances serve as almost interchangeable one-note accompaniment for the different aspects of Malcolm's message and life that are expressed in each of six sections. It is a pity, because Mr. Rodgers has a company of fine dancers. He also has something to say.

The program's soloists also included Kayoko Sako, Kim Grier, Khamla Somphanh, Felicia Kennerly, Bryan Haynes and Long Zhao.

good to see them mostly in the pink on Friday evening in a brief program of 19th-century American songs presented in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition "Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age."

The musicians' plain-spoken style seemed, if anything, to contrast with the ornate grandeur of the furniture on display, although the faltering "Grandfather's Clock" of which Ms. Morris sang might well have been the Herter example, now lacking its innards. The point, of course, was that these songs — except, perhaps, for those of a mildly subversive bent, like "100 Years Hence" — would have been heard in the patrician parlors graced by the furniture.

Ms. Morris, though fighting dryness in her voice at times, easily gave the lie to "I Cannot Sing the Old Songs." She achieved transcendent moments in the haunting classic

Tom Brazil

Dale Doules, Paul Zimet, Ellen Maddow and Tina Shepard in "Betty Suffer's Theory of Relativity."

JENNIFER DUNNING

# Stone's Nixon Is a Blend of Demonic and Tragic

[LC]

*Continued From Page C13*

reaction to the director's last two films. These were "Heaven and Earth," a seriously flawed drama about Vietnam that collapsed at the box office, and "Natural Born Killers," a movie that earned profits but was denounced by many critics for its over-the-top violence.

Mr. Stone has assembled a high-profile cast for this film. Besides Mr. Hopkins, who took the role after Tom Hanks turned it down, the film's cast includes Joan Allen as Pat Nixon ("She looks remarkably similar, the same beautiful, fragile bones," said Mr. Stone). Other lead actors are Powers Boothe (Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr.); Ed Harris (Howard Hunt); Bob Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover); E. G. Marshall (John Mitchell); David Paymer (Ron Ziegler); David Hyde Pierce (John Dean); Paul Sorvino (Henry A. Kissinger); J. T. Walsh (John Erlichman), and

James Woods (H. R. Haldeman).

Also in the cast are Edward Herrmann as Nelson Rockefeller, Madeline Kahn as Martha Mitchell, and Sam Waterston as Richard Helms. The screenplay was written by Mr. Stone, Christopher Wilkinson and Stephen J. Rivele.

A number of former Nixon associates — including Mr. Dean, General Haig, Mr. Ziegler, John Sears, Leonard Garment and Elliot Richardson — have met with the film makers and actors. Alexander Butterfield, a former Cabinet secretary and special assistant to Nixon who first revealed the existence of the secret tapes that the President had made of his conversations, is the film's technical adviser.

Mr. Butterfield, an outgoing and blunt-spoken businessman from San Diego who is writing a book about Nixon, has been on the movie set every day and has been on call for Mr. Stone and the actors. "Oliver has had to take some creative license, to

> In his youth, the bad boy of directors backed the 37th President.

cut and paste, but he's been very fair," he said. One of Nixon's closest personal aides, he said he remained utterly puzzled about Nixon's personality. He has had numerous conversations with Mr. Hopkins, and helped the actor especially with the way Nixon — who died in April 1994, at the age of 81 — spoke, behaved and gestured.

"I remember Haldeman once saying that Nixon was the strangest man he ever met, and I felt good when he said that because I agreed," said Mr. Butterfield. "For one thing, he gestured like no one else I ever

knew. He was always a little off balance. No finesse. So unathletic, pitifully unathletic.

"Even after his last maudlin and, in my opinion, stupid speech to his staff — why everyone was crying I never understood because it was so fragmented, so discombobulated — he walked to the South Lawn and gave this almost enthusiastic wave. It was so incongruous, like he was going on another trip. That's what was so strange about him."

The Nixon family has remained uninvolved with the film. But Julie Nixon Eisenhower, one of the President's two daughters, sent a note and a copy of her 1986 memoir, "Pat Nixon: The Untold Story," to Mr. Hopkins's mother, Muriel, who visited the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., with her son.

Mr. Hopkins, who received an Academy Award as best actor for his performance in "The Silence of the Lambs" in 1991, said the Nixon role was the hardest of his 35-year career. Seated in his trailer during a lunch break, the actor said he was concentrating on the Nixon voice and accent. Even off camera, Mr. Hopkins tries to walk and talk and gesture like the former President. Yet the role seems to torment Mr. Hopkins, who wears only a fake hair piece and false teeth to hint at a physical resemblance to Nixon. (Mr. Stone said, "I didn't want makeup to get in the way of his ability to allow people to look into him.")

To Mr. Hopkins, the role is almost Shakespearean. "I never feel I can get the accent right," he said quietly. "I can do Nixon, the essence of Nixon, the tortured man, but the technical stuff is the hardest. I've got the mask, but it's the accent. Everyone knows what he sounded like. The voice. I've just got to grab onto it like a fireman's pole, hold onto it and let it carry me."

"Oliver says, 'Be bold, be bold, do Nixon, just do it,'" said Mr. Hopkins, who has watched hours of newsreels and tapes of the former President. "I feel I'm just about keeping my head above water. I sense I know him. I sense he was run out of his job by his own demons. I understand the rejection he felt, the isolation. And I feel compassion for this man."

George Balanchine was so major
an influence on the New York City
Ballet, which he established with
Lincoln Kirstein in 1948, that it is
easy to forget how many different
choreographers were invited to work
with the company in its first 15
years.

Some of the troupe's eclectic early approach may have been recalled on Sunday afternoon by the highly disparate program presented at the New York State Theater. Interest focused primarily on Damian Woetzel, who was new and powerful in the title role of Balanchine's "Prodigal Son." But other debuts, in "Sinfonia," a ballet that Peter Martins created for a benefit in 1993, were just as significant: they gave a slight work a more substantive look as it re-entered the repertory.

Mr. Woetzel was represented as a
choreographer, albeit a relative be-
ginner, through his recent "Glazunov
Pas de Deux." At the other end of the
spectrum was Jerome Robbins, a
20th-century master, represented by
"The Four Seasons."

For all their distinctive aspects,
these pieces hardly showed any of
the choreographers at his best. They
demonstrated, rather, City Ballet's
view of itself as a creative company.

"Prodigal Son" embodies an est-
hetic that Balanchine totally reject-
ed after the 1930's. It is less a mas-
terpiece than a historical curiosity, a
vestige of the modernism that inter-
ested the young Balanchine when he
created the last work produced by
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

In 1929, everything about "Prodi-
gal Son" was experimental. Prokof-
iev's music was still a far cry from
the programmatic and accessible
score he would compose a decade

later in "Romeo and Juliet." The
costumes and décor were School of
Paris, with Rouault's Orientalist im-
ages influenced by the painter's
mentor, Gustave Moreau. The plot, a
retelling of the biblical parable of the
Prodigal Son, was distilled, using
principles borrowed from the con-
structivist movement.

relic of his past to demonstrate the
road he had traveled and the revela-

Damian Woetzel of
the New York City
Ballet in the title role
of Balanchine's
"Prodigal Son."

Paul Kolnick/New York City Ballet

composer whose mournful, post-im-
imalist Symphony No. 3 brought him
international fame, has turned down
invitations from many a prestigious
ensemble. Yet on Sunday afternoon
he performed not in a conventional
concert hall and not fifth famous
musicians, but in a ballroom at the
Marriott Marquis Hotel, on a pro-
gram otherwise devoted to amateur
Polish-American choruses and danc-
ers. (He is also to play at the Kos-
ciuszko Foundation, 15 East 65th
Street, Manhattan, on Thursday.)

The occasion was the 44th interna-
tional convention of the Polish Sing-
ers Alliance of America, an organiza-
tion founded 106 years ago in Chicago
by Polish immigrants who wanted to
keep their native choral-singing tra-
dition alive. Today the organization
has 1,500 members, and about 600 of

[L.C.T.]

## Letters to the Editor

# 'The Jane Fonda Version of History'

The following letter from Henry A. Kissinger is in response to a review of the television film "Kissinger and Nixon" ("Battle of the White House Egos" by Robert Goldberg, Leisure & Arts, Dec. 18). The phrases "poor old doltish Nixon" and "a Nixon presumably too boozed up to know what he was signing" are used by Dr. Kissinger ironically, not to insult or deride Richard Nixon; their derision is aimed at the review and the film (the film depicts Nixon as drinking heavily). Dr. Kissinger also is referring to himself ironically with the terms "premier spinmaster" and "the old spinmaster," etc. (the review refers to him as "one of the first great modern spin doctors").

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read the review of "Kissinger and Nixon" in The Wall Street Journal. What is the point of being the premier spinmaster if one is found out so easily? Here the old spinmaster has been busily confusing the issue on Vietnam for 20 years. Nixon and I nearly got away with creating the impression that we were standing up for the honor and credibility of the United States in refusing to turn over to the Communists millions who, in reliance on America's promises, had cast their lot with us. We had conducted policies from a besieged White House, gone through the anguish of Cambodia and the risks of mining North Vietnam, faced down scores of congressional resolutions demanding withdrawal, to obscure the real purpose of the spinmastership—now, alas, unveiled in a TV film endorsed by The Wall Street Journal—that all this was "not to score, but to win over the fans in the bleachers." Incompetent as Nixon and I proved to be, we were not aware that there were fans in the bleachers (they surely were not in Congress or the media) and the conservatives were uncharacteristically silent.

Of course, there are a few glitches: for example, how the spinmaster, whose office was down the hall from the president, managed to escape for his nefarious secret negotiations without Nixon knowing it or how he organized the airplane to get to Paris. In fact, the spinmaster was even cleverer than that. He left memos in the files, approved by a Nixon presumably too boozed up to know what he was signing, approving every trip and its talking points in advance and every trip report later.

Poor old doltish Nixon. He left a trail of handwritten notes urging the spinmaster to proceed and not one document or tape that supports what the filmmaker and your reviewer discovered—that he wanted to delay the negotiations until after the election. But the old spinmaster who tried to trick Ford into resisting the Cuban troops in Angola, from which he was restrained by vigilant neo-conservatives, overcame all these obstacles. He even fooled Nixon into believing that there had been no real disagreement between them, as is shown in the extract from a letter to me from Nixon dated April 9, 1990, when a national magazine tentatively tried out the thesis

so triumphantly vindicated in the film endorsed by The Wall Street Journal review, namely that Nixon and I were adversaries rather than partners.

There was only one area where we had a significant difference of opinion. I felt that you had more confidence in the negotiating process than I had. On the other hand, as I noted in my Memoirs, I had to admit, once you negotiated the Paris Peace agreement, that you were right and I was wrong on this score."

Nixon and yours truly, the old spinmaster, were clearly trying to put one over when we presented our Vietnam policy as an effort to extricate our country honorably from a liberal debacle. It was two liberal administrations that transformed the containment approach of Eisenhower into a social reform policy that blew up in our face, as it was later to do in Somalia. It was these administrations which opened the supply routes through Laos (which Eisenhower wanted to defend) into Vietnam, overthrew Diem, then sent 500,000 troops with a strategy of attrition, thus leaving the initiative to our enemy. And having negotiated a bombing halt just before leaving office, the perpetrators of that policy then joined the peace movement and made life hell for those who wanted to extricate America with honor from that war.

But the film and your reviewer were not so easily fooled. They got to the heart of the truth—which apparently was that the Nixon administration's heavy thinking was a sham, and the real failures were in the conservative camp because the "two performers were eagerly awaiting the next morning's reviews." And it was a measure of the clumsiness that the performers' reviews turned out to be uniformly hostile despite their most heroic efforts. No matter. Anyone duplicitous enough to doubt that the Backfire was a strategic bomber is also quite capable of spinning a yarn for a TV film 20 years later to the effect that he single-handedly achieved peace by double-crossing his president and betraying America's allies. Such characters must be exposed, even if it means that The Wall Street Journal ignores demonstrated factual misrepresentations and, in effect, endorses the Jane Fonda version of history.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

New York

By ROBERT GOLDBERG

Television

"Kissinger and Nixon"

"Kissinger and Nixon" frames the story differently, more tightly. Here, Dr. Kissinger is at the center, and the focus does not stray over the years to include the whole saga of the Indochina war or the War-gate coverup. Instead, the film recounts the tale of six months, from the summer of 1972 to early 1973—six months in the secret Vietnam negotiations.

In the summer of 1972, as the election approaches, overtures from North Vietnam lead to a reopening of the Paris peace talks. Nixon (Beau Bridges) thinks in terms of football, and doesn't want to settle for a loss or a tie—especially just before the election: "The American people ... want to see us prevail. This is sudden-death overtime, and they want to see us score the winner!" Kissinger (Ron Silver) believes that the timing offers a real chance for peace. But Nixon would rather get re-elected, with a "brand new first and 10," and then conclude the war himself. Both men want their piece of the glory.

The subtlest point of "Kissinger and Nixon" is that in this clash of opposites, both men played the game the same way—with an eye on the audience. It seems as if, to use a Nixonian metaphor, the point wasn't to score, but to win over the fans in the bleachers. Bringing home the peace was good, but getting the accolades from the press or the Nobel committee, that was much better. Finally, they weren't so different, these two performers, both eagerly awaiting the next morning's reviews.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL MONDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1995 A11

A11

TIONAL

Haiti Gets Light Turnout
For Presidential Election

By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Relatively few Haitians turned out to vote for a new president yesterday in an election the U.S. considers crucial to restoring democracy in Haiti and ending its military presence here.

Official results won't be announced until Dec. 27, but it was widely expected that Rene Preval, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's handpicked candidate, would be the easy winner. In a local newspaper poll last week, Mr. Preval had the approval of 64.5% of the capital's electorate. If Mr. Preval fails to win more than 50% of the vote in the 14-candidate field, a runoff will be held in January.

International observers said voter participation was as low as 5% in the Haitian capital and as high as 36% in the country's northwest. The short political campaign was plagued by uncertainty as to whether Mr. Aristide would attempt to stay in office for another three years to make up for time he spent in exile following the 1991 coup.

By midafternoon, there was only one report of violence, when a United Nations vehicle in the town of Petit Goave was hit by shots.

Strikes Start to Fizzle Out in France;
Effect on Reforms, Economy Will Linger

By THOMAS KAMM
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

PARIS — France's public-sector strikes appear to be winding down after 24 days—but at a cost of delayed reforms and an economic slowdown that imperils Europe's plans for a common currency.

Some unions threatened more protests, after marches Saturday drew at least 600,000 people throughout the country. Public transportation started to run fitfully over the weekend. Government officials and labor experts are predicting a return to normalcy over the next few days.

Prime Minister Alain Juppe, in a television interview yesterday, said it's time to sit around the table to "solve this family quarrel." He stressed that he wouldn't back down from his plan to overhaul France's deficit-ridden social security system, which lies at the root of the strikes. However, he pledged that he wouldn't raise taxes further after his plan is implemented. He also said at a meeting with unions Thursday that he would make proposals to boost employment.

In a sign of confidence that basic fiscal policy is emerging largely unscathed from the strikes—but also to help offset the

strikes' toll on the nation's sluggish economy — the Bank of France on Friday said it would lower its key intervention rate by 25 basis points to 4.45%, its lowest level in 23 years.

Despite the rate cut, the French franc fell very slightly against the German mark, closing Friday at 3.4477 francs (70 U.S. cents) for one mark, compared with 3.4434 francs on Thursday. The Paris Bourse's CAC 40-stock index fell 0.8%.

If the strikes end quickly, Mr. Juppe will have saved his job. And he will be able to claim that he preserved the centerpiece of his reform plan — the overhaul of France's health-care system as part of a broad plan to cut the social security deficit to 17 billion francs next year from a projected shortage of 61 billion francs.

Mr. Juppe was forced to make two big concessions. He backed off from a bid to force public-sector employees to work 40 years to collect a full pension rather than 37.5 years. He also withdrew, pending new negotiations, a cost-cutting plan for France's state railway. The railway is expected to post a 1995 loss of 12 billion francs; its debts total 175 billion francs.

The retreats don't threaten the government's aim to cut the budget deficit to 290 billion francs in 1996, from 322 billion francs this year, economists say. But they add that the problems of the railway's losses and the pension system will have to be addressed soon.

More worrisome to economists is the fact that the strikes have worsened a clear economic slowdown, and many doubt that France can meet its 1996 budget deficit target unless the Bank of France sharply cuts interest rates. Such a failure would cast a cloud over the European Union's aims to establish a common currency in 1999, which includes strict guidelines for budget deficits.

Japan to Halve Key Property Tax

By JATHON SAPSFORD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

TOKYO — Japan's ruling coalition parties agreed on a tax policy for the fiscal year beginning April 1 that would halve a key property tax, in an effort to revive the country's weak real-estate market.

Private analysts welcomed the move but warned it might not be enough to stem a

plan would reduce government revenue by more than 10 trillion yen ($98.4 billion) next fiscal year. But the reforms are deemed necessary to stimulate Japan's weak economy. Japan's Economic Planning Agency said Friday the economy shows signs of reviving but is far from staging a full-fledged recovery.

The tax being cut was introduced in 1992 to end the speculative frenzy in Japan's property market. Since then, property values have crashed, hampering economic expansion and wreaking havoc on bank balance sheets. The government says land prices are down about 60% from a 1991 peak, though some analysts say the decline is even steeper.

Makoto Hayashi, chief representative of Tokyo's Real Estate Management Research Center Co. said investors are deterred from buying real estate by an array of seven different taxes on property transactions ranging from buying to leasing.

Europe's Car Registrations Rise

BRUSSELS — New-car registrations in Western Europe rose an estimated 3.6% to 953,300 units in November compared with the year-earlier period, as three of Europe's largest markets saw big increases in sales, the Association of European Car Manufacturers said.

LEVEL 1 - 1 OF 1 STORY

SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C01

LENGTH: 684 words

BODY:

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: December 09, 1995

PICKS & PANS

TUBE: In *Kissinger and Nixon*, Ron Silver (right) placates his boss, Beau Bridges.

BERTRAND CARriere/TURNER PICTURES INC.

TUBE

by David Hiltbrand

NETWORK TV HAS A BAD CASE OF THE reruns this month, and you are to blame. You have this annoying habit of getting caught up in holiday activities and losing sight of how important it is to keep watching TV. Well, the networks would rather not waste fresh episodes of hit series on measly December audiences. Instead, the Big Three—more so every year—are serving up episodes that already aired only a month or two ago. Ho, ho, ho!

As prime time repeats on itself, this seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the season so far. The new dramas have been disappointing, with even the best of them, ABC's *Murder One*, losing its focus after its whizbang start and the worst, CBS's already canceled *Courthouse*, seeming desperately gaudy. (The judges on this show had more former lovers than Madonna.) The new sitcoms are better, but

only marginally so. The best of the freshman class, ABC's *The Naked Truth* and CBS's *Can't Hurry Love* and *Almost Perfect*, feature flashy writing and engaging ensembles but lack the cohesive, self-sustaining concepts and inspired chemistry that have sparked such classics as *Cheers* and *M*A*S*H*. My midterm grade for the season: B-

KISSINGER AND NIXON

TNT (Sun., Dec. 10, 8 p.m. ET)

Set in 1972, this film dramatizes the byzantine relationship between our 37th President and his German-born National Security Adviser. When we first see Nixon (Beau Bridges), he is bellowing from his seat in the Oval Office, "Where is my Jew boy?" Despite such demeaning and hostile treatment, Kissinger (a paunched-up Ron Silver) plays his boss like a harp, stroking Nixon's ego and plucking at his deep fear of rejection.

Both actors turn in solid perfor-

THIS WEEK

**TUBE:** *Kissinger and Nixon* portrays fear and loathing in the White House; revived, *Flipper* is still all wet

**SCREEN:** The Old West seems mighty old and tired in *Wild Bill*; Jennifer Jason Leigh heats up *Georgia* 25

**SONG:** *Waiting to Exhale's* soundtrack has big names (Whitney Houston, TLC) but little impact; Meat Loaf's latest sounds warmed over 28

**PAGES:** *NYPD Blue* writers David Milch and Bill Clark tell tales out of the precinct in *True Blue*; Howard Stern's *Miss America* won't be winning any congeniality contests 39

**bytes:** Jimi Hendrix's web site has his horoscope but no guitar solos 53

mances, Bridges fulminating away in Nixon's butchered syntax and Silver mumbling in Kissinger's dyspeptic, Teutonic accent. Though the depiction of the laborious peace negotiations with North Vietnam quickly becomes monotonous, the film, based on newly appointed TIME magazine editor Walter Isaacson's 1993 biography of Kissinger, presents a fascinating re-enactment of White House infighting: Kissinger on one side and H.R. "Bob" Haldeman (Ron White) and Charles Colson (Tony Rosato) on the other. The road to peace has never seemed more treacherous. Grade: A-

JOURNEY

CBS (Sun., Dec. 10, 9 p.m. ET)

A restless and troubled woman (Meg Tilly) bolts the family farm after yet another rancorous battle with her father (Jason Robards), leaving behind her two children. Her 11-year-old boy (Max Pomeranc) feels

12/11/95 PEOPLE

15

PICKS & PANS

## AMERICAN GREETINGS
SENDS BIRTHDAY WISHES TO

Bess Armstrong, Dec. 11

Tracy Austin, Dec. 12

Mayim Bialik, Dec. 12

### American Greetings Supports

Gilda's Club
Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Special Olympics

A contribution in the name of each celebrity has been made to the People's first charities. To make your own contribution, please call 1-800-324-7672.

Birthday Bear™ & Design ©TCFC ©AGC, Inc.

## TUBE

particularly sad and abandoned and blames Robards for Tilly's departure.

Gradually, Robards begins to heal the rift with his grandson by passing on to the boy his own passion for photography, showing him the epiphanies buried in casual family snapshots. Pomeranc, who starred in the 1993 film *Searching for Bobby Fischer*, brings a soulful quality to the emotionally bruised youth. Robards turns in a rich and resonant performance as the eccentric shutterbug. *Journey* is remarkably uneventful—about the most momentous occurrence is the birth of a litter of kittens—but it is also singularly touching. Grade: A-

## FLIPPER

Syndicated (Check local listings)

In this remake of the '60s surf-and-turf series, our unsinkable dolphin hero Flipper has befriended a pair of Florida teens (Payton Haas and Jessica Marie Alba). These two are always enlisting their fin-ish friend in innocent commercial schemes. ("Fetch us those lobsters, Flipper. Tickets for the Nine Inch Nails concert go on sale tomorrow!") When danger looms—and it does in every tritely plotted episode—it's time to call on the grownups. The oldsters here are Haas's mom (Colleen Flynn), a Naval officer with an incredibly flexible schedule, and a marine biology professor (Brian Wimmer of China Beach).

But enough about the humans. They're just the spear-carriers in this bouillabaisse. The real star of the

A JOURNEY Meg Tilly, Max Pomeranc and Jason Robards portray a fractious family.

show is now played by Slim, 19, and three backups. He is not as sleek or comely as the original, Susie, who died several years ago. However, Slim is a better actor. Anguish and concerned chiding are his specialties. Grade: C+

## DANIELLE STEEL'S MIXED BLESSINGS

NBC (Mon., Dec. 11, 9 p.m. ET)

As the opening credits of this middling melodrama roll, we attend three glossy picture-book nuptials (the happy couples: Scott Baio and Julie Condra; Bruce Greenwood and Gabrielle Carteris; James Naughton and Bess Armstrong). Before long, these disparate Seattleites are all flipping through magazines in the waiting room of an avuncular fertility specialist (Bruce Weitz). This obvious hankie-soaker is far better acted than it deserves to be. Grade: B-

## LIVING ON THE EDGE

PBS (Tues., Dec. 12, 9 p.m. ET)

This grim *Frontline* documentary follows the declining fortunes of two blue-collar families, one

FLIPPER Everyone's favorite dolphin jumps back into the swim of things.

HALLMARK

RON PHILLIPS/SANUEL GOLDWIN TELEVISION

Scrapbook

cus ahead of Louisiana, to late January. And then
Gramm will spend the whole month of January in isola-
tionist Iowa beating up Dole for supporting Clinton's
Bosnia intervention.

STANDARD MAILBAG

Would the anonymous seminarian who keeps offer-
ing us multi-crayola'ed screeds on the outside of
his envelope (the latest of which reads "Watch out!...
POWER SEEKERS... Pride.....The Self Righteous-
ness of the Right....Satan Begone!") please include a
return address on your next correspondence? Your
restraining order's ready.

DON'T BE LIKE HENRY

Here's something Henry Kissinger is more upset
over than last week's cover of THE WEEKLY STAN-
DARD: a new TV movie about his negotiations with the
North Vietnamese in 1972. *Kissinger and Nixon*, which
airs Sunday, December 10, on TNT, offers a rare depic-
tion of the then-national security adviser losing sight of
the interests of the South Vietnamese as he grows more
insistent on making a deal with Le Duc Tho. The
movie, a sophisticated piece of political theater, has out-

raged Kissinger; in a letter to *TV Guide*, he
decries the movie's portrayal of "a reptilian
Kissinger [conning] a boozing, anti-Semitic
Nixon into peace talks with Hanoi."
Kissinger has a point about Beau Bridges's
irresponsible portrayal of Nixon; the depic-
tion of him here is false and repugnant. But
writer Lionel Chetwynd does Kissinger full
justice as a brilliant negotiator, player, and
thinker concerned about the loss of American
lives—as well as demonstrating his well-doc-
umented ability to manipulate the press and
take his negotiations farther than his boss
wanted. "The film brazenly reverses history,"
Kissinger writes. No, it doesn't. Chetwynd is
careful to avoid the charge that Kissinger was
seeking a "decent interval" before the North
Vietnamese would sweep in and subsume the
South. He just portrays the Paris Peace
Accords as a disaster, and they were.

THE READING LIST

As some American soldiers ready for war, here are a
few great works about the ambiguities of being a
soldier:

*The Iliad*, by Homer. The founding document of Western literature features what is still its most subtle depiction of false manhood: the supposedly brave and noble Achilles, who spends much of the war in his tent, sulking. Just because a man looks the part of a hero, and has the equipment to prove it, doesn't mean he is one.

*Henry V*, by William Shakespeare. Though the English win a great war against France, rallied by their king's call to arms for England and St. George, Shakespeare begins the play by making sure we understand the war is an unnecessary act of barbarism, foisted upon the king by greedy churchmen eager to expand their tax base.

*War and Peace*, by Leo Tolstoy. "Hurrah!" shouts young Petya, whose life we have followed over the course of a thousand preceding pages, as he enters the battlefield for the first time—and is instantly shot and killed.

*Duck Soup*, by the Marx Brothers. Do "Freedonia"
and "Sylvania" remind you of, say, "Serbia" and
"Bosnia"?

DECEMBER 11, 1995

THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 3

Letters to the Editor

In Defense of Henry Kissinger

I was greatly shocked at the portrayal of Dr. Henry Kissinger as a devious man ready to sell out the South Vietnamese to the Communist North Vietnamese in a Jan. 23 Letter to the Editor by Stephen Young.

At that time I was the U.S. military attache in Paris, having recently come from service in Vietnam. I was with Dr. Kissinger when he made the first contact with the North Vietnamese in Paris. I subsequently smuggled Dr. Kissinger into Paris 15 times to meet with the North Vietnamese. I myself met with them some 50 times at his instruction over two years.

From all of my conversations with Dr. Kissinger and from all of the instructions I received from him during that period, it was clear to me that he was seeking an honorable solution that would guarantee the continued existence of a free and independent South Vietnam. Many times he said to me, "We must find an honorable solution before the Congress gives the farm away." Eventually Congress did do that when it refused further aid to South Vietnam. Then the South Vietnamese army that had held An Loc for 72 days, despite 10,000 incoming rounds of artillery a day, collapsed. (No U.S. troops have ever been subjected to that kind of bombardment in any war we have fought.)

One day during the secret talks in Paris one of the North Vietnamese negotiators said, "I don't know why we are negotiating anything with you. I have just spent five hours with Senator McGovern. Your political opposition will force you to give us what we want." Dr. Kissinger replied sharply: "You are the most repressive and the most tyrannical nation on the face of this planet. You know nothing about an opposition, because you have always brutally crushed any that raised its head in your own country. Leave the discussion of an opposition to us who tolerate one. You know nothing about this matter."

The North Vietnamese giggled with embarrassment and never made any similar reference again.

At no time did I ever have any sign that Dr. Kissinger was preparing to sell out President Thieu or South Vietnam. If I had I would have resigned and retired from the Army.

I am outraged by this attempt to portray Dr. Kissinger as a devious defeatist.

VERNON A. WALTERS
Ambassador

Lt. General, U.S. Army (Ret.)
Palm Beach, Fla.

I am disturbed by Mr. Young's polemic against Dr. Kissinger. As John Paul Vann's successor in Military Region III in 1969 and 1970 and later as deputy chief of mission under Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in 1972-1973, I was deeply involved in U.S./Vietnamese relations during the period to which Mr. Young alludes. I worked closely with Dr. Kissinger and Gen. Haig during their frequent visits and was privy to—indeed drafted some of—the "secret correspondence" between Ambassador Bunker and the White House.

Relations between Dr. Kissinger and Bunker were close and friendly; I never heard Bunker say that he had been lured by Dr. Kissinger into misleading Thieu regarding the very important issue of U.S. policy on the withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam. All of us in Saigon, including the South Vietnamese leadership, knew that leaving the issue of the North Vietnamese presence to the Indo-Chinese countries meant that South Vietnam would have to cope with dangerous North Vietnamese "leopard spots"; but we Americans agreed with the pungent statement of either Bunker or Kissinger that one could not do with a pencil what we had failed to do with more than a million armed men.

It is very misleading for Mr. Young to state that Dr. Kissinger did not believe in "Nixon's policy of Vietnamization." None of us in Saigon—Bunker, Abrams, Weyand or I ever saw any sign of that, and we agreed with the White House that this policy was rational, moral and appropriate and did our damnedest to make it work.

It is absurd to affirm that it was Dr. Kissinger's deviousness that brought about the "betrayal of South Vietnam." It was North Vietnamese non-compliance with the Paris Agreement and the refusal of the U.S. Congress to permit retaliatory action or to provide the promised support that led to the defeat of our ally.

CHARLES S. WHITEHOUSE

Marshall, Va.

[LCS]

WSJ 2/5/96

* * *

01/25/96 THU 12:13 FAX 202 887 5222

NIXON CENTER

002

A FORUM FOR
AMERICAN INTERESTS

January 25, 1996

The Editor
Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

To the editor:

As a participant in the U.S. negotiations on Vietnam during the Nixon Administration, I am completely befuddled by the version of events in Stephen B. Young's letter published January 23.

In particular, the idea that the Nixon-Kissinger policy on Vietnam over four years was foisted on an absent-minded President by his devious national security advisor is one of the wackier ideas in recent circulation -- even more cartoonish a version of history than the Turner Television broadcast that Mr. Young was commenting upon. Nixon's reputation does not gain by having defenders like this.

Every negotiating trip by Kissinger to Paris followed the same procedure -- intensive private conversations with the President beforehand in the Oval Office and by phone; strategy memoranda submitted to the President, which came back peppered with detailed Nixon marginal comments and instructions; detailed reports to the President afterwards. This procedure was most emphatically followed in the case of the May 31, 1971, Paris meeting that Mr. Young is so exercised about.

On the issue of whether North Vietnamese troops could remain in the South, U.S. policy evolved in a manner that is no secret now and was not a secret to the South Vietnamese. Nixon formally proposed a ceasefire-in-place in a televised speech of October 7, 1970 -- with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu's concurrence. A more elaborated U.S. proposal was presented to the North Vietnamese in the secret talks on May 31, 1971, including a ceasefire-in-place, U.S. withdrawal, and return of prisoners, leaving the political issues to be negotiated subsequently by the North and South Vietnamese. Amb. Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon, who knew all the details, briefed Thieu in general terms (and correctly) that it was along the lines of the October 7, 1970, proposal. On January 25, 1972, President Nixon made the May 31

NIXON CENTER FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM

1620 EYE STREET, N.W., SUITE 900 ★ WASHINGTON, D.C. 20006
(202) 887-1000 ★ (202) 887-5222 FAX

HONORARY CHAIRMAN
WALTER H. ANNENBERG

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

FOUNDING CHAIRMAN
GEORGE L. ARGYROS

VICE CHAIRS
TRICIA NIXON COX
JULIE NIXON EISENHOWER

DWAYNE O. ANDREAS
ROBERT F. ELLSWORTH
MAURICE R. GREENBERG
HENRY A. KISSINGER
EUGENE K. LAWSON
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN
C. WILLIAM MAYNES
JOHN MCCAIN
ANN MCLAUGHLIN
LIONEL H. OLMER
JAMES E. PERRELLA
JAMES R. SCHLESINGER
DIMITRI K. SIMES, EX OFFICIO
ROBERT S. STRAUSS
JOHN H. TAYLOR, SECRETARY

ADVISORY COUNCIL

CHAIRMAN
HENRY A. KISSINGER

JONATHAN AITKEN
GRAHAM ALLISON
ROBERT W. BLACKWILL
EDWARD F. COX
ROBERT W. DEAN
ALTON FRYE
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN
LEE H. HAMILTON
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
JOSEF JOFFE
CHALMERS JOHNSON
NANCY A. LIEBERMAN
ROBERT C. McFARLANE
PETER R. ROSENBLATT
WILLIAM V. ROTH, JR.
BRENT SCOWCROFT

PRESIDENT
DIMITRI K. SIMES

SENIOR STAFF
GEOFFREY KEMP
PETER W. RODMAN
PAUL J. SAUNDERS

JAN-25-1996 12:14

202 887 5222

97%

P.02

01/25/96 THU 12:14 FAX 202 887 5222

NIXON CENTER

2

proposal public in another televised speech, and made a revised offer based on it -- all with Thieu's explicit concurrence.

When in October 1972 Hanoi dropped all its political demands for dismantling the South Vietnamese government, the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese proposals on the table became the basis of the Paris Agreement. Thieu's fundamental unease at that point lay not so much in the terms or the negotiating tactics as in the stark fact that paper proposals for compromise which he had endorsed (which he may well have thought would never be accepted) were about to become reality.

The Paris Agreement of January 1973 essentially froze the status quo on the ground -- a military balance that had been much improved during 1972 by U.S. mining and bombing of North Vietnam and by the South Vietnamese army's performance. The Agreement included a ban on infiltration of arms or personnel to reinforce North Vietnamese troops in the South, as well as a ban on the use of Laotian or Cambodian territory for that purpose. The U.S. calculation was that illegal North Vietnamese resupply in the South after the Paris Agreement could be blocked or deterred by U.S. bombing if necessary, while the U.S. was permitted to continue to arm and train the South Vietnamese. But soon, Watergate and the Democratic Congress removed these instruments from our hands, and the balance of forces then tilted inexorably against the South Vietnamese.

When Mr. Young accosted President Nixon in retirement 20 years later with his mysterious question about "Bunker's two-step approach to ending the war," no wonder he was met by a glassy stare. The reference and the description would have been unrecognizable to any of us.

The final outcome of 1975 was never foreordained -- least of all in the negotiating positions that the U.S. (and South Vietnam) had been putting forward themselves in 1970-72.

Peter W. Rodman
Washington, D.C.

JAN-25-1996 12:14

202 887 5222

974

P.03

JAN-31-1996 10:31

EUSO

Pp. Charles Hill

JAN-31-1996 10:27

96%

TOTAL P.02

P.02

02/07/96 WED 12:34 PAA 202 861 5222

NIAUN CENTER

002

[L]

THE RICHARD NIXON

LIBRARY & BIRTHPLACE

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

CO-CHAIRS

TRICIA NIXON COX

JULIE NIXON EISENHOWER

TREASURER

JACK DROWN

SECRETARY

DONALD L. BENDETTI

ROBERT H. ANPLANALP

CAROLINE L. AHMANSON

JONATHAN AITKEN

DWAYNE O. ANDREAS

WALTER H. ANNENBERG

GEORGE L. ARGYROS

GENE ALTRY

ARNOLD O. BECKMAN

ROLAND E. BIGONGOR

MARGARET MARTIN BROCK

DAVID "WHIT" CROMWELL

FREDERICK B. DENT

BUDDY EBBEN

ROBERT H. FINCH

MAX M. FISHER

PETER M. FLANIGAN

ALBERT H. GORDON

GAVIN S. HERBERT

HUGH HEWITT

DONALD M. KENDALL

KENNETH L. KLACHCIGAN

ROY M. KNAUFT

KATHERINE B. LOKER

DAVID J. MAHONEY

ROBERT L. MEADOR

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JEREMIAH MILBANK

CYNTHIA MILIGAN

DAVID H. MURDOCK

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HUBERT C. PERRY

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RUTH B. SHANNON

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W. GLENTON STONE

RONALD H. WALKER

JOHN C. WHITAKER

RONALD L. ZIEGLER

DIRECTOR

JOHN H. TAYLOR

ASST. SECRETARY-TREASURER

LOE G. GAUNT

February 6, 1996

To the Editor, Washington Post / Los Angeles Times :

In his vicious attack on Henry Kissinger (letters, Feb. 4), Oliver Stone has graphically proved the central assertion made by many critics of his film "Nixon" -- namely, that Stone's purpose was not to enlighten people about the 37th President but instead to spread disinformation about the central events of his public life, especially the war in Vietnam.

The goal of Nixon and Kissinger was to withdraw American forces from Vietnam in a manner that would permit the non-communist government in Saigon to defend itself and to deter Hanoi's persistent aggression. Winning the war by defeating North Vietnam militarily was never the issue. The issue was preserving the freedom of a population in South Vietnam on behalf of which three million young Americans, including Stone, ultimately fought and 58,000 died.

In January 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords were signed, a framework had been created within which these goals could have been achieved. When Saigon fell a little over two years later, it was not because of any deficiencies in the agreement or in the army of South Vietnam. By the spring of 1973 the Watergate crisis had deprived President Nixon of the political authority he would have needed to use air strikes to block Hanoi's violations of the accords. Meanwhile Congress slashed aid to Saigon so brutally that by 1975 it was pathetically outgunned by Soviet-supplied forces in the north. Stone's feverish "beast" metaphors, his unintentionally comic depiction of Richard Nixon, and indeed all the frantic revisionism of surviving elements of the '60s left cannot mask the fact that Saigon fell because the United States, weary after a decade of war, lost interest in keeping its promises.

18001 Yorba Linda Boulevard · Yorba Linda · California USA 92686

Telephone: (714) 993-5075 Fax: (714) 528-0544

FEB-07-1996 12:35

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JAMES H. WEBB, JR.

3 February 1996

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

FEB 05 1996

Having recently been on an extensive overseas trip, I had the pleasure only last
night of reading your piece regarding Oliver Stone's *Nixon*.

Since leaving my post as Secretary of the Navy in 1988, I have pursued twin career
paths: one in film producing and screenwriting, the other as the founder of an
investment company specializing in Southeast Asia with an emphasis on Viet Nam
(where I was wounded twice as a Marine in 1969). It is one of the great ironies of
my life that I am far more respected for my combat service in Viet Nam, even
among communist government officials, than I am in Hollywood.

In 1993 after months of negotiations I arranged Vietnamese government support for filming the screen version of my novel *Fields of Fire* on location where the fighting actually took place, in the An Hoa Basin west and south of Da Nang. The project has all the elements of an incredible and powerful uniqueness: the novel is the most-taught piece of American literature in college courses on the Viet Nam war and is mandatory reading in the U.S. Marine Corps, the setting is incredibly picturesque and redolent with *Schindler's List* memories, the Vietnamese government has pledged full support among its villagers and even its military, the budget is ridiculously spare by current film standards. But Hollywood is ruled lock, stock and barrel by those, like Oliver Stone, who are adamantly and dishonestly re-writing the history of that era to conform with a collective behavior on their part which, now capable of being judged with some distance, was obscene. I have no doubt that if the story were biased toward the Viet Cong it would have been made in a heart beat.

That Americans and others throughout the world now gain their understanding of history from these film makers is as undeniable as it is frightening. Something clearly must be done about it, which is why I switched from novels to film in the first place. But the depth of this dislike of America has truly astounded even a cynic like myself.

In any event, thanks for your very powerful riposte to Stone.

Peter M. Irvine
1032 Page Court
Naperville, IL 60450
(708) 355-6330

FEB 0 2 1996

January 25, 1996

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
River House
435 East 52nd Street
New York, NY 10022

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

I was most impressed with a column or letter of yours printed in the Washington Post I believe on January 24th regarding the movie Nixon I did not see the piece published but G. Gordon Liddy read excerpts on his radio show. You addressed concerns I have had regarding the effect on the public perception of truth and reality by the blending of fact and fiction in the media. Your commentary was extremely perceptive for obvious reasons.

Since I have no way to obtain a copy of the Washington Post I was hoping you could send me a reprint of your comments. In the hope that a reprint is available I have enclosed a stamped self-addressed envelope.

With my thanks,

From: Norman Podhoretz To: Henry Kissinger

Date: 1/31/96 Time: 09:38:31

FAX COVER
PAGE

JAN 3 1 1996

<table><tr><td>To: Henry Kissinger</td><td colspan="3">From: Norman Podhoretz</td></tr><tr><td>Fax Number: 759-0042</td><td colspan="3">Company: Hudson Institute</td></tr><tr><td>Date: 1/31/96</td><td>Time: 9:38:04</td><td colspan="2">For Information Call: 212-861-0286</td></tr><tr><td>Subject:</td><td colspan="3">Fax Number: 212-861-9029</td></tr></table>

Thanks for the copy of Nixon's speech, which does of course bear out your point about the withdrawal of American troops. But the issue raised by Thieu, and by those who have accused you and Nixon of selling him out, concerned the provision allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South. I know that you told Thieu at the time that he had agreed to this as part of every joint American-South Vietnamese proposal for a cease-fire in place since October 1970. I also know that you were relying on attrition. Nevertheless he did balk when push came to shove, and this is what your right-wing critics both then and now (including Lionel Chetwynd, the guy who made the TV movie) focus on. To complicate matters, some of your left-wing critics (e.g., Tad Szulc) use the same argument. Obviously they have no moral or intellectual right whatever to make such a point, but as we both know, these people have no shame and will say anything, no matter how much it contradicts everything else they say, if it happens to suit their purpose at a given moment.

Looking through my book, I am after all unable to find any specific examples other than Curtis LeMay of right-wingers who advocated a more aggressive win-the-war strategy than Nixon was willing to pursue. I do find that Lyndon Johnson constantly complained of such pressures coming at him from the Senate Armed Services Committee, but you and Nancy were right when you told me that during the Nixon administration nothing comparable went on in Congress. On the other hand, I can assure you that the conservative movement was full of people who were against a negotiated settlement and wanted to use whatever means it took (including bombing the dikes, etc.) to win. Probably that was why Bill Buckley turned down your request to mobilize support for you on the Right. Of course in those days the conservative movement was not nearly so strong or influential as it became under Reagan, which is why its position was not especially visible or salient at the time.

Midge and I very much enjoyed seeing you and Nancy the other night.

Cover pages by Delrina

JAN-31-1996 09:34

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„ WIR SIND
AUCH
WATERGATE “

Zwei Jahrzehnte nach Nixons Sturz steht sein Fall nach wie vor
im Rampenlicht. Vier politische Meinungsbildner aus Deutsch-
land ergreifen für CINEMA Partei im Streit um Richard Nixon

Stone den Fall Nixon als Material für
eine klassische Tragödie gewittert ha-
ben. Die Umsetzung ist in ihrer Me-
galomanie faszinierend: Hochmut
und Sturz werden erlebbar und über
drei Stunden lang in all ihren Facet-
ten ausgebreitet. Viele Freunde von
Stone wird die so kräfz zurückgenom-
mene Polemik dieses Werkes überra-
schen, aber sie zeugt auch von einer
Entwicklung des Filmemachers in der
Beherrschung seines Materials. Eine
Rehabilitation Nixons, auf die ameri-
kanische Konservative hoffen, ist der
Film nicht, aber für die erwartete Hin-
richtung besitzt er zu viele Zwischen-
töne. Als Richard Nixon im April
1994 starb, versammelten sich seine
vier Amtsnachfolger an seinem Grab.
Die Nachrufe waren verhalten, oft be-
müht. Ronald Reagan beschrieb Ri-
chard Nixon als „komplizierten und
faszinierenden Menschen“. Und Oli-
ver Stone hätte ihm vermutlich zum
ersten Mal in seinem Leben zuge-
stimmt.
Klaus Dahm

Faszinierende Charakter-
studie des Watergate-
Präsidenten im Aufstieg
und freien Fall

Original: Nixon; USA 1995; 190 Min.; Regie: Oliver Stone; Buch: Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkerson, O. Stone; Kamera: Robert Richardson; Musik: John Williams; Darsteller: Anthony Hopkins (Nixon), Joan Allen (Patricia Nixon), Paul Sorvino (Henry Kissinger), Powers Boothe (A exander Haig), Ed Harris (E. H. Hunt), Bob Hoskins (J. E. Hoover), E. G. Marshall (Mitchell), David Paymer (Ron Ziegler)

**Dr. Klaus von Dohnanyi** Die Film-
industrie der Vereinigten Staaten hat eine bewundernswerte Fähigkeit,
sich der lebendigen Zeitgeschichte anzunehmen. Vermutlich liegt das
auch daran, daß die Bürger der Vereinigten Staaten mehr als andere
Völker wissen: Die Politik, ihre Leidenschaft, ihre Macht und Ohnmacht,
ihre großzügige Grazie und ihre hinterhältige Bosheit – das sind wir alles
selbst. Wir sind nicht nur „Lindenstraße“, wir sind auch „Watergate“.
Nixon war einer der großen Präsidenten des Jahrhunderts. Und er war
auch einer seiner kläglichsten, öffentlichen Figuren. Shakespeares Könige
und Helden, seine großen Herzen und kleinen Geister waren Figuren
seiner Zeit. Warum soll uns das heute nicht möglich sein? Deutschland
traut sich nicht – Amerika macht’s möglich.

Dr. Klaus von Doh
bis 1988 Erster Bün-
meister von Hamb

**Wolf von Lojewski** Es fiel mir oft schwer,
in ihm einen amerikanischen Helden oder Schurken zu sehen. Eher schon
eine Figur aus Shakespeares Königsdramen: genial und charakterlich
höchst zweifelhaft, hin- und hergerissen zwischen Größen- und Verfol-
gungswahn. Seine Chinapolitik hat einer eingefrorenen Weltpolitik neue
Wege geöffnet, innerpolitisch spaltete er die Nation in „die“ und „wir“.
Als er im Watergate-Skandal versank und gehen mußte – Amerikas erster
Präsident, der in Schmach vorzeitig das höchste Amt verließ –, da plagte
ihm auch noch eine schlimme Venen-Entzündung. Und ich erinnere mich
noch an einen Jesuitenpater, der ihn zum Ende hin in ethischen Fragen
beriet. Wir standen auf dem Rasen des Weißen Hauses, und er humpelte
an uns vorbei: ein gebückter Mann, von dem so mancher fürchtete, er
könne notfalls schnell noch einen Krieg anzetteln mit den Russen – nur
um seiner Amtsenthebung zu entgehen. Es war ganz still, und er schaute
seinen Füßen beim Gehen zu. Sie passen ja nur halb, aber es gingen mir
Shakespeares Verse durch den Kopf – Richard III, 1. Akt, 1. Szene: „...die
Hunde fangen zu bellen an, hink' ich vorbei.“ Und doch: Als zehn Jahre
nach dem Skandal Meinungsforscher die Amerikaner fragten, mit wel-
chem ihrer noch lebenden, ehemaligen Präsidenten sie mal persönlich
zusammentreffen wollten, entschied sich eine klare Mehrheit für ihn.

**Manfred Bissinger** Mit „Tricky Dicky“
begann der Niedergang der politischen Kultur in den USA. Richard Nixon
war Machtmensch, Menschenverächter und Meister der inszenierten
Lüge, skrupellos und frei von ethisch-moralischen Gewissensbissen. Da
solche Eigenschaften in Washington (und nicht nur da) inzwischen längst
zum Polit-Repertoire gehören, verblaßt Nixons Monströosität in der
Rückschau. Seine Sünden werden ihm heute also allzu rasch vergeben –
zumindest vergessen sollten wir sie aber nie.

**Dr. Theo Waigel** Der frühere amerikanische
Präsident Richard Nixon wird ungeachtet von der Watergate-Affäre als
einer der großen Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten in die Geschichte
eingehen. Mit einer weitsichtigen Strategie gegenüber der früheren
Sowjetunion und der Volksrepublik China schuf er die Voraussetzungen
für die Beendigung des Vietnamkrieges und die Überwindung des Kalten
Krieges. Nixons fünf Amtsnachfolger haben sich zu seinen Lebzeiten
stets auf die sachkundige Analyse und den weisen Rat des „Elder States-
man“ verlassen können. Als entscheidender Befürworter enger deutsch-
amerikanischer Beziehungen und einer starken NATO hat sich Richard
Nixon bleibende Verdienste um Frieden und Stabilität erworben.

Dr. Theo Waigel,
Parteivorsitzend-
Bundesfinanzmin

79

JACK GROSS

January 31, 1996

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
350 Park Avenue - 26th Floor
New York, NY 10022

FEB 0 5 1996

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

An old friend General Russ Dougherty just sent me your Op-Ed comments on Oliver Stone's Nixon for which I am grateful to him and to you. It was definitive, specific, and clarifying and I read it just as carefully the second time.

When written by one whose knowledge of the subject far exceeds that of the producer, disclaiming corrections are vital. Or else it makes a travesty out of history. This you did superbly. And you were kind not to use the word reprehensible.

While I knew some of the inside people, I met the president only once, except for a brief correspondence. As to humor, I felt he had his own special kind. At a D.C. banquet, I was sitting with Ted Walkowicz (Ford Foundation head) and others just in front of the head table. Prior to the formalities we decided to play liar's poker, often played with some vengeance. Suddenly, a voice from someone leaning on the head table said, Ted, whoever wins, make sure they report to the IRS. It was President Nixon with a wicked grin.

As to the movie itself and because of the producer's fixation in assigning his own version of events, it might warrant a paraphrase, "Let him who is Stone throw the first sin".

I may have another of your political caricatures. If I can find it I'll send it to you.

1919-20 TOWNE HOUSE APARTMENTS • HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA 17102 • (717) 232-5841

THE WOODROW WILSON CENTER

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25 January 1995

JAN 3 1996

JAN 3 1 1996

Dear Henry:

A voice from a far Harvard past -- remember me? I must just congratulate warmly you on your fine piece in the *Washington Post* yesterday on the abominable Stone *Nixon*. I have long shared your view of the great harm to popular understanding of history and politics caused by such opinionated movie makers. Their command of technology and great resources is so much greater than either their commonsense or sense of responsibility. They act like the military of their imagination.

Have you noticed that the editors of *American Historical Review* now have felt the need to have a regular section of (usually acid) reviews of historical movies? Their editors must have become convinced of the need.

Why you were given a cigar is quite clear. The fact that you have never smoked is quite irrelevant to the symbolic truth! Arthur Schlesinger jnr. long ago in the first vol of his history of the New Deal noted, like a tendentious journalist, that at their hand-over meeting Hoover smoked a cigar but FDR a cigarette. Odd how readily this cliche became established that good guys and Democrats smoke cigarettes and Republican Fat Cats smoke cigars. I remember times when every janitor at the door had a cheap wet cigar drooling from his lips.

WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS
1000 JEFFERSON DRIVE, S.W. WASHINGTON, D.C. 20560
SIMRC 022
202-357-2429 TELEX 264729 FAX 202-357-4439

Robert Carl McFarlane

FEB 09 1996

February 7, 1996

Dear Henry,

Warm regards,

THE NEW YORK TIMES

EDITORIALS/LETTERS

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1995

To the Editor:

The "Kissinger and Nixon" docudrama broadcast this week by TNT found me, as a direct participant in those times, riveted to my seat. I had completely forgotten that President Nixon was a lush, nor had I realized what a cad I was or how brilliantly Henry A. Kissinger, then the national security adviser, was undercut by my machinations.

ALEXANDER M. HAIG JR.

Washington, Dec. 13, 1995

## The New York Times
Company

LAURA J. CORWIN, Secretary

RICHARD G. THOMAS, Treasurer