ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9602020052
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
MUCH TO my spouse's deep disgust, trying to get me to a movie is something like trying to herd cats. It requires the sort of submission to organization at which I bristle.
Read a book, watch a videotape, play mah-jongg on the computer - all those and 1,001 other earthly delights can be done at home, more or less at one's own speed and on one's own terms.
But going to a movie means being at an appointed place at an appointed hour. And unless you're by yourself and willing to forget how much you paid for admission, once you enter the theater you're there for the duration - and you don't know, going in, whether it'll be worth the effort or not.
Even good popcorn, which to my knowledge is locally available only at the Grandin, has to work hard to offset the misery of a mediocre flick.
But not long ago, lured during the Great Near-Blizzard's opening hours by the prospect of travel in a recently retired executive editor's four-wheel-drive vehicle, I was persuaded to go see "Nixon," Oliver Stone's biosaga of the nation's 37th president and most famous unindicted co-conspirator.
I went partly to revisit an old loathing, partly to see how badly Stone would get it wrong.
They said the movie would be long, and it was. I figure 30 minutes could have been cut, minimum, and the movie would have been better; an hour, minimum, without hurting anything.
First thing I'd do, I'd get rid of those corny time-lapse scenes of clouds skittering across the sky. Next, I'd cut the manufactured Nixon-childhood scenes. Hollywood-style psychoanalysis drives me bananas.
All in all, though, the critics seemed to like "Nixon" better than they had expected to, and I don't take issue with the general judgment.
Though much of the film is obviously speculative, critics have noted that the number of gross misrepresentations of what is known about Nixon's life is limited - when compared, anyway, to Stone's "JFK," a movie I consciously avoided after reading about its impossible confusion of fact and conspiracy fantasy.
Moreover, Stone and actor Anthony Hopkins managed to capture something of the complexity of Nixon. While that disappointed my eager expectation of an easy-to-hate cardboard Nixon, it made for a more interesting and more honest movie.
Indeed, as Hendrik Hertzberg noted recently in The New Yorker, Stone's Nixon - a conflicted man with a tattered moral core, yes, but also a perceptive politician and far from the reflexive right-winger of myth - is a lot closer to the truth than the Newt Gingrich-ian notion that America's problems today all go back to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
"Johnson and the Democrats," Hertzberg quotes Mr. Speaker, from a speech at the Western States Republican Leadership Conference, "... committed two great acts of hubris. One was that they tried to win in Vietnam without using all of our military power, and the other was that they tried to change America by centralizing power in Washington. Both failed. It was clear by 1968 that unless you were prepared to use a massive amount of military power we were not going to drive out the North Vietnamese, ... and it was clear by 1968 to most Americans that the Great Society wouldn't work."
But much, maybe most, of what's generally regarded today as the Great Society's legacy stems not from Johnson but from his successor, Republican Nixon.
Vietnam? U.S. involvement lasted five more years after Nixon's election in '68, at a cost of almost as many American dead (28,000) as under Johnson (30,000).
On the domestic front, Nixon initiatives include the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; affirmative action as a centerpiece of civil rights; the Clean Air Act of 1970; the indexing of Social Security benefits to cost-of-living rises; expansion of the Food Stamp program; federal support for the arts and the humanities; and mandatory wage and price controls.
Nixon, Hertzberg also notes, proposed but did not win a health plan based on employer mandates, akin to the ill-fated Clinton administration plan in 1994, and a Family Assistance Plan that would have tripled the number of welfare recipients.
There's nothing new, of course, about law-office history, of which partisan political history is a subspecies. The deliberately manipulative, highly selective and contextually distorted use of historical data to advance a legal case or political cause is commonplace.
Nor, within certain broad boundaries, is there anything particularly wrong with it - so long as it is understood for what it is. America's legal and political systems are set up to be adversarial: The other side offers its manipulative, selective and distorted data, and from the clash presumably emerges some rough degree of justice and truth.
Confusion arises, however, when law-office history masquerades as history by professional historians. Gingrich's college-professor pretensions might fool some people into forgetting that history in the service of a political agenda is best taken, like movie-theater popcorn, with a few grains of salt.
LENGTH: Medium: 92 linesby CNB