Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (53 page)

Stone responded to the furor surrounding his film. He was willing to give way on most issues. He freely admitted that
JFK
was intended as “entertainment” and that he had taken dramatic license with the facts.
JFK
was not supposed to tell the truth about the assassination; Stone simply wanted to present a “paradigm of possibilities” that would point out the shortcomings of the Warren Commission’s report. He noted where he had fictionalized or created composite characters and agreed that he had made his Garrison “better” than the real person. He was even willing to negotiate his portrayal of Kennedy. Stone was aware of Kennedy’s faults: the pattern of sex and drug use that marked his life, his “stealing the election in’60,” and his penchant for saying “one thing to the public” and doing “another thing behind their backs.” In his defense, Stone correctly maintained that three hours was insufficient time to fully develop Kennedy’s character and that, in any case, there was “a larger issue at stake.”

On the “larger issue,” however, Stone would not budge. He continued to insist that, had Kennedy lived, he would have ended the Vietnam War. Stone firmly believed that Kennedy had been reevaluating Vietnam and the cold war throughout 1963. Citing national security memoranda and statements made by Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Stone claimed that Kennedy was only waiting to be reelected before withdrawing from Southeast Asia. Instead, he was murdered, thus putting “an abrupt end to a period of innocence and great idealism.”

With the publication of Robert Dallek’s favorable biography of John Kennedy in 2003, there was, in fact, much to suggest that Kennedy wanted a way out of Vietnam. Nevertheless, Dallek can reach no firm conclusion, particularly because the president’s advisers were so divided on what to do about Vietnam. Only three weeks before he was killed, Kennedy approved the overthrow of South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, on the grounds that a new government was needed to save South Vietnam from communism. Kennedy’s National Security Memorandum (NSAM) 263, which Stone cites, did call for the withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. troops, but according to Dallek this was not meant to give notice to Diem that the United States was displeased with his corrupt regime. Kennedy was apparently ambivalent about what to do on Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson’s NSAM 273 Stone claimed to be a radical departure from Kennedy’s position. The jury is still out on whether President Kennedy would have moved out of Vietnam after the 1964 election, as a considerable number of his inner circle of advisers claimed he planned to do.

If Stone has been flexible on other issues, why does he remain so steadfast in his assertion that Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam War? To do otherwise would be to undermine all that he has done in the last twenty years. In his films, he has constructed an explanation for an unexplainable war, reducing a complex swirl of ideology and global politics to a simple cause and effect relationship. Further, his theory supports his contention that the war had “no moral purpose.” In JFK, Vietnam resulted from the cowardly murder by a group of vicious, power-hungry warmongers of a benevolent king who was trying to bring peace to the world. A more despicable beginning could hardly be imagined, tainting the war with evil before it even began in earnest. Finally, placing Kennedy’s death within the context of Vietnam gives Stone and other veterans a hero in a war without acknowledged heroes. Kennedy represents the only hope that America could escape from the clutches of “the Beast” that has held the reins of power since 1963. If Kennedy did not offer hope in the 1960s, what chance is there that any future leader would be inclined to give power back to the people?

In showing how a corrupted American society created Vietnam, Stone returned to the theme of
Born on the Fourth of July
. In earlier films, he showed how a culture of violence, manifested in both public and private institutions, caused one young man to go to war.
JFK
maintains the same image of America but makes a quantum leap in interpretation. Instead of exploring the effects of this culture on one person, he demonstrates how one manifestation of violence affected the course of the entire nation. Whereas Chris Taylor and Ron Kovic may have been naive individuals with no direct relation to viewers, the events in
JFK
, with Vietnam as its centerpiece, implicate all Americans who remain complacent and refuse to challenge the system.

Having, for the first time, explored the origins of the Vietnam War and situated it within a particular view of how American history operates, Stone was prepared to show how the war ended. Although it is impossible to say what he will do in the future, it may be that
Nixon
will mark Stone’s final cinematic statement on the war. Although
Nixon
lacks some of the stridency of his earlier films, it reinforces the themes posited by Stone’s other Vietnam War films. Instead of merely discussing the end of the war, he continues his bold explorations of the conflict’s impact on both American and global history.

Even while he was president, Richard Nixon had intrigued Stone. Stone saw his father in the blunt and withdrawn executive, and the shame of Watergate helped turn Stone into a critic of America. Nixon, along with Kennedy, “shaped the era in which [he] grew up,” and Stone eagerly plunged into the task of bringing the story of “the dominant figure in the latter part of this century” to the screen. Again, as with
JFK
, he engaged in the basic research required of any historian. He read “everything there was” on the ex-president and spoke with many of the people who would be portrayed on-screen. Stone also listened to some of Nixon’s presidential tapes that had not yet been released to the public. Still smarting from critics’ accusations that he had created characters and evidence for
JFK
, Stone released an advance copy of the script for Nixon, complete with hundreds of footnotes listing books, interviews, tapes, and oral histories.

At over three hours,
Nixon
is a lengthy yet compelling portrait of a complex politician. Stone’s Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) is a master of detail, yet prone to confusion; a caring yet cold person; a man with a bold vision of the future who is haunted by the past. Nixon’s greatest demon is the memory of JFK. Nixon resents Kennedy as only a hardscrabble, self-made man can resent a person who has been handed everything. At the same time, he maintains that he and the man from Massachusetts were like “brothers.” Not content to merely expose this contradiction, Stone digs deep to explore the roots of Nixon’s guilt, suggesting that he was indirectly responsible for Kennedy’s death. Nixon, he says, was in charge of a program called “Track Two,” a covert program to assassinate Fidel Castro, and may also have been involved in the Bay of Pigs in some way. By participating in this effort, Nixon unwittingly helped create the culture of violence that, as detailed in
JFK
, led to Kennedy’s death and, as seen in
Born on the Fourth of July
, inspired Ron Kovic and others to go to war.

Although there is no evidence that Nixon knew of the plot to kill Kennedy, Stone shows him near the scene of the crime and explicitly links Kennedy’s death to the Vietnam War. In the film, we see Nixon in Dallas in November 1963, meeting with a group of far-right businessmen. As Nixon uncomfortably banters with high-class prostitutes, Jones and others urge Nixon to run for president in 1964. The wealthy businessmen are displeased with how Kennedy is handling Vietnam and promise Nixon “a shit pot” of money and a victory in the South in exchange for a more militant foreign policy. Nixon demurs, claiming that Kennedy is unbeatable. But what if, one of the extremists asks, Kennedy does not run in 1964? Nixon is unnerved by the implications of this statement and beats a hasty retreat. Although he was clearly not responsible for Kennedy’s death, Nixon’s association with the forces that killed the president haunted him. Stone beautifully captures this mood by drenching the White House in a stormy, almost gothic atmosphere. In a very real sense,
Nixon
assumed the quality of a horror film.

Besides deepening his explanation of the causes of the war, Stone continues to expand his vision of how the war affected the world.
JFK
treats Vietnam as an event of national importance.
Nixon
, however, goes beyond this, and shows how the war played a critical role in the development of the global cold war. At times, Nixon seems to prosecute the war solely to salve his own bruised masculinity; he refuses to be pushed around by a smaller country. But, for the first time, we also see how Vietnam was but one aspect of a larger scene; Nixon refuses to back down in the face of a communist alliance. When he is in control of events, Nixon realizes that he has to continue to vigorously prosecute the war in order to gain concessions from the Soviets and the Chinese. He is successful in this endeavor. Stone shows Nixon’s success in his meetings with Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev. But, he argues, simply demonstrating Vietnam’s importance in international politics does not make it a worthwhile war. Instead, Vietnam is reduced to a mere pawn in a global game. In January 1968, Private Stone’s platoon acted as human bait to draw out a larger Vietnamese force. Other Vietnam veterans served the same purpose, only their job was to lure the world’s major communist countries into negotiations with the United States. In Stone’s view, the war was a chess game with one king and many pawns.

Finally, the Vietnam War comes to a close. It does not, however, reach either a glorious end or a satisfying resolution. After learning that the North Vietnamese are prepared to sign a treaty, an exhilarated Nixon calls a press conference to announce the conclusion of a successful war. He believes that he has finally negotiated a “peace with honor” and is prepared to join the country in celebration. But the press conference quickly turns hostile. One reporter challenges the president, claiming that the last several years of the war accomplished nothing, that the terms Nixon got were little different from those offered in 1968. As the president stammers, reporters bombard him with questions. Much to his surprise, they are less interested in the end of the war than in the breaking Watergate scandal. Vietnam has become a footnote in the history of the cold war. For Nixon and America, the war did not end so much as just fade away. There were no parades, no celebrations, and, for Stone and others, no closure. This stands as the final insult for a generation of soldiers and forced at least one to begin writing about his experiences. The lack of closure in 1973 led Stone to follow a twentyyear-long path to find redemption. In ending the war on-screen, Stone has taken us to the beginning of his own life as a filmmaker.

In a 1991
Rolling Stone
interview, journalist David Breskin asked Oliver Stone if he felt like a great artist. “I never doubted it, from day one,” Stone replied. “When I was eighteen, I just felt like I had a call... And living up to that call has been the hardest part.” From the first, Vietnam was an integral part of that calling. As a nineteen year old, he began a long, sprawling manuscript entitled “A Child’s Night Dream.” As a twenty-three-year-old film student at NYU, his first picture was entitled
Last Year in Vietnam
. At the age of forty, his first great commercial success as a director was
Platoon
. The circle closed eleven years later when
A Child’s Night Dream
, heavily edited and slimmed down, was published by St. Martin’s Press. The link between the nineteenyear-old would-be Hemingway and the fifty-one-year-old established artist was a passion for America’s involvement in Vietnam: why we went, how we fought, what were the results and the implications.

In the process of becoming an artist, Stone also became the most successful and controversial historian of the war. For him, the past had an irresistible pattern, one woven with lost opportunities, conspiracies, fallen heroes, personal biographies, and impersonal forces. “I’m looking for a very difficult pattern in our history,” he said. “What I see in 1963, with Kennedy’s murder at high noon in Dallas, to 1974, with Nixon’s removal, is a pattern.” It is a pattern of promise and betrayal, vision and death, from John and Robert Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Richard Nixon. “These four men came from different political perspectives, but they were pushing the envelope, trying to lead America to new levels. We posit that, in some way, they pissed off what we call ‘the Beast,’ the Beast being a force (or forces) greater than the presidency.”

Stone’s burden is to be history’s witness. For him, the past is a very real, painful, and unresolved phenomenon. Like William Faulkner, he believes that “the past is never dead.” In fact, “it’s not even past.” But Stone’s view of history contains inherent problems. It indicts an entire culture but suggests that certain members of that culture can make a lasting difference. For example, in
Born on the Fourth of July
, Stone contends that a martial culture packed Ron Kovic off to Vietnam, but in
JFK
he argues that Kennedy would have ended the war and that his promise died with him. On a higher level, Stone realizes that the duty of the historian is to keep the past alive. It is the tension between his desire to teach and entertain and his desire to be taken seriously as an arbiter of the past that makes Stone such a controversial figure. Always reluctant to accept the work of popular historians (which Stone certainly is), academics have resisted embracing his vision of the past. And yet, his Vietnam films seem to have touched a nerve in the American public. To his credit, as his fame has grown, he has consistently adopted more sophisticated methods of exploring the past. Beginning in 1986 with an insulated, autobiographical view of history, Stone has expanded his analysis to incorporate the broader themes and movements that lay behind his own experience in Vietnam. In doing this, he uses the methods of a professional historian, going so far as to issue footnotes to accompany his work. Still, Stone remains true to his vision above all else; the details must be subservient to the big picture, the facts must support the conclusion. As Stone wrote, “Elie Wiesel reminds us that survivors are all charged with a sacred mission: to serve as witnesses and teachers of what they suffered, thereby preventing such catastrophes from occurring again.” It is this goal, this quest for relevance, that drives Oliver Stone’s pursuit of the past, separates his work from that of academic historians, and forces Americans to decide which is more important: a truthful rendition of the facts, or facts rendered in such a way as to illustrate the truth.