American Presidents and Oliver Stone: Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush between History and Cinema

By Carl Freedman

Perhaps no current filmmaker has made more provocative films about American history than Oliver Stone. In this book, Carl Freedman gives a detailed and nuanced account of the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush as fictionalized in Stone’s biographical films JFK, Nixon and W.

Offering detailed historical perspectives alongside careful aesthetic criticism, Freedman explores how Stone uses melodrama, tragedy and farce to transform politics into national mythology. Synthesizing film criticism with political and historical analysis, the book transcends the limitations of formalism and empiricism, reflecting on both Stone’s achievements as a filmmaker and American politics of the past sixty years. 

Oliver Stone’s importance among filmmakers as the major chronicler of recent US history is the starting point for the analysis of his three ‘presidential’ films: JFK, Nixon and W. While not claiming equal artistic merit for Stone’s films, Freedman makes some comparison with Shakespeare’s history plays and draws on T.S. Eliot’s notion of ‘essential history’ to transcend the barren dichotomy of formalism versus empiricism – that is treating historical fiction as either only pure fiction, with nothing to say about real history, or judging it as non-fiction by the extent to which it adheres to superficial historical detail. Instead the focus is on the capacity of Stone’s films to illuminate the structural workings of history, contemporary and general.

Freedman is thoroughly familiar with his subject, and his meticulous attention to historical accuracy and critical attention to the films is impeccable. This book has a powerfully original focus and makes a significant contribution to the field through offering these detailed historical perspectives alongside much more careful aesthetic criticism of the films. It has the potential to become not only a great source on its subject, but a model of how to approach historical fiction in general.

This is an academic study but is written in such an accessible style that it will have genuine appeal to the general reader – to anyone with an interest in cinema, politics and recent history. Wide-ranging, accessible and highly original, American Presidents combines erudition and complex analysis with jargon-free writing and is sure to engage anyone interested in the intersection of American politics and cinema.

The academic readership will be among humanities scholars and students of film, popular culture, media, politics, political history and modern history. It will be highly relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying film or modern American history and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Nov 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789382648

Carl Freedman

Carl Freedman is the William A. Read professor of English literature at Louisiana State University and the author of many books and essays. His most recent volume is American Presidents and Oliver Stone: Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush Between History and Cinema (Intellect, 2020). Contact: Department of English, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70808, USA.

Book preview

American Presidents and Oliver Stone

American Presidents and Oliver Stone

Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush between History and Cinema

Carl Freedman

First published in the UK in 2020 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2020 Carl Freedman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, orotherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copy editor: MPS Technologies

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Production manager: Emma Berrill

Typesetting: Newgen

Print ISBN 978-1-78938-262-4

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-263-1

ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-264-8

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

To find out about all our publications, please visit

www.intellectbooks.com.

There, you can subscribe to our e-newsletter,

browse or download our current catalogue,

and buy any titles that are in print.

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

An die Nachgeborenen—

Brandon, Finnegan, Leila, Martin, Rachel, Rosa, Simon, and Stephen—

And, as always and forever,

To Annette—

And to the memory of my father, Leon Freedman (1921–2013), with whom, had it been possible, I would have discussed every page

. . .and yet I often think it odd that it [history] should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.

—Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Contents

Introduction

I. KENNEDY: ICON

To Assassinate a Movie

JFK: American Melbourne

Precursor-Texts: Rashomon and Citizen Kane

JFK: Conspiracy

JFK: Father-Leader

JFK: Son-Avenger

II. NIXON: TRAGIC HERO-VILLAIN

From Kennedy to Nixon

From Melodrama to Tragedy

From JFK to Nixon

Nixon: Personal Tragedy

Nixon: National Tragedy

Nixon: American Tragedy

Conclusion

III. BUSH: (UN)FORTUNATE SON

From Tragedy to Farce

W.: The Man

W.: The War

Finale

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

This volume attempts to construct a critical genre through the synthesis of two genres in which I have worked in the past: historical and political analysis, on the one hand, and, on the other, film studies. My aim is to transcend the limitations of both formalism and empiricism while, at the same time, making use of the genuine insights that both approaches have to offer. Before briefly outlining the theoretical infrastructure of this project, I will say a few words about the artist whose work provides the project’s occasion.

No current filmmaker—probably no filmmaker of any era—has displayed a greater interest in American history than Oliver Stone. To be sure, not all his movies are historically oriented. For example, U-Turn (1997), a savage, darkly comedic, and much underrated neo-noir crime thriller, is set in an only vaguely contemporary present rather than at any particularly exact time. Then too, Natural Born Killers (1994) and Any Given Sunday (1999) are historical only in a fairly general way, as they examine the corruptions of the mass media and of big-time professional sports, respectively, during the final decade of the twentieth century. But most of Stone’s best and most acclaimed films take very specific historical events and personalities for their raw material—and usually events involving Stone’s own country.¹ Salvador (1986), Stone’s first important film (as a director), engages US involvement in El Salvador during the period of civil war, assassinations, and right-wing death squads. His trilogy of films about the Vietnam War—Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven & Earth (1993)—is rivaled, perhaps, only by Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) as providing the closest we have to a definitive cinematic treatment of the first war that America lost. His two films about Wall Street—Wall Street (1987) and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)—perform the uncommon feat of finding human drama among the stratospheric machinations of US-based finance capital.²

In the following pages, I will examine three of Stone’s other historical films, namely, those that focus on the individual personalities of three US presidents: JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), and W. (2008). JFK and Nixon are Stone’s longest and most ambitious films, and between them, in their high seriousness, offer a generally (though not totally) pessimistic account of America from the 1960s to the early 1970s. W., which deals with the first decade of the new century, is much slighter and considerably lighter in tone, forming a gloomily comic—indeed, almost grotesque—sequel to the earlier downbeat duology.

It is worth noting that, in addition to the fiction films mentioned above, Stone has also expressed his interest in history through a number of nonfictional documentaries. The most important of these is the twelve-part television series, The Untold History of the United States (2012–2013), which ought to be considered along with the exactly contemporary book of the same title—a lengthy and heavily footnoted volume that Stone co-authored with the professional historian Peter Kuznick. Hyperbole is a figure that Stone not infrequently uses, and the title of the book and the series is indeed somewhat hyperbolic. Neither the series nor the volume covers the whole history of the country; the subject is rather the United States during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on foreign and military policy. Nor do Stone and Kuznick relate a genuinely untold story. On the contrary, what they offer is mainly a vast and skillful summary of work by many well-known historians and journalists: primarily, scholars of what was once called the revisionist school, but who are more usefully described simply as students of history who write about the United States in the commonsense way that powerful nations other than the United States are nearly always written about—that is, as a country that has normally used its power to promote and defend, largely through violence and fraud, what the dominant forces of the country have perceived to be the nation’s socio-economic and political interests. The story is untold only in the sense that it varies from the more-or-less official story typically promulgated by most politicians and enshrined in school textbooks. Intrinsically useful for the student, especially the beginning student, of American history, the series and the book are useful for the viewer of Stone’s films in providing a capacious account of Stone’s view of his country’s past, one written in the cold prose of historiography, so to speak, rather than in the poetry of cinema.

There are two antithetical ways that Stone’s historical films have often been considered—both of which this book rejects. On the one hand, many commentators—especially historians and journalists with no particular knowledge of or interest in film as an art form—have frequently approached Stone’s fiction films as though they were nonfictional works of history, and have attempted to evaluate them for factual accuracy. Sometimes such evaluations have been laudatory. For instance, many of those familiar with the day-to-day inner workings of financial trading have praised Wall Street for its sure knowledge of the details of Wall Street life, even when they have sometimes objected to the basically condemnatory attitude that the film takes to the lifeworld it depicts. Likewise, many of Stone’s fellow Vietnam combat veterans have been impressed by the realism of Platoon. More often, though, the attitude of those who have tried to grade Stone’s films as though they were term papers submitted by a pupil in a history class has been harsh. The most extreme example here is JFK, which, as we shall see, was subjected, upon its release—and, indeed, even before its release—to a campaign of vituperation unequalled by the reception of any other movie in Hollywood history. Of the huge number of attacks claiming that Stone had gotten the facts of the Kennedy assassination wrong, virtually none paid even the slightest attention to the plain fact that JFK is a work of cinematic art.

The opposite of this crudely fact-oriented response to Stone’s films is to take refuge in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous maxim, It’s only a movie—an approach that, though never adopted by Stone himself, has sometimes served as a defense mounted by others against objections to the films’ supposed failures of accuracy. This approach stresses that a movie is not a work of historical scholarship, and is therefore not to be judged by the same standards. JFK is a tautly constructed thriller, brilliantly acted and filmed at a virtually unsurpassed level of technical sophistication—that, it has been argued, is how it ought be judged, rather than on the basis of whether or not it succeeds in solving the many real-life mysteries of Dealey Plaza.

The formalism of this approach has the advantage of treating cinema as cinema rather than as something else, and of directing our attention to the aesthetic richness and complexity of Stone’s work. At the same time, and like all formalism, it runs the risk of trivializing the objects of its consideration. The intentionality of JFK and Nixon and W.—which is not quite the same thing as the subjective intentions of Oliver Stone as an individual, though it is certainly not unrelated to them—is inseparable from the actual personalities, events, patterns, and issues of modern US history. Though it is certainly possible to enjoy these films simply as entertainments and to subject them to a merely immanent formal criticism, to do so is to ignore a great deal of what they have to offer. For all its aesthetic and epistemological naïveté, the vulgar historicism that would judge Stone’s work according to a crudely empirical standard does at least grasp that his movies invite us to grapple with issues different from and in the long run vastly weightier than casting and camera angles.

Stone, of course, is by no means the first artist to mine the history of his country for raw material that is transmuted into works of fiction. Tolstoy and Sir Walter Scott are among his more illustrious predecessors in this regard, but the most illustrious of them all—and, I believe, the one who has had the greatest influence on Stone himself—is surely Shakespeare. Nearly a third of the plays in the Shakespeare oeuvre are those generally designated histories, and, as Jan Kott has pointed out more convincingly, perhaps, than any other critic,³ the essentially political concerns of the histories animate many of the tragedies as well. Like Stone, Shakespeare has sometimes been judged on the empirical accuracy of his work and found wanting. Consider Richard III, one of the most popular of the histories and the earliest Shakespeare play still widely performed and read (in the modern era, the titular role has been played by Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Ian McKellan, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, and many other major actors). There is actually an entire organization (the Richard III Society, whose website may be found at http://www.richardiii.net/index.php) that is largely devoted to arguing that Richard of Gloucester was really quite a good monarch, and not at all the monstrously evil Machiavellian schemer portrayed by Shakespeare.

Yet, even if all the claims of Richard’s admirers were assumed, for the sake of argument, to be valid, no rational Shakespeare critic could suppose that that disposes of the interest of the play. Shakespeare, as T. S. Eliot wrote, "acquired more essential history from Plutarch [and, he might have added, from Holinshed, Shakespeare’s chief source for English and Scottish history] than most men could from the whole British Museum" (emphasis added).⁴ The proof of Eliot’s assertion is to be found in the plays themselves. We know that Shakespeare acquired a vast amount of essential history because the plays convey a vast amount. Though Eliot does not explicitly define what he means by essential history, the point seems to derive from Eliot’s favorite philosopher. In the famous ninth chapter of the Poetics, Aristotle proclaims poetry (in the sense of all imaginative or fictional discourse) to be more philosophical than history (by which Aristotle evidently means the merely factual chronicle): The true difference is that one [history] relates what has happened, the other [poetry] what may happen.⁵ For our purposes, we may understand essential history to mean the most fundamental and general patterns of the historical process—those that determine what may happen, as Aristotle says—as they are manifest in a particular time and place but also, possibly, in others. Great work does not transcend its historical moment (in the sense of leaving it behind) but penetrates so deeply into it as to be of enduring interest and value. The discrete facts of the chronicler or the empiricist are not, of course, wholly irrelevant to essential history, but neither can the latter be reduced to the factually accurate chronicle or judged by its standards. Richard III is a penetrating study of fifteenth-century English political history—and, by extension, of much other history too—regardless of the play’s strict factual reliability. Nothing that the enthusiasts of the Richard III Society say can degrade the value of Richard III: just as nothing proposed by the admirers of the Warren Report or the enemies of Jim Garrison can nullify the interest of JFK.

Stone’s importance as an artist is, obviously, not equal to Shakespeare’s. But sometimes smaller things can profitably be compared to greater ones. Films like JFK, Nixon, and W. are comparable to plays like Richard III, Richard II, Henry V, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth in the sense that they are all works of art that use aesthetic techniques to consider problems of history and, more specifically, problems of leadership and governance. No sane viewer or reader would approach Shakespeare as a historian rather than as a poet and playwright. But it is only by appreciating him as a poet and playwright that we can see how his work offers an understanding of what Eliot called essential history that is more wide-ranging and profound than that of perhaps any other writer whom we know, professional historians included. Likewise, we need to approach Stone as a filmmaker—indeed, as a dramatist, as he has more than once described himself—in order to grasp how and to what degree his films can illuminate issues of modern American history (and perhaps of other history too). The matter may be put like this. When Richard III first appeared on the stage, the civil wars of fifteenth-century England were a fresh, and deeply disturbing, historical memory for the viewers. Yet the play retains its vitality for many who have no special interest in or knowledge of the time and place that the play dramatizes. We do not yet know whether Nixon (a drama about another evil political Richard)⁶ will continue to seem exciting for audiences that need to be told who Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman and even Nixon himself were. But the gamble of this book is that it will—that, indeed, all of the three films considered will live beyond their historical moment, not by attempting to transcend it (any more than Shakespeare’s histories attempt to transcend fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England) but by capturing some fundamental insights about modern America, and perhaps much else. In the pages that follow, I will indeed have a good deal to say about Kennedy and Nixon and Bush as known to (nonfictional—which is not to say univocal) history as well as to Stone’s historical fictions: not in order to grade the latter against the former, but rather better to understand just what kind of insight Stone’s movies provide. The sunny hopefulness of Kennedy, the tormented evil of Nixon, and the pathetic silliness of Bush were not invented by Oliver Stone: but neither do his representations of these matters have any claim to being exhaustive or unproblematic. They do, however, have a claim to teach us a good deal, and not only about three individual personalities. This volume will attempt to demonstrate how. It is in this way that my general method is to combine—and, I hope, successfully to synthesize—film criticism with historico-political analysis, with the goal of giving new strength and life to both.

I should add one thing. I have never before written about George W. Bush at all, and I have never written about John Kennedy at great length. But I have written an entire book about Richard Nixon, a book, in fact, that contains some brief commentary on Nixon and JFK.⁷ Since I dislike repeating myself, I have tried to reduce overlap between that book and this one to the barest essential minimum; but, since I cannot assume that all readers of this book will be familiar with the earlier one, some repetition has proved inevitable. I ask those who have read the earlier book to bear with it.

It remains to express my gratitude to those who have helped to give this book whatever merit it possesses—with, of course, the normal understanding that none of them is in any way responsible for any flaws and shortcomings that may remain, which are exclusively my own responsibility. As ever, I am indebted to more people than I can name; but I will do my best to particularize the most important debts of which I am aware. I mention the following individuals according to alphabetical order by surname. Stacia Haynie, the provost of my university, appointed me to my current professorship, one whose reduced teaching duties freed up some of the time in which the book was composed. Christopher Kendrick, my closest co-thinker since our long-ago days in graduate school together, read the entire book in manuscript and contributed many characteristically acute suggestions. Joseph Kronick, the chair of my department, awarded me a research grant that was important in helping with the late stages of the book’s composition. Daniel Lindvall, the editor of Film International, has robustly supported my work in film criticism for many years, most recently by publishing an earlier version of the Kennedy chapter of this book. Stephen Peltier, in a precise instance of without whom this book would never have been written, suggested to me the basic idea for it in the first place. Grover Proctor generously shared with me his wide-ranging scholarly knowledge of the Kennedy assassination. Steven Shaviro, whose profound understanding of both cinema and American political history (among other matters) has been an assistance and an inspiration to me for decades, was once again unfailingly helpful. Jelena Stanovnik, my editor at Intellect, provided—not for the first time—indispensable support and guidance in turning a manuscript of mine into a book. Finally, I must mention, though I cannot name, the two anonymous peer-reviewers for Intellect, who provided encouragement and valuable suggestions for revision; both were exemplary in understanding what I was trying to do and in helping me to do it better.

My greatest debt by far is, as always, to my wife, Annette Peltier Freedman. She read the book in manuscript, discussed it very usefully with me, and, in addition, made life, for me, much better worth living in every other way as well.

CHAPTER I

Kennedy: Icon

Kennedy: Icon

To Assassinate a Movie

In December 1991, Oliver Stone released JFK, a more than three-hour film that focuses on, and fictionalizes, the investigation that Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, conducted into the murder of President John F. Kennedy.⁸ It was, in the standard Hollywood parlance, a major motion picture. Stone’s earlier films had established him as one of Hollywood’s most successful directors: a winner of multiple Oscars and Golden Globes, who worked with major studios and commanded big budgets and popular stars. He was (and is) known both for extraordinary technical virtuosity and, as we have seen, for his passionate interest in modern American history, especially the Vietnam War (of which he is a decorated combat veteran). JFK was made at Warner Brothers on a budget of roughly $40,000,000. In the leading role of Jim Garrison, it stars Kevin Costner, then at the very peak of his career. Costner had recently directed, co-produced, and starred in Dances with Wolves (1990), winning Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director and receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Few, if any, of Hollywood’s leading men were at that time more popular and respected. JFK co-stars, as Garrison’s wife Liz, Sissy Spacek, herself an Oscar winner and frequent Oscar nominee. The film is also notable for featuring numerous major film and television stars, most in relatively small roles: Ed Asner, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Laurie Metcalf (at that time very popular for her supporting role in the television sitcom Roseanne [ABC, 1988–1997]), Gary Oldman, Joe Pesci, and Donald Sutherland, among others.

It is unsurprising that, with so much talent and so many resources behind it, JFK was received very favorably by the nation’s film reviewers, and went on to win various awards (including Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing, and a Golden Globes award for Stone as Best Director) and to gross, worldwide, more than five times its budget. But the reaction of America’s political journalists was very different from that of film critics and the filmgoing public. Beginning even before the movie’s release (mainly on the basis of purloined early versions of the screenplay), dozens of prominent (and not-so-prominent) journalists—most of whom had never displayed any particular knowledge of or interest in either cinema or the Kennedy assassination—launched a campaign of condemnation against Stone’s film that remains unparalleled in American history. Across the political spectrum, conservatives and liberals alike formed a chorus of denunciation, generally maintaining that the treatment of history in JFK was not simply inadequate or erroneous but somehow evil and shameful. Never, before or since, have the prime keepers of the nation’s everyday political discourse seemed so determined to destroy a movie—in many cases, even before the public had had a chance to watch it. Sometimes the attackers even derogated the film’s artistic quality, nearly always without any supporting argument.

To document the particulars of the campaign against JFK in even a remotely thorough way would require far more space than the effort would be worth for our purposes. But a few examples will be useful in giving some taste of the extraordinary obloquy that the film met. The attack by Tom Wicker of The New York Times—at that time one of America’s leading liberal journalists and the author of two popular books about Kennedy—was fairly