Nixon as Richard II via Hollywood

Oliver Stone’s movie Nixon illustrates both the strengths and limitations of empathy as a basis for psychohistorical drama. The film is a tour de force of imaginative reconstruction, and a most serious effort to recount the Nixon story and era from the former President’s own viewpoint. In the process of identifying with Nixon, however, the director has lost his own ethical and historical bearings. The violence of the Southeast Asia war and the President’s complicity in Watergate become mere backdrops for the unfolding of a personal tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, presided over by the inner humanity and even the nobility of Richard Nixon.

Nixon himself may well have viewed his era through the prism of such narcissism, and capturing that perspective was an important psychohistorical achievement. But Stone never systematically develops an alternative, more critical perspective. He only provides a few isolated glimpses, such as the disturbed and skeptical look on the face of Mrs. Nixon in response to Richard’s paranoid assertion that opposition to the war was only about hating and opposing him. Similarly, the viewpoint of the war protesters is given equal time in the Lincoln Memorial scene, but only momentarily. Meanwhile, the film is pervaded by Nixon’s fantasy of his deep similarity to Lincoln, with its self-serving analogy between the Civil War and Vietnam, and between Lincoln’s dictatorial practices and Nixon’s.

To be sure, Stone’s empathy was no small achievement considering Nixon’s unappealing aspects, and without empathy the film would have failed in a different way. But this case illustrates that empathy is not enough. The kind of approach needed here was that of Robert Jay Litton in The Nazi Doctors, where a combination of empathy and critical perspective captures both the person’s conscious self-image and what C.G. Jung called his or her shadow. Also relevant here is Eric Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, which argues that individuals must begin to assume responsibility for such splitting and repression or, in Lifton’s terms, “doubling.”

Responsibility is especially important where criminal conduct is at issue, as where Nixon’s service to his own and the US’ collective ego prolonged the Vietnam War, unnecessarily killing and maiming millions. The same approach must be applied to Truman on Hiroshima and LBJ on Vietnam. Stone, by contrast, discovered that Nixon did not have horns and then proceeded to rationalize his crimes from that perspective. The director thereby missed the doubling at the core of the matter.

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