Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  Stone even contends that Americans are at their worst when they are trying to be at their best. In one scene, South Vietnamese soldiers, American allies, use honey donated by the United States and angry ants to torture Le Ly. On a metaphoric level, Stone uses Steve Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) as the representative American. A twisted, misguided killer, Steve attempts to atone for his own sins by showering Le Ly with jpgts and by taking her out of her natural environment and dropping her in the United States. But just as the relationship between the United States and the Republic of South Vietnam rotted, so the unnatural union of Steve and Le Ly turns expletive and violent. Steve’s suicide reinforces Stone’s view of the results of the American mission in Vietnam.

  Heaven and Earth differed from Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July in its public reception. Expensive to make, it failed miserably at the box office. Production costs exceeded the combined costs of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, but Heaven and Earth grossed only $6 million in the United States. Although it was critically applauded—one reviewer called it “Stone’s ultimate war film”—it failed to reach the audience the director intended it for. It had a message for all Rambocheering, Reagan-voting Americans, but few people paid it even passing attention.

  After the success of Born on the Fourth of July and before the debacle of Heaven and Earth, Stone moved on to new topics. Instead of fulfilling his dream of making a comedy, he decided to catalogue the life of his musical hero, Jim Morrison. But even before The Doors was completed, he had laid the foundations for a bold return to the Vietnam genre. By the late 1970s, he had decided that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had drastically altered the course of the war and America’s future, but it was not until 1988, when book publisher Ellen Ray gave him a copy of Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins in an elevator in Havana, that he became convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone. Stone devoured Garrison’s work, buying the rights to it with his own money. He then immersed himself in the “serious research” required of any historian. He read every book on JFK and the assassination that he could lay his hands on and, along with screenwriter Zachary Sklar and coproducer A. Kitman Ho, conducted over 200 interviews with conspiracy theorists and other people with knowledge of the case.

  Stone’s conception of the film soon outgrew the mere circumstances of the assassination. “The central historical question” that courses through the movie centers on neither Jim Garrison nor the identity of the president’s killers. Instead, Stone used the murder as a means of exploring the event that was central to both his and, he believed, his nation’s life: Vietnam. In this way, he was building on issues he had explored in his previous films. Platoon was an autobiographical study that showed how the everyday horrors of the war affected a young man. Born on the Fourth of July carried the war home by examining how indifference, misunderstanding, and the perverted nature of American life affected Ron Kovic’s life. But now, Stone cast an even wider net. JFK is a biography of America since World War II, with Vietnam serving as the defining event for the period.

  Stone begins JFK by rehabilitating the slain president’s image. A narrator informs the viewer that Kennedy represented “change and upheaval” in American government. We see Kennedy as he wanted to be seen, making conciliatory speeches toward the Soviets and frolicking with his family. Most importantly, we learn that Kennedy, through no fault of his own, found himself embroiled in a war in Southeast Asia. After the assassination, a stricken black maid, perhaps the mother of a grunt, sobs as she tells a reporter what “a fine man” Kennedy was. Meanwhile, Guy Banister (Ed Asner) cheers the killing, ripping Kennedy for letting the “niggers vote.” Those who supported and those who objected to Kennedy are neatly delineated. Stone seems intent on transforming Kennedy into the stained-glass hero that the Vietnam War never had.

  Vietnam barely ripples the surface of the first half of the film. As New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) initially becomes obsessed with the assassination, there is little indication that the war plays a pivotal role in anything. Instead, the war appears, as it did in the mid-1960s, as background noise always present, but rarely commented on. A brief clip shows Lyndon Johnson declaring his intent to vigorously prosecute the war. Another quick mention informs us that Johnson is asking for more money and more men to fight the war.

  As Garrison unearths more information, however, Vietnam becomes increasingly central to the story. The pivotal scene comes when Garrison travels to Washington, D.C., to meet Mr. X (Donald Sutherland). Mr. X gives him the broader perspective that the DA could never have unearthed on his own. Mr. X cannot tell Garrison who killed Kennedy, although he suggests that top government officials were involved; when he refers to “the perpetrators” and calls the killing a “coup d’ etat,” Stone flashes images of LBJ. He can, however, give Garrison information on the more important issue why “they” killed Kennedy. Kennedy had irritated powerful militarists with his refusal to invade Cuba and his decision to eliminate the CIA’s power to conduct covert activities during peacetime. The central issue, however, was Vietnam. Kennedy wanted to pull out of Vietnam by 1965, a decision clearly unacceptable to the military and the big arms dealers, who stood to make a killing if the killing continued. Somehow, these forces colluded, perhaps in combination with others, to remove the offending executive and replace him with the more hawkish Johnson, who was “personally committed” to Vietnam. Once Kennedy was out of the way, the war could start “for real.” Kennedy’s murder and the continuation of the war marked the final triumph of the military-industrial complex, a powerful junta that could run roughshod over any elected official. The personalized war Stone presented in Platoon had thus grown into a critical event that marked a decisive shift in the power structure of the United States.

  JFK was a mortar lobbed at the establishment, and it set off a firestorm of controversy. Many critics ignored Stone’s central thesis, seizing instead on the idea that he had proposed a grand conspiracy involving the CIA, FBI, elements of the military, anti-Castro Cubans, New Orleans homosexuals, the Dallas police department, and God only knows who else. Others blasted Stone for lionizing Garrison, who had, in real life, used some questionable methods (including truth serum and questioning hypnotized subjects) to gather his evidence, and for presenting speculation and composite figures as factual. Indeed, JFK attains the highest level of realism in any of Stone’s films. As in Platoon, the camera acts as an eye, as fallible as any human being’s. The camera jerks as we see something out of the corner of our eye. Did we really see what we thought was there? Stone never provides an answer. Further, Stone has mastered the technique (first seen in the 1972 Republican Convention scene in Born on the Fourth of July) of combining documentary and new footage into a seamless unity. His realistic approach went too far for many of his detractors, one of whom referred to JFK as “the cinematic equivalent of rape.”

  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 ca
lls 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.