Perhaps the best example of this comes from the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” produced by Robert Redford and starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as cub Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  

The movie was a dramatization of Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book by the same name that chronicled the investigative reporting that led to the resignations of Bob Haldeman and John Erhlichman.  The book was a best-seller in its own right-especially after their editor suggested the early drafts needed something more catchy and they hit upon the idea of naming Woodward’s secret source of government information after the recent pornographic movie, “Deep Throat.”  

There was, however, one very substantive difference between the book and the movie-that has been lost on almost everyone:  While their book scrupulously avoided giving any hint of Deep Throat’s specific government employer, the movie version made it all too clear that Deep Throat was a member of Nixon’s White House staff-a whistle blower, if you will, so disgusted with the wrongdoing going on within the Nixon White House that he risked everything to pass along damaging information in the hopes that its publication would lead to the criminals being brought to justice. 

The movie makes this point several times, in several different ways: 

• Redford and Hoffman are filmed outside the Library of Congress, effectively at a dead end in their leads. They muse in the importance of getting access to a knowledgeable source-and Redford says to Hoffman, “I have a contact at the White House.”
• On the one occasion when Redford actually phones Deep Throat at his office, he is shown in a telephone booth (remember those?) across the street from the Old Executive Office Building, the massive Second Empire building that is the part of the White House compound where most of the White House staff have their offices. Woodward is shown as looking toward the Old EOB when speaking to Deep Throat.
• Several times, when they are to meet in one of their night time rendezvous, Deep Throat is shown in his car leaving the White House gate at the end of West Executive Avenue, which is where the senior staff had coveted parking spaces. (The most senior staff, of course, had offices in the West Wing, whose entry was on West Executive Avenue, but they had ‘portal to portal’ limousine service such that they would not have taken their own car to the office.)

A blockbuster hit, it not only made Woodward wealthy, but launched many a writer on a journalistic career hoping to be the next successful investigative reporter.  The story also provided the opportunity for innumerable cocktail conversations over three decades to speculate about Deep Throat’s true identity. 

While I believed it prudent not to talk about my own Watergate involvement, on rare occasions in this same thirty year period-usually after admitting I had been the lawyer on Nixon’s staff who had finalized the White House tape transcripts before their publication, I would be asked if I knew Deep Throat’s identity.  I would answer in the affirmative-and conversation would hush and ears would lean inward to finally have confirmed the long-secret identify of that particular member of Nixon’s own staff– the key insider who had so nobly sold him out:  Was it Henry Kissinger, Dean’s deputy Fred Fielding, Zeigler’s assistant Diane Sawyer, or even Mrs. Nixon herself?  I would confide that I-and many others on the defense team believing the leaks had to have originated from within the Department of Justice-had concluded it must have been Mark Felt.  The reaction was uniform:  “Mark Felt, who the heck was he?”  And I would reply, “Why, yes, Mark Felt, the white rat”, which was his behind-the back nickname at the FBI.  As I would launch into an explanation of  why I was so sure, eyes would glaze over and conversation would drift into another direction-because everyone had seen Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman on the hunt-and ‘knew’ as fully as truth could be told, that Deep Throat had to have been a member of Nixon’s White House staff. 

So matters stood for over thirty years:  Woodward conscientiously refused to reveal Deep Throat’s true identity-the hallmark of a great and trustworthy investigative reporter.  That is, until May of 2005, when Mark Felt’s daughter revealed him as Deep Throat-and Woodward rushed a book into print, titled The Secret Man, that confirmed and expanded upon their unique, mentor-like relationship.  By this time, Felt had become senile, couldn’t add any detail to his revelation, and ultimately died late last year without additional comment. 

But here’s the rub the no one seems interested in exploring:  Mark Felt was Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Information, an agency of the Department of Justice-without any connection to Nixon or his White House staff.  Of course, there remains the underlying question about whether the Deep Throat character was really a composite-but it is relatively clear, by Woodward’s own words, that Mark Felt was his secret source of the government’s investigative information. 

There are several ramifications from this, now fully confirmed, situation: 

• First, far from a whistle blower, Felt was a career bureaucrat, bitter about not being named FBI Director following the death of J. Edgar Hoover-who was venting his disappointment by leaking dynamite information derived from the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation into the Watergate cover-up. Who cares? Well,
  • Woodward was not printing information from someone within the Nixon White House that knew specifics of the cover-up; he was printing information already known to and under aggressive investigation by the Department of Justice.
  • Put another way, it is now clear that it was the career prosecutors (Earl Silbert, Seymour Glanzer and Donald Campbell) who had broken the cover-up case and were moving swiftly toward a comprehensive indictment-well before Archibald Cox’s appointment as Special Prosecutor.
• Second, it is little wonder Woodward kept Felt’s identity secret:
  • Merely printing information passed along from someone at the heart of a Department of Justice investigation hardly qualifies as the sort of investigative reporting that had won Woodward worldwide acclaim-and made him rich and famous.
  • What Felt did-leaking information from an on-going investigation-was not only illegal and improper, it could well have slowed the progress of the investigation itself (by alerting participants and their defense counsel to actions being taken by their former colleagues). Perhaps as important, Felt had compounded his offense: He had retired from the FBI in 1973, shortly after Haldeman, Erhlichman and John Dean had been forced to resign; but following the 1974 publication of the book, he had been subjected to a hostile, aggressive FBI interview (at a Washington hotel room rented for that occasion), during which he specifically denied being the Deep Throat of Woodward’s book. His patiently false answers to FBI questions-especially after being informed of his risk–subjected him to further criminal prosecution.

I was a lawyer on Nixon’s White House staff for five years-and Fred Buzhardt’s principle deputy during the Watergate defense effort that began in earnest following the Haldeman/ Ehrlichman/Dean resignations.  I am quite confident that, but for Woodward printing Felt’s revelation without attribution (or even indication that they came from within the Department of Justice’s own ongoing investigation), the promised comprehensive criminal indictment for the Watergate cover-up would have come in the summer of 1974 and the nation (regardless of who was included in that indictment) would have been spared a fully year of agony-and all of the political intrigue I documented in my recent book. 

The movie’s lie, perpetrated as Woodward stood silent for three decades, is almost universally accepted as true.  So much so that no one really cared when Deep Throat’s identity became known.-Such is the enduring power of a hit movie’s falsehood.

Introduction:

In a sense, son-in-law Edward Cox was mistaken when he told President Nixon shortly before his 1974 resignation that doing so would not stop the onslaught.

You don’t know these people. I know them. Let me tell you something about them. I worked in the US Attorney’s Office in New York. And I went to school with some of these people. They’re tough. They’re smart. But, most of all, they hate you with a passion. Most because of the war, and some because of other reasons. And they and others like them, and the press, they’re going to hound you. They’re going to harass you for the rest of your life.

Nixon died in 1994, almost fifteen years ago, but even his death did not stop the onslaught from those radicalized by their opposition to the Vietnam War… The “Frost/Nixon” movie is the latest ad hominem attack.

Being the only President to have resigned, there is a gracious plenty of wrongdoing involved in Watergate that could still be explored—but the misrepresentations and sheer inventions from Producer Ron Howard, Playwright Peter Morgan and Consultant James Reston, Jr. reach a new low in political revisionism.

I call them ‘lies, damn lies, and dramatizations,’ but they raise the essential question of how much the truth can be shaved in film making without becoming outright propaganda.

Given Hollywood’s lingering hatred of Richard Nixon, such questions seem irrelevant—and it should come as no surprise that that “Frost/Nixon” has been nominated for five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing.

Background:

The movie is a dramatization about the taping of almost thirty hours of interviews done by British TV host David Frost with former President Richard Nixon, with the help of Frost’s two researchers, Bob Zelnick and James Reston, Jr. The edited version—four ninety minute segments–was broadcast in 1977 to great critical acclaim and drew the then-largest worldwide audience for a news interview—with an estimated forty-six million viewers in America alone.

The movie’s difficulty is that from Nixon’s furtive glance after giving the victory sign as he boarded the helicopter on the day of his resignation to the vignette about the Gucci loafers, its most dramatic moments bear little resemblance to what actually happened during the interviews themselves. How can we know this for sure? For those caring to look, there are three primary sources—all prepared by Frost or one of his researchers.

First, a DVD exists of the actual broadcasts, issued in Great Britain with an afterword by Sir David Frost. While readily available, apparently none of the movie’s reviewers saw fit to view the actual broadcast, since they show that time and again the movie version alters, omits or improperly edits what was actually said by Nixon and by Frost.

Second, there Frost’s own book, published in 1978 and entitled, “I Gave Them a Sword”: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews. As the inside scoop on ‘the story behind the story’, at least from Frost’s point of view, anything of significance not actually contained in the taped interviews themselves would surely have been mentioned in his 320 page book.

Finally, there is the 181 page booklet by James Reston, Jr. that was published in 2007. Entitled, “The Conviction of Richard Nixon, The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews,” it attempts—albeit some thirty years later—a rather audacious historical re-write designed to show how he (and he alone) brought Nixon down by discovering an unknown tape recording whose last minute use by Frost was not only the ‘gotcha moment’ in the interviews, but proves Nixon was at the center of the Watergate cover-up.

The booklet was hardly a critical success—and Reston’s claim so patently absurd as to be dismissed entirely– but for one reader: Peter Morgan, who based his stage play on Reston’s version of events. Reston—and not Frost—also is the one on whom Ron Howard relied for any historic accuracy in the movie. As we shall see, their reliance was entirely misplaced.

While the movie fairly portrays the Frost team’s extensive preparations and his two researchers’ massive disappointment in Frost’s seeming inability to nail Nixon on either foreign or domestic initiatives of his presidency, its portrayal of Nixon’s actions and statements is patently fraudulent.

Fortunately, while awaiting announcement of the Academy Awards, we can review what was actually filmed or written by the very people on Frost’s team that appear in the movie—and contrast that to the movie’s version of events. This is not a situation of being faced with competing claims from Nixon supporters; it is an exercise in comparing what Frost said happened then—and what people have been filmed as saying in the movie.

Specifics:

At least three participants are unfairly maligned in “Frost/Nixon”: David Frost, who is portrayed as a washed up, witless dandy; Jack Brennan, Nixon’s aide-de-camp, who is cast the heavyweight protecting Nixon from himself; and former President Nixon, who is portrayed by Frank Langella as doing and saying things Nixon simply did not do or say.

Let us begin with a simple example: The movie would have us believe that David Frost picked up Caroline Cushing on his flight to California by offering to include her in his first meeting with Nixon, scheduled for the very next day. In his book, Frost carefully details that first meeting, naming all participants–without any mention of Cushing. Yet he does mention her appearance and participation in several other events. A harmless dramatization? A little white lie just to show where Frost’s interests really lay? Perhaps, but factually incorrect and a substantial disservice to both Frost and Cushing.

Another dramatization has to do with the Gucci loafers worn by Frost and commented upon by Nixon. The movie ends with Frost giving Nixon a pair as a gift—apparently oblivious to the fact that Nixon disdained them as effeminate. Isn’t it intriguing that this little vignette—which provides such clear insight into the personalities of both Nixon and Frost–is nowhere mentioned in Frost’s own book? Oh, it could have happened—but it didn’t. The Gucci loafer scenes are a complete and knowing fabrication.

Aside from such dramatizations, there are far more serious breaches of historic accuracy, including:

• Interview Payment: Frost not only paid Nixon $600,000 for the interviews (as claimed), he also promised him twenty percent of the profits—an omitted fact that shows the project was more of a joint venture between Nixon and Frost. For the most part, they were not adversaries; they had a common interest in the interviews being acclaimed and widely distributed.

• Unsettling Pre-Interview Questions: The claimed pattern of Nixon asking Frost seemingly innocent but deliberately unsettling questions as each taping session was about to begin continues this deliberate misrepresentation: by and large, the interviews were not an adversarial proceeding.

• Opening Question: While the opening question (about why Nixon did not destroy the tapes) did indeed occur, Frost’s book notes that he had informed Jack Brennan of his intent and obtained Brennan’s concurrence before that morning’s filming began—so Nixon was hardly surprised at the question–and no doubt agreed it would heighten viewer interest.

• “Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”: Nixon actually made this statement during their interview, but it was in the context of why members of any administration should not have to worry about being indicted by a later administration based upon a differing legal interpretation. While others might disagree, this is precisely the point the outgoing Bush administration would make about their aggressive questioning of certain terrorists (i.e.: waterboarding): If done under presidential order after full legal review, those carrying out the instruction should not be subject to second-guessing—or government employees could never feel safe in carrying out presidential directives. The movie’s treatment is a deliberate and substantive misrepresentation.

• Brennan’s Threat to Ruin Frost: Brennan made the statement, but in the context of improper editing (where Nixon’s responses might be omitted) and not with regard to any questioning about Watergate. In fact, Frost characterizes their exchange as sort of an informal compact that he would fairly present Nixon’s accomplishments and they would not try to stonewall questions about Watergate.

• Midnight Phone Call: Among the most dramatic moments of the film is Nixon’s late night call to Frost, supposedly after having too much to drink—surely a poignant moment where Nixon reveals his inner torments. Since no mention whatsoever of this call is made in Frost’s book, we can only conclude it to be another complete and deliberate fabrication.

• Brennan Interruption: Another telling and dramatic movie moment occurs as Nixon (purportedly) is about to confess to the crimes of Watergate and Brennan deliberately invades the set to interrupt the proceedings. In truth—as written by Frost himself—Brennan merely held up a sign saying, “Let him talk”, and it was Frost himself who decided to call for a time out in the filming—by telling Nixon they needed time to change tapes–with the intent of enabling Nixon to collect his thoughts before proceeding. Frost details his following discussion with Brennan, but makes no mention whatever of Brennan then counseling Nixon in private.

• Nixon “Confession”: In the movie version, Nixon is caught by his own words on the tapes and confesses to being a part of the Watergate cover-up. But his words from those interviews were changed in the movie version. What Nixon did (which was most appropriate) was to apologize to the Nation for his mistakes during Watergate—rather a distinct difference. Frost’s book details how everyone—on both teams—seemed pleased with their Watergate exchange. Indeed, even the 1977 DVD cover blurb characterizes that part of the interview as, “culminating in the unprecedented sight of a president apologizing to his people.”

• Farewell Meeting: The movie ends with Frost calling upon Nixon in his San Clemente home following the broadcasts and that Nixon, dressed in shirt sleeves and musing about golfing in retirement, implies that he had been unmasked and undone. In contrast, Frost wrote that he had met with Nixon for their final time in his office just after the second program on foreign policy had been broadcast [i.e.: before any broadcast of their Watergate segment]–so no such observations by Nixon could have occurred. There is no mention of shirt sleeves, only an allusion to Nixon’s staff always being careful to wear coats and ties when entering his office. By then, Nixon was hard at work on his Memoirs, the second of the ten books he would write. While Frost doesn’t dare say so, it is even possible they congratulated each other on the apparent success of their venture.

Conclusion:

What are we to make of all this—a movie whose portrayal of Nixon is so biased and based on such sheer invention as to be meaningless? A conservative producer could make a movie about any of the last three Democratic presidents—and portray Bill Clinton as a philandering lightweight, Jimmy Carter as the most inept president of our lifetime, or Lyndon Johnson as a bullying, intemperate redneck. But if their film changed the words and actions of actual events to ‘prove’ their version of these leader’s souls, there would be adverse editorial comment and public reaction—as there was when this was tried with Ronald Reagan and the public outcry led to cancellation of the planned broadcast.

The Frost interviews were (and still are) mesmerizing—but they show something entirely different from the movie’s version: They show Frost probing and Nixon responding, defending his decisions and his administration. He is and remains the dominant foreign affairs president of our lifetime: Detente with Russia, the opening to China, ending the Vietnam War—all remain accomplishments of great magnitude. His domestic agenda, forged with a Congress dominated by the opposing party, shows a creativity and innovation unsurpassed by subsequent administrations. Watergate, of course, overshadows all else, but recent revelations about the true identity of Deep Throat, about the conduct of Judge John Sirica, and about the complex roles played by John Dean may yet lead to a different interpretation of those historic events.

But the Left’s residual hatred of Richard Nixon has no bounds and we are left with a movie based on the terrifically biased version by a junior researcher, basking in his fifteen minutes of fame. “Frost/Nixon” contains great acting to be sure, but the factual basis of its most telling moments is virtually non-existent.

Are Academy Awards given out on the basis of how evil some wish our thirty-seventh president to have been? We shall have to wait and see—but the American people have a right to ask how this movie could have been produced, promoted and reviewed without anyone pointing out how much of it is merely a fictionalized version of events.