From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Day the Truth Was Shot
Oliver Stone tries history again. An eyewitness sets the record straight
Newsweek called it "fascinating." The Boston Globe "engaging" in the way it "chronicles a frighteningly chaotic moment when our government was in more disarray than most of us knew." Richard Dreyfuss, one of its stars, says it was "the best historical drama I had ever read," adding elegantly that "it doesn't screw around with the truth."
Oh, but it does. "The Day Reagan Was Shot," a Showtime drama that premiered on Sunday to wide acclaim, is yet another dubious Oliver Stone production. Usually Mr. Stone flies solo on the Noon Balloon, but this time he was joined by director and co-pilot Cyrus Nowrasteh.
Like most Stone movies, "The Day Reagan Was Shot" begins with a faithful dramatic representation of the main event: in this case, the March 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley. Thereafter, as the scene shifts to the White House, the fictional account begins.
How do I know it is fictional? Because I was there. Oh, and I had a tape recorder. While a team of senior staffers (Edwin Meese, James Baker, Michael Deaver, Lyn Nofziger) assembled at George Washington University Hospital to direct events there, I brought together within the White House Situation Room a team of senior cabinet officers and White House staff.
Situation Room meetings are rarely tape-recorded, but because we were dealing with a national emergency that afternoon, I placed my own small recorder in the center of the table. I captured the entire proceedings, about six hours. Written versions of these events have appeared since, some mostly accurate, others mostly inaccurate, but none has approached "The Day Reagan Was Shot" for brazen distortion.
Apart from the drama of the shooting, the most memorable aspect of the day, for many, was the appearance of Alexander Haig, secretary of state, in the White House press room. It was there that he made his statement about being "in control" in the White House. In fact, he was not, nor did he state the presidential succession accurately. But he and the team of officials meeting in the Situation Room did have the situation under control, and despite brief uncertainties and a few flashes of tension, they performed admirably.
But for Hollywood, admirable actions by people associated with the Reagan White House are not the stuff of drama. So Messrs. Stone and Nowrasteh depict certain cabinet members as uninformed weaklings and Mr. Haig as a brooding, swaggering, cursing, face-slapping coup-plotter. Other cabinet members and senior White House staffers are cowering wimps.
The film places generals in the Situation Room when they were not there; introduces conversations that never occurred; claims that a "red alert from NORAD" was in progress (there is no such thing) and that a Soviet "wolf pack" was off our coast with malign intent. (It wasn't: There were more Soviet subs than usual because it was the end-of-the-month changeover day, as we figured out within 20 minutes.)
The film claims that communications between the hospital and White House were spotty and uncertain; shows Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin complaining in a telephone call about weapons systems aimed at the Soviets that were not even decided on until months later; and makes Nancy Reagan out to be an emotionally unstable woman and aide Michael Deaver a sinister manipulator of the news. Meanwhile, Chief of Staff James Baker is a scheming politico, and Counselor Edwin Meese III is uninformed and confused.
In fact, Messrs. Baker, Meese and Deaver ran a tight command center at the hospital. They were in constant touch with the Situation Room on secure lines kept open at all times, and Mrs. Reagan displayed the same courage and determination that she has shown through her husband's struggle with Alzheimer's Disease.
One of the most ludicrous scenes of the movie has Mr. Deaver and Mrs. Reagan forcing the president, just after surgery and still on a hospital gurney, to sit up, smile and sign a dairy-support bill, compelling him to do several "takes" for the camera to deceive the public about his fitness. (The bill was actually signed a day later in his hospital room, with the president already safely recovering.) Messrs. Deaver and Baker are also depicted trying to pressure the surgeons to lie to the press and public about Mr. Reagan's condition, but no such pressuring occurred.
The problem here is not simply that Messrs. Stone and Nowrasteh have sensationalized and distorted the truth but that they have made a film that will be taken as accurate--especially by viewers under, say, 30. There is something about the full Hollywood treatment, with its star performers and glossy production values, that imprints history on the mind (however falsely) more vividly than any book can.
It is true that there were brief moments of tension, notably between Mr. Haig and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger over whether the "DefCon" (defensive condition) had been raised. (It had not, and before making his unexpected press-room announcement, Mr. Haig knew that.) And Mr. Haig did mistakenly claim that, in the absence of the vice president, he was "constitutionally" at "the helm." But Messrs. Stone and Nowrasteh's vindictive treatment of Mr. Haig (played by Richard Dreyfuss) does not even come close to an accurate portrayal of an experienced public servant trying to sort out a complex situation.
Messrs. Stone and Nowrasteh had completed their shoot by the time I wrote an account of the March 1981 events in the Atlantic Monthly, on the 20th anniversary. They then had a problem: They needed to validate their version and had not known about my tapes. I insisted on seeing the film before talking with Mr. Stone's people, and after I did, Mr. Nowrasteh had the temerity to say that the tapes "corroborate our movie." They do no such thing.
Once again Oliver Stone leads the viewing public to believe that the world was at the brink of disaster, thanks to an internal government conspiracy (an attempted coup by Mr. Haig), aggravated, according to Mr. Nowrasteh, by "a lot of mistakes by high-level cabinet members [that] put us on a very intense nuclear alert status . . . and the Russians responded accordingly." This is fantasy.
The end of the movie is a hoot. Mr. Haig, his coup plot foiled, confronts the cabinet and White House staffers with a deal: He'll not tell about their nearly having thrust the nation into nuclear war if they'll not tell about his lunge for presidential power. Sneering, Mr. Dreyfuss strides from the room while the band of spineless officials breathes a sigh of relief.
Maybe the whole thing was meant as a comedy. If not, it is simply a swindle.
Mr. Allen, Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, 1981-82, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a consultant at Apco Worldwide.
