Abstract

Minority Report

In the auditorium of that ghastly "Palace of Culture" on the Potomac, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and watch as motion picture director Oliver Stone is introduced by Jack Valenti, of the Motion Picture Association. Valenti recalls how he "went to war" against Stone over former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, determined to defend the reputation of his onetime boss, former U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Stone is man enough to take a square look at the "tortured" figure of former U.S. President Richard Nixon. Stone himself, replying to the introduction, seems to delight in that most dubious of appellations-the title "unpredictable." He desires to represent Nixon as a "Shakespearean" figure, riven by irony and contradiction and thus, inevitably, more human than he is usually portrayed. The unspoken corollary is that a more human Nixon is less deserving of unequivocal condemnation.