Episode Details

Oliver Stone's 1995 film Nixon, starring Anthony Hopkins as the haunted, duplicitous 37th U.S. president, marked both a turning point in the filmmaker's career and a significant shift in public opinion about Richard Nixon. Historian and writer Michael Koncewicz, author of They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President's Abuses of Power , joins us for a detailed discussion of the film's complex engagement with the actual history of the Nixon administration. As we consider Nixon alongside Stone's numerous other historical films (many of which ruminate on the 1960s), we explore a filmography marked by a sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating mix of wild aesthetic experimentation, paranoid conspiracy mongering, and conventional liberal sentimentalism.