Aides’ films shed light on Nixon years

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Dipper Films
John Ehrlichman, shown with a Super 8 movie camera — one of three top Nixon aides who filmed private moments

These days, Dwight Chapin shoots movies on his iPad.

But, in the Nixon White House, he and colleagues John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman were Super 8-wielding auteurs, capturing intimate moments that eluded the press corps: Tricia Nixon before her wedding; the president in Beijing enjoying a ballet about a workers insurrection; Pope Paul VI shot sideways (because Haldeman had smuggled his camera into the Vatican).

The images, surreptitious and otherwise, are included in Our Nixon, an impressionistic documentary directed by Penny Lane and premiering tonight on CNN. The film makes use of home movies shot by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chapin, some of which had been confiscated by the FBI during the Watergate investigation. The footage remained largely unseen for 40 years.

“They weren’t being hidden,” Lane said. “They were being ignored.”

A Kickstarter campaign by Lane and her co-producer, Brian Frye, helped pay for transfers of the material, the rights to which were in the public domain, from the National Archive. They spent two years making the film, which was originally intended to be about the personalities revealed, not hard-core Nixon history.

“We didn’t even want to mention Watergate,” said Lane, 35. “There are so many great books, and so much research. What we were interested in were the human casualties, the people who got caught up in it, and who went down.”

At the heart of the documentary are nearly 4,000 hours of audio from the infamous Oval Office taping system, 500 reels of Super 8 film confiscated by the FBI from Ehrlichman’s desk after his resignation in 1973, and original footage donated by Haldeman’s family to the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2012. It provides a unique look at a doomed presidency that can still start arguments.

“We know that people come into the film with a lot of baggage,” Lane said. “There are people who say, ‘I can’t hear John Ehrlichman’s voice without my stomach hurting.’ And there’s the Nixon loyalist side, which has its own strong feelings about, say, Dan Rather or Daniel Ellsberg.”

One loyalist is Chapin, the former deputy assistant to the president and the lone surviving member of the White House movie crew. (Haldeman died in 1993, and Ehrlichman in 1999.) All three served prison time for Watergate-related crimes.

Among the aspects of the documentary Chapin takes exception to is the juxtaposition of Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech of Nov. 3, 1969, and a telephone conversation with Haldeman that seems to address the same speech.

That telephone call never existed, Chapin said, because the Nixon taping system had not yet been installed.

“That conversation,” he said, “was about a speech much later in the administration. Penny (Lane) didn’t have anything, so she lifted that discussion from later in the administration and brought it into the Nov. 3 speech. That is obviously creative license, but, if you’re representing your film as documentary, it becomes a piece of propaganda.”