Jefferson Morley—the dogged, relentless gumshoe whose pursuit of what the CIA knew about the assassination of John F. Kennedy has been invaluable in changing what the public knows about that dark watershed in American history—sent out a newsletter on Monday that contained a scene that Oliver Stone deleted from his biopic of Richard Nixon. It was a dramatization of an actual meeting between President Nixon and CIA director Richard Helms in which the two of them circle the subject of what the CIA knew of those events—Anthony Hopkins’s Nixon nervously hiding behind bluster while Sam Waterston plays Helms, as cool and cold-blooded as a viper. Every word of their dialogue carries a hidden, poisonous spine like those rockfish that paralyze divers, never so obviously as when Nixon tries to explain his efforts at a breakthrough with China, which he says might separate Russia from China and “could create a balance of power that would secure the peace into the next century.”
