Scandal as Entertainment

High ratings--beratings from the real Watergators

The new slogan of television programmers might well be a version of Lord Acton's aphorism: "Power corrupts, but oh! so intriguingly." ABC'S $7.5 million miniseries, Washington: Behind Closed Doors, an unabashed takeoff on Watergate, was just about as successful as the network had hoped it would be. The show climbed steadily from an opening-night Nielsen 34 share, and at week's end had captured a 40 or more share of tube watchers in major American cities. That was not quite a blockbusting success on the scale of Roots (viewing share: 68), but at ABC it was seen as a very smashing start for the fall season.

The 12 1/2-hour melodrame `a clef has started a vigorous debate about the propriety of taking fictional liberties--including some extreme ones--with painful, important events of recent political history (see Newswatch). Though they watched it with fascination, many viewers felt that Behind Closed Doors trivialized what it piously intended to portray: a sordid and tragic interlude in national politics.

In Washington, there were flurries of telephone calls among Central Intelligence Agency alumni as they watched CIA Director William Martin (Cliff Robertson) explain to his mistress that he had lied before a Senate committee about political assassinations abroad. Martin is a fictional mutation of former CIA Chief Richard Helms, and a plot line of Behind Closed Doors is that the top spook blackmailed President Richard Monckton (Jason Robards) to cover up the killings. Nothing of the kind ever occurred, but some CIA veterans were concerned about the possibilities of further damage to the agency's already battered image.

The truth of Behind Closed Doors is Robards' extraordinary capturing of the persona of Richard Nixon. But aside from that, distortions abound. No evidence exists, for example, that John F. Kennedy ever personally ordered political assassinations abroad, as the show has it. The miniseries has the Washington Post discovering malfeasance long before the Watergate breakin; it did not. The video version of the burglary by White House plumbers of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist becomes a break-in at a St. Louis courthouse; instead of psychiatric records, the squad is after police records. The fictional Lyndon Johnson orders the CIA to carry out an illegal hunt for any Nixonian dirty laundry before the 1968 elections. So far as is known, Johnson did no such thing.

Investigative Reporter Bob Woodward says that the miniseries "illustrates the precise reason why Carl Bernstein and I refused to sell movie or TV rights to The Final Days." Both feared what dramatization might do to their account of Richard Nixon's resignation; having been participants in All the President's Men, they felt they could exercise some control over their first book. Woodward also objects to The Company, John Ehrlichman's novel on which the miniseries is loosely based. Says Woodward: "The events, the characters are so thinly veiled. If a work is fiction, then there is an obligation to go a great distance away from well-known facts and characters."

Most of those well-known characters--the real-life participants in Watergate--were not talking about the series. Some of them, like H.R. Haldeman, portrayed by Robert Vaughn with cool viciousness, are now in prison. Surprisingly, one who comes to Haldeman's defense is Herb Klein, communications director for 5 1/2 years in the Nixon White House, who eventually quit as the Watergate investigations were growing. Says he: "The overcentered power of Haldeman is inaccurate. He's a tough guy who ran a tight ship, but he wasn't a Nazi dictator." The fictional Klein character, Bob Bailey (Barry Nelson), is mislabeled as the White House press secretary and quickly fired by Vaughn/Haldeman. Says the real Klein: "If anyone was going to fire me, it would have been the press, not Haldeman. I was never threatened or accused of leaking information."

Another Watergate figure who feels wronged is former Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, caricatured in the show as an unbelievably goony Hank Ferris. (Actually, Ferris' job is a mixture of Ziegler's and that of former Special Assistant to the President Jeb Stuart Magruder.) Says Ziegler: "I have had friends call me about the portrayal of Ferris, who comes across as a particularly insipid character. I'm comfortable in my own mind that I'm not that character." Maurice Stans, chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President, calls the whole production "so far from the actual life in Washington that it can only harm the country by making people think that this is a true picture of the capital."

ABC's answer to all such complaints, of course, is that Behind Closed Doors is a confection and nothing more. Nevertheless, it has obviously touched a nerve in American society that was all too recently scraped raw by the actual experience of Watergate. |

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