MEDIA: INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE

...Familiar poses were struck-the Kennedy brothers in silhouette against the high Oval Office window, the President standing behind his desk, leaning over in solemn and lonely thought-all of this in the manner of reverent tableaus...

...It was billed as "theater of fact," but it had more the appearance, particularly in this season, of a Bible story about legendary figures in a famous saga...

...Some of these Nixon scenes have indeed been performed on TV, usually by actors or reporters who have recited the lines without inflection, striving against interpretation in an effort to be fair...

...which popped out like small snatches from famous arias...

...Curiously, the fact that this was an acted-out version of known events, without benefit of either behind-the-scene tapes or imaginative conjectures, also throws an odd light on the Cuban missile crisis itself...

...Watching the show, one began to yearn for the digressions, the coffee-drinking, the obscenities and mumblings of real conversation...

...To that extent, the Nixon tapes have cleared the air...

...The noble determination of some counselors, for example, to endure nuclear war rather than trade off an obsolete American base in Turkey seemed in this version just plain ridiculous-which indeed it may have been...

...Although it was refreshing to see, in "The Missiles of October," a President and his advisors actually dealing with a subject worthy of presidential concern, it is now hard to believe that crisis behavior at the White House was ever so inexorably purposeful and so full of speeches as we used to think, and as we were given here...

...One listened, in some disbelief in 1974, to the various drastic proposals that were advanced as appropriate responses to the Soviet weapons in Cuba...

...TV eats up facts-real facts, large facts, mostly small factsbut a three-hour concoction of distilled facts molded into heroic drama is disorienting at best...

...My guess is that the dramatist, Stanley R. Greenberg, took the gist of these conversations from the works of Robert Kennedy, Sorenson, Schlesinger and so on, and then filled them out with anecdotes, philosophical and political musings, and wry remarks from the storehouse of well-known Kennedy lore...

...But there were no insights into these real human beings which might have given dimension to the project...

...No matter how boring the presentation, however, the muddled humanity of the characters and the accumulating suspense of the story made for lively television...

...In the latter drama, the characters are vividly human...

...The viewer could hardly help being reminded that we have recently had a revealing look at another set of conversations within the Oval Office which offer some interesting contrasts...

...In any case, no serious justification for it could emerge from this oversimplified tale...

...Where the workings of government are concerned, give us the actual tapes, or perhaps a good long Congressional hearing where we can measure a man by among other things, how he sits in his chair and pours his water...

...Thus the author, in an attempt to present an objective view of what happened during those famous thirteen days, actually seemed to suggest how bizarre and disturbing the facts of this incident really were...

...Arguments in favor of these proposals may have been weighty and persuasive at the time, but when stated baldly now in a drama, without a context of history and politics, or of human feeling and thought, they sometimes seemed like the panicky deliberations of those generals and high officials in a science fiction movie who must plan countermeasures against the Blob, or whatever alien thing has landed in their pasture...

...So much for the "theater of fact" on television...

...INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE MEDIA During the week before Christmas, ABC presented "The Missiles of October," a three-hour dramatization of what went on in the White House and the Kremlin during the Cuban missile crisis...

...President" even in private) so that individual scenes had all the nuance and authenticity of a typical TV conversation between stoneface Biblical types (cf...

...The result was a long stream of rhetoric interspersed with a few famous remarks ("We were eyeball to eyeball etc...

...John Kennedy was played by William De-vane, who is becoming a sort of Charlton Heston of the Kennedy family (he was Robert in the Off-Broadway MacBird) and he was joined here by a large company of actors impersonating the real characters who had crucial roles during those thirteen days...

...The sequence of events presented here was from the public record- official, dehumanized-and as a consequence it occasionally took on a fantasy-like absurdity...

...the story of Joseph and His Brothers which is coming around again on this network-or rather don't cf...

...In one sense, "The Missiles of October," despite the magnitude of that particular crisis, pales beside "The Cover-ups of March, April, May, June and So On...

...The language was for the most part formal and inflexibly focused on the crisis (as I recall, Robert addressed his brother as "Mr...

...they go about trying to solve their miserable crisis in a stuttering confusion which is, if not admirable, at least fascinating in its revelation of character and development of plot...

...MICHAEL MURRAY...

...this story...