A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Hugh Hewitt, the old Nixon-hand, liked the movie, which somewhat surprised me. I agree with Hewitt that Frank Langella gives a masterful performance as Nixon and that Michael Sheen and Sam Rockwell do a great deal to buttress the film, as does Kevin Bacon's on-point portrayal of Jack Brennan, Nixon's Chief of Staff in exile.

But while the writing was excellent, the direction superb and the acting quite compelling, I was disappointed somewhat in Frost/Nixon for the liberties it took with the actual course of Richard Nixon's post-Presidential career. As discussed by Fred Schwartz, the actual interviews between Frost and Nixon were not the cathartic releases the movie made them out to be. Quite the contrary:

In return for his $600,000 appearance fee, Nixon "admitted" what had already been proven; dodged or rationalized inconvenient facts; acknowledged errors but denied committing any crimes; and ended with a show of contrition and a play for sympathy. Little or no new information was uncovered, and nobody who had followed Nixon's career was surprised in the least by his manipulations and evasions. The consensus was that the whole thing wound up an overblown bore.

To someone who was around back then, the idea of making a major motion picture about such a notorious fizzle seems bizarre; you might as well write an opera about "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault." Is this just a case of memory being deceptive? Were the interviews really a landmark of a milestone of a watershed, as the publicists assert? To test this, I looked back at the reception they got in the media of the time.

The show's producers secured lavish advance coverage by giving virtually everyone with a press card some sort of "leak": transcripts, unedited video, production notes, briefing materials, correspondence. The week of the broadcast, Nixon was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, in that long-vanished era when those publications were considered influential. In the days leading up to the broadcast, the Washington Post ran several solid pages of Watergate transcripts and analysis, flashing back to the glory days of 1973.

After the airing of the first interview -- the only one anybody cared about, since it contained all the Watergate material -- there was far less hoopla. The Post's Bob Woodward, Nixon's erstwhile tormentor, called it "a much-touted television interview which shed little new light on the scandal."

Elsewhere in the Post, Haynes Johnson's analysis dripped with disappointment: "[The former president] proceeded, for the next 90 minutes, to give us all the familiar Nixon responses we have all seen for more than a generation. Those advance reports about Nixon being broken -- or shattered -- or even shaken by the withering interrogation of David Frost are in error. Nixon is in control throughout. He offers little that is new, and less that is of substance." Johnson continued: "Last night's program was billed as a dramatic and historic encounter between Nixon and his opponent, the relentless David Frost. It was nothing of the sort. . . . By the very end of the program, Frost looks as though he's swept up by the Nixon responses. . . . The tables have been turned. Frost had met his match."

The New York Times, in a brief, unsigned "Week in Review" item a few days later, echoed the been-there, done-that theme: "The spectacle was a familiar one . . . he portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview."

The Los Angeles Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch went with wire-service reports, supplemented with roundups of comments whose general tenor is summed up in a Post-Dispatch headline: nixon interview generates partisan political reactions. These papers, like most others, saw no need for any follow-up after the first day.

Of course, the reasons for the revision of history that surrounds Frost/Nixon are easy to understand when one remembers that Nixon is supposed to be a stand-in for George W. Bush and that the movie not-so-subtly hints that it is high time for a confessional from the outgoing 43rd President not unlike the supposed confessional the 37th President gave to David Frost. Propagating a particular story line, however, does not make that story line true. At the end of the movie, we are told that a triumphant David Frost was able to once again become the toast of the celebrity-journalism world and that he even regained his table at Sardi's, while Nixon was just known for Watergate and nothing else. Of course, if the sole object of good journalism is to get one a table at Sardi's, then one needs to worry about the mission statement journalists currently have for themselves. As for Nixon's post-Watergate career, it actually was quite a bit more successful than Frost/Nixon made it out to be; the former President was able to move back East fairly quickly--a goal that he set for himself in the movie--became the elder statesman that he wanted to be and at his death, he had either outlived many of his enemies or won their grudging respect.

I enjoyed the movie, political junkie that I am. To be sure, there was a certain battle of wills that went on between Frost and Nixon but the movie overdramatizes that battle and misrepresents history. For that, it deserves to be called out.