June 14, 2007
The Frost of Yesteryear Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:40 AM EST Publishers send me a lot of books. Usually I spend a minute or two flipping through the pages before deciding whether to keep or discard them. A few months back I got uncorrected proofs of a forthcoming book called The Conviction of Richard Nixon. Hmm, I thought, the title is certainly intriguing. Is it an imaginary trial, written by a lawyer perhaps? An account of the congressional investigations of 1973-74? An episode from his earlier career? Some sort of alternative history? On closer inspection, I was disappointed; it seemed to be just another rehash of Watergate. And when I looked closer, it was even less promising: A rehash not of the scandal itself but of David Frost’s 1977 interviews with Nixon. The idea, evidently, was that Frost had “convicted” Nixon in some unspecified fashion. An entire book about some interviews? I dropped it in my wastebasket. Imagine my surprise, then, when a play based on that book opened on Broadway this spring. In fact, Frank Langella, who plays Nixon, has just won a Tony Award.* And now there’s an interview on this site in which the author and our own Allen Barra discuss the Frost/Nixon encounter as if it were the most important event in the history of the Republic. Now, I was around in 1977—not yet old enough to vote, but not much younger than at least one of my fellow bloggers today—and I distinctly remember how disappointing everyone found the interviews. Nixon admitted things he had to admit because they were on tape, said he couldn’t remember other stuff, came up with some bogus rationalizations, confessed to errors in judgment, and made the obligatory show of contrition. In other words, Tricky Dick had been his usual Nixonian self, evasive and unrevealing. Despite his histrionics, the interviews added up to a big nothingburger, with plenty of cheese. To be sure, memory can be deceptive, especially after so many years. For example, Mr. Reston says in his interview that “no one ever accused Richard Nixon of being an idiot,” which I know for a fact is not true; in my youth, people did it all the time. So I looked at newspapers from when the interviews were broadcast. (I used the New York Times, which in those long-gone days was liberal but not left-wing, because that’s what the Forbes library has on microfilm.) Sure enough, the reaction was one of disappointment. According to an unsigned item in the Week in Review section, “the spectacle was a familiar one . . . Mr. Nixon moved closer than ever before to admitting culpability in the Watergate cover-up, but he insisted, as before, that he was guilty of no crime and 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.” If Nixon was “convicted,” it was the tapes that did it. In the Frost interviews he accepted responsibility without blame, admitted mistakes but not criminal acts, and said he had resigned voluntarily to spare the nation further turmoil. Nothing new, nothing unexpected. Viewers were unimpressed; ratings declined sharply for later installments in the series, and a poll taken afterwards showed a small decline in Nixon’s “highly unfavorable” rating, from 47 to 42 percent. How did this damp squib become a watershed, a momentous turning point, a landmark in the history of the Presidency? At first glance, the case resembles that of another play currently running on Broadway, Inherit the Wind. As is well documented (here and here, for example), most contemporary observers, including H. L. Mencken, saw the Scopes Trial as a victory for creationism; no one thought Clarence Darrow had shown up William Jennings Bryan. But later historians ignored all this and portrayed the trial the way they wished it had been. There are some similarities between that and the Nixon interviews, though the Scopes Trial got enormously more publicity when it happened, and I’m sure that Frost/Nixon does a better job of sticking to the truth (it could hardly do worse). Yet I think a closer Broadway parallel lies in the recent rash of “jukebox musicals,” in which the works of ABBA or Billy Joel are woven in a story and performed on stage every night. We all know that nothing is as good as it was when you were young; the girls were prettier back then, the music was better, and the politics were more exciting and clear-cut. So now that the 1970s are in the ascendant with Broadway’s graying audiences, why not generate another batch of retro kicks with a show based on the decade’s greatest political hit, Watergate? As Mr. Reston points out, Watergate “put the nation through a terrible agony”—so terrible and agonizing that Democrats have been gleefully reliving it ever since. Cherry-pick the best moments, embed them in a backstory, hire some impersonators, and you’ve got a Broadway hit. In politics as in music, the worn-out schtick of the late 1970s seems fresh and new when it’s been out of circulation for a while. And, truth be told, we all find ourselves humming “Dancing Queen” and “Only the Good Die Young” once in a while. So there’s no harm in reliving your youth by wallowing in Richard Nixon’s reptilian charm one more time. Like Billy Joel and ABBA, it’s a guilty pleasure—though if Nixon were around today, he would be sure to dispute the “guilty” part. --------------------- * I’m sure Langella does a great job, though in my childhood, Nixon was the easiest person in the world to imitate. All you had to do was puff out your cheeks and say, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear” in a gruff voice, and you had him dead on. If you were going all out, you made V signs with your fingers--in fact, if you did that and glowered, you could imitate Nixon silently. I’m also just barely old enough to remember when people used to imitate LBJ. That might have been even easier: Just put on any sort of Southern accent, however fake, and people in our far-from-cosmopolitan little Northeastern town, where the very idea of a Southern accent was inherently hilarious, would laugh uproariously. It still worked a decade later when Jimmy Carter was President. There was a commercial for frozen waffles in which a Southern-accented mother told her husband that she’d just made waffles in the toaster, whereupon her twin little girls chimed in with: “An’ weeee he’ped!” This always put me and my siblings out of commission for the next five minutes. For the whole time I was in middle school, all you had to do was say, “An’ weeee he’ped!,” even if it made no sense in the context, and people would think you were the next Richard Pryor.
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