Nixon’s Final Campaign
By MICHAEL NELSON
Richard Nixon ran more campaigns for national office than any other American except Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he tied. In the six presidential elections from 1952 to 1972, Nixon was on the ballot five times, as the Republican nominee for either vice president (1952 and 1956) or president (1960, 1968, 1972). He was elected twice as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate and twice as the head of the ticket, losing only to John F. Kennedy, in 1960. Another of Nixon’s national political campaigns, his battle to hold on to the presidency during the Watergate crisis, ended in a second defeat. He resigned in August 1974 in the face of certain impeachment and removal.
But what of Nixon’s final campaign, the one he waged from 1974 until his death, 20 years later, to be remembered as a statesman and foreign-policy maestro rather than as a crook and subverter of constitutional democracy? All of Nixon’s earlier campaigns had clear outcomes: He either won the office he sought or lost it. A recent flurry of Nixon books and a smash London and Broadway play about his famous post-presidential interviews with the British television-talk-show impresario David Frost indicate that the returns from Nixon’s last campaign are still coming in. And the outcome may remain too close to call for quite some time.
The play, Frost/Nixon, dramatizes the first major battle over Nixon’s reputation between the former president and his critics: the lengthy televised interviews with Frost in 1977. Frost paid Nixon $600,000 for the privilege of questioning him on camera for more than 28 hours, resulting in four 90-minute programs. In their session on Watergate, the last to be taped but the first to be aired, Frost drove a visibly shaken Nixon to admit that he had “let down the country,” “did abuse the power I had as president,” and “said things that were not true.” Most memorably, Nixon mourned, “I brought myself down. I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish.”
The interviews were seen at the time as a clear defeat for Nixon. As David Greenberg shows in Nixon’s Shadow, “Far from changing minds, Nixon’s victim pose elicited mostly scorn.” A Newsweek poll showed that considerably more people lowered their opinion of Nixon after watching the interviews than raised it. In 1982 the first survey of historians to be conducted after the interviews ranked Nixon in the lowest category of presidents, ahead of only Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant and behind James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.
The Conviction of Richard Nixon, James Reston Jr.’s contemporaneously written but only recently published account of his work 30 years ago as a researcher for Frost, shows how hard fought Nixon’s Watergate concessions were. Until nearly the end of the 12 days of interviews, Nixon successfully dodged, weaved, and filibustered Frost’s questions on subjects he didn’t like while discoursing impressively whenever Frost asked about foreign policy or other topics on which he felt at ease.
Meanwhile, between bouts of fuming at Frost for his weak questioning and docile listening, Reston dug deeply into the available Watergate tapes and found a previously neglected June 20, 1972, conversation between Nixon and his chief political staffer, Charles Colson, that seemed to place the president in the Watergate cover-up three days earlier than did the more familiar June 23 recording, which Nixon had come primed to discuss. (That’s the one in which Nixon suggested that aides ask the CIA to divert the FBI from its Watergate investigation on dubious national-security ground.) Frost did his homework, surprised Nixon on camera with the new transcript, and successfully badgered him into what remains the closest thing to a confession he ever made. “He was firmly skewered,” Reston writes. “His face showed it. His gibberish confirmed it. … After the interviews a role for him as an American plenipotentiary seemed highly unlikely. He died in 1994, with this last dream unfulfilled.”
But were the Frost interviews the stake in the heart that Reston claims? In hindsight, argues Conrad Black in The Invincible Quest, the interviews were actually the forum in which Nixon was allowed to lay claim to the limited zone of culpability Nixon called it “horrendous mistakes unworthy of a president,” which Black notes is somewhere “between mere mistakes and a crime” whose boundaries he would defend for the rest of his life. The interviews also allowed Nixon to show the full sweep of his mastery of foreign affairs, so much so, Reston reports, that technicians on the film crew, “bored as they were by the fineries of foreign policy,” said they “might even consider voting for Nixon again if they had the chance.”
Arguably the main contribution the Frost interviews made to Nixon’s redemption was the predicate they laid for Frost/Nixon. I have not seen the play, and I am eager to find what the director, Ron Howard, makes of it in the film version he plans to release in early fall 2008. But I have read the playwright Peter Morgan’s script and confirmed the judgment of most leading theater writers that, as Ginia Bellafante observed in The New York Times, “so committed is the play to the idea of Nixon’s likeability that it may be one of the great victories of Nixon revisionism.”
The Nixon of Frost/Nixon is strange, to be sure. Attempting small talk, he asks Frost, “Did you do any fornicating?,” and throughout the play he gazes enviously at Frost’s hand-tooled Italian loafers. (The former actually happened; the latter is Morgan’s invention.) But Morgan also puts words of, well, wisdom in Nixon’s mouth. “Never retire, Mr. Lazar,” Nixon tells the book agent Swifty Lazar in his first long speech of the play. “To me the unhappiest people in the world are those in the watering places, South of France, Palm Springs, Newport … going to parties every night, playing golf every afternoon, then drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little, retired no purpose. What makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.”
Nixon’s odd attractiveness in Frost/Nixon should come as no surprise. All of Morgan’s recent scripts notably The Queen, about Elizabeth II in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, in 1997, and The Last King of Scotland, about the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin have portrayed their historical protagonists as more complex and substantial than their prevailing public images. The choice of accomplished and appealing actors for these roles has helped to win a measure of audience sympathy for their characters: Frank Langella as Nixon, Helen Mirren as the queen, and Forest Whitaker as Amin.
One reason the Frost interviews have been so important in helping to fix Nixon’s place in history is that until recently the records of his presidency were locked in escrow. That was the result of yet another Nixon campaign: to keep his administration’s secrets for as long as possible. Now that most of them are available, though, what the historian Robert Dallek rightly labels “a striking irony” has become apparent. The combination of 2,800 hours of previously secret White House tape recordings and 20,000 pages of transcribed telephone calls (in addition to all those papers) makes the Nixon administration “more transparent than any before or since.”
Dallek is a self-proessed document maven, so much so that he told The New York Times that he chooses which presidents to write about based partly on which new collections of documents have recently been opened for inspection. Over the years, this approach has served him well. His biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy are solid, if somewhat ploddingly written, and each is marked by fresh revelations. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, for example, famously revealed the wacky drug cocktails that Kennedy took as president to deal with his terrible health problems.
Dallek’s new book, Nixon and Kissinger, is very much in the three-documents-and-a-cloud-of-dust tradition. It is a dual biography of the president and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, which focuses on the major foreign-policy decisions that Nixon, advised by Kissinger and almost no one else, made from 1969 to 1974. Dallek describes himself as a “Franklin Roosevelt Democrat,” so it’s no surprise which of those decisions he thinks were good (the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union) and which he thinks were bad (the slow disengagement from Vietnam, the overthrow of the socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende, the tilt toward Pakistan in its war with India). Dallek does find it remarkable, given the wild insecurities and hatreds that plagued both Nixon and Kissinger and often poisoned their working relationship, that so many of those decisions were good ones.
What’s lacking in Nixon and Kissinger is, well, anything we didn’t already know from lots of other Nixon books. Those were written with fewer documents, but enough, apparently (along with interviews, the public record, and the insights of careful Nixon watchers), to tell us as much about him as Dallek does. Stephen Ambrose and Richard Reeves on Nixon, Walter Isaacson and Jeremi Suri on Kissinger, and Larry Berman on the two men’s relationship are among the many who have plowed that field, and it’s not clear what Dallek adds to their labors other than a few more illustrative quotations.
In trying to make sense of Nixon, Dallek seems to follow Reeves’s 2001 book, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, in arguing that Nixon was mainly motivated by his twin desires to win elections and do great things in foreign policy. But it’s not evident that Dallek understands what Reeves understood: Nixon wanted to win elections in order to do great things in foreign policy. Dallek also puzzles, as Reeves did, about why so flawed an individual as Nixon chose politics as his vocation, but it’s Reeves who figured out that Nixon saw politics as the arena in which, through great deeds, he could become a better person than he knew himself to be by nature. “Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone,” Nixon wrote on one of many Reeves-quoted lists he drew up for himself as president. “Need to be good to do good. Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspirational. Goals: Set example, inspire, instill pride.”
Perhaps to compensate for the absence of document-generated revelations or insights in his book, Dallek sometimes inserts offhand claims that take him recklessly beyond the archival record, in which he is, if not interesting, at least secure. For example, more than once he writes that a rapid pullout from Vietnam, far from signaling weakness to the world, as Nixon and Kissinger believed, would have signaled strength. But where’s the evidence or even the argument to support that claim? Does Dallek seriously think that Nixon could have conceded defeat to the Communists in Vietnam without losing the political base that enabled him to pull off his openings to the two major Communist powers?
Elsewhere Dallek asserts (again, more than once) that when Watergate heated up after Nixon had the special prosecutor Archibad Cox fired in the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Nixon should have invoked the 25th Amendment, “suspended his authority until his culpability could be determined,” and turned the powers of the presidency over to “Gerald Ford or House Speaker Carl Albert.” But after Spiro Agnew had resigned, Ford wasn’t confirmed as vice president until December, and Albert was a notorious public drunk. Besides, the 25th Amendment deals with presidential disability comas, nervous collapses, recovery from heart attacks, and the like. As its legislative authors made clear when Congress approved the amendment, in 1965, it was never meant to supplant the impeachment process.
Conrad Black’s The Invincible Quest is also full of opinions about Nixon, most of them upbeat, but then Black doesn’t make much pretense of offering anything else. His relentlessly chronological biography reads like an annotated timeline of Nixon’s life drawn from other Nixon biographies, a thick file of clips, an occasional document, and some late-in-life conversations with Nixon, whom he grew to like immensely. This goes on for 1,152 pages. Sounds awful, doesn’t it?
Except it isn’t. Two qualities redeem The Invincible Quest. One is the verve, style, wit, and vibrancy of Black’s running commentary on the people and events who populate the book; he’s the drink-in-hand raconteur who never stops talking but somehow never bores. The other is his opinions, which are so unpredictable and interesting.
Black’s forte is the extended riff, but here are some of his pithier comments on various public figures:
“Ronald Reagan was much disparaged as an ex-actor, as if that were an undignified occupation, especially in starstruck America.”
Hubert Humphrey “was a good man, a sincere liberal, but more dated and caricaturable in his yokel’s enthusiasm than Nixon.”
In his relations with the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, “Nixon was in the classic position of the national leader who feared his own police minister, like Napoleon and Fouché and Khrushchev and Beria.”
John Connally “was the sort of tall, firm-voiced, confident person who always impressed Nixon, provided he actually knew what he was talking about and was not just a blowhard.”
Henry Kissinger “has always been an inexhaustible storehouse of nasty opinions about almost everyone … no matter how congenial he is with the individuals when he sees them.”
Nixon’s party on the China trip “had hardly got to the end of Mao’s long driveway before they began the reinterpretation of their host’s anodyne, geriatric remarks into Confucian proverbs virtually written on giant tablets of the rarest marble. … This self-important, affected, aphoristic style took like measles among the Americans.”
As for Nixon himself, he “thought that he was doomed to be traduced, double-crossed, unjustly harassed, misunderstood, underappreciated, and subjected to the trials of Job, but that by the application of his mighty will, tenacity, and diligence he would ultimately prevail.”
Well, does Nixon seem likely to prevail in his final campaign, the one for historical vindication? Certainly he played his post-presidential hand skillfully, starting with the Frost interviews. For 20 years after he resigned, Nixon avoided partisan politics and controversial domestic issues, made foreign trips and wrote well-received books about foreign policy, and confidentially advised presidents who consulted him on world affairs. Bill Clinton was especially smitten, and, at Nixon’s funeral attended by all five living presidents spoke the words Nixon would most havewanted the world to hear: “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”
Historians still rank Nixon low among presidents, although scholars in a 2000 Wall Street Journal survey lifted him from the “Failure” category into the lower range of the “Below Average,” enabling him to surpass Buchanan, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Franklin Pierce. Black’s generally pro-Nixon book isn’t selling nearly as well as Dallek’s generally critical one, and reviewers have been kinder to Dallek than to Black.
Outside the academy, however, Nixon’s prospects are much better. In a key indicator of changing public opinion about the former president, over the years voters have gone from disapproving Ford’s pardon of Nixon by two to one to approving it in the same proportion. College students, I find, accept what Ambrose has called the Nixon-inspired “impression that the only thing he and his administration had done wrong was Watergate.” What’s more, students tend to regard Watergate as politics as usual. That’s no surprise: The news media’s reflexive use of “gate” as the suffix attached to every small scandal has made the original seem small, too. And Nixon’s ability to win campaigns never depended on carrying the faculty vote.
Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College. He is author, with John Mason, of How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) and, with Sidney Milkis, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (CQ Press, 2007).
The Post-Celluloid Era
Is Tinseltown really about to disappear from our cultural radar screens? Not likely.
A REVIEW
By Geoff Pevere
The Decline of the Hollywood Empire
Hervé Fischer
Talonbooks
160 pages, softcover
ISBN 9780889225451
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One need not venture far into The Decline of the Hollywood Empire before stumbling across the first exclamation mark. It is right there, at the bottom of the first page of chapter two: “Digital distribution,” writes author Hervé Fischer, “will end this archaic system of distribution and hasten the decline of the Hollywood empire: two giant steps forward for film in one fell swoop!”
If this is true, the excited punctuation is wholly warranted. The mere idea of the collapse (“imminent” and “inevitable,” apparently) of the planet’s mightiest pop cultural apparatus evokes images worthy of the kind of apocalyptic spectacle Hollywood has been trading in since D.W. Griffith hired his first elephant wrangler: walls crumbling, skyscrapers toppling, seas rising, ships sinking, great cities consumed by conflagration—the whole judgement-day, world’s-end, made-in-California, Day of the Locust shebang.
Like most people who have been prophesying Hollywood’s fall since C.B. Demille was in junior-sized jodhpurs, Fischer—a philosopher, multimedia artist and holder of the Daniel Langlois Chair for Fine Arts and Digital Technologies at Concordia University in Montreal—sees the prospect as a cause for celebration. Ergo, all those excited exclamation points: “Marketing and promotional budgets for A-movies are as staggering as those for the productions themselves!” he exclaims by way of noting just how insanely cost-inefficient current mainstream Hollywood production practices are. Yet, at the same time, “movie-making is a license to print money, which the majors don’t want to let expire!” Yet what is the average cost of your run-of-the-mill blockbuster, as of 2002? “A record $102.8 million!”
While not always quite so breathlessly, doomsayers have been bellowing through the Hollywood hills for years. Clearly, there’s something about this industry, which has held the planet in its twinkly thrall for almost a century, and which has transformed so much, that summons wishful thinking of the deathly variety. Artists would like to see it suffer and die for its philistinism. Small businesses want it dead for its muscular monopolism. Non-American film makers would kill it for killing non-American film industries. Minorities loathe its stereotypes. And really: who wouldn’t like to see Tom Cruise counting his change at the 7-Eleven?
But if there is one reason why the mainstream American movie industry has incurred such biblical wrath over the decades, it has probably got something to do with guilt. If you love movies, you’ve loved Hollywood at some time or another. And if you love movies, you’ve had to hate yourself for that.
Fischer’s slim polemic, which was published in French in 2004 and translated into English in 2006, is steeped in the spurned lover’s pain. “There are two Americas,” he clarifies. “The creative one that we love … and the imperialist one we love less.” (That “we” is revealing. You talking to me?) Indeed, when it comes to citing examples of films and film makers that the author holds as models for potentially promising cracks in the system, his examples are not that far from the middle: the long-redundant Woody Allen is “the symbol of independent film, a unique anti-star who has rejected the Hollywood studio system.” (He is? Hasn’t the studio system rejected him?) The Matrix, which has so far spawned two sleepy hundred-million-dollar-plus sequels and a brisk business in merchandising, “will also go down in the history of this return to the original, fantastical spirit of film.” Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the most blockbustering, multiplex friendly documentary made prior to the long, profitable March of the Penguins, even gets its own exclamation point: “It beat documentary sales records in every country, from Great Britain to Cuba, the latter of which showed a pirated, subtitled version in 120 theatres and on television four weeks after the movie’s release in the United States, with a glee we can only imagine!”
If I seem to stress, unfairly perhaps, Fischer’s taste in movies—he also praises, of all things, Steven Spielberg’s flair for “naturalism”—it is not simply because my enthusiasm is less than his for Woody, Mike and The Matrix. It is because his book is about technology—specifically about how “the digital revolution tolls the bells for the empire”—and when reading about either the technology or business of movies, I am likely to slip right off into oblivion without having some real movie references as a form of intellectual purchase, no matter how many exclamation points may spike up the prose. These are matters that matter to me only insofar as they inform what is actually on screen.
Thankfully, Fischer reveals that they do inform what is on screen, although perhaps not enough to save the book from frequently reading like a digital media convention catalogue: “HD, as defined and adopted for television in 1999—HDTV—refers to the SMPTE standard of 1920 × 1080 pixels. In reality, HD is more commonly in the order of 1280 × 1024 pixels, what is referred to as 1K. In fact, a properly adjusted digital image of 1280 lines offers definition that is comparable to that of a standard 35mm print, which is in the order of 1920 × 1080 pixels.”
Sorry? Did you say something? If this is the discourse of the coming digital revolution, wake me when it’s over. But when it is over—Fischer gives the smoke a decade or so to clear—we may well find ourselves on a vast and open new frontier: the post-celluloid era.
For here is the crux of Fischer’s argument. Film is a 19th-century medium, projected by a contraption that fires beams of light through a strip of perforated celluloid as it runs at a regulated speed from one reel to another. Despite the fact that this technology is antiquated, expensive, damaging and ungainly, it remains the operative form of distributing and exhibiting movies for the Hollywood-dominated commercial mainstream. And this for a simple, vaguely sinister reason: as long as the standard exhibition format for Hollywood movies remains 35mm film, the industry maintains its monopoly over the multiplexed middle. All other formats, no matter how much more cheaply produced and disseminated, are closed out and marketplace dominance is assured.
Here are the consequences: movies have become more expensive, requiring a tighter hold on the global market to make a profit. As they have become more expensive and more global, they have necessarily become blander and more disposable: the only other products that sell as readily in Singapore as they do in Saskatoon are probably Big Macs and diet cola. Promotion costs now almost equal production costs, the inevitable result of making movies that require an enormous opening weekend return on their investment to turn a profit. (And who has the energy and intestinal fortitude to line up opening night? Teenagers.) This is why most of the people on the planet can now enjoy the same new talking baby dinosaur sequel on exactly the same day, why the same six movies are playing on screens in virtually identical multiplexes from here to Bangkokand this is why, not to put too fine a point on it, most Hollywood movies today suck like the retreating tide preceding a tsunami.
So there is a connection, loath as someone as technophobic, numerically challenged and content oriented as I am might be inclined to admit it. Technology plus economics equals the current sorry state of the mainstream cinema.
But this is changing, as The Searchers Ethan Edwards might put it, as sure as the turnin of the earth. Digital, which eliminates celluloid and thus the huge production, promotion, distribution and exhibition costs, is the rampart-storming battering ram of the empire-collapsing revolution. It will democratize the form, open the floodgates of access, reinvigorate the art, revitalize national culture and restore the cinema to what Fischer, paraphrasing McLuhan, calls the magic lantern of the imagination.
In Fischers scenario, the Imperium of Hollywood has been struggling to keep digital from penetrating its walls, but the barbarian flood is about to breach: With the advent of digital distribution, the film industry will fragment, diversify and take root again in national cultures, Fischer concludes. Logic is not on Hollywoods side.
This too may be so, but logic, especially in this most whimsical of spray-and-pray industries, has never held much sway. Surely logic would have dictated that Hollywoods decline would already have transpired. Already, the American mainstream movie industry has defied logic by surviving, against such other thought-to-be-catastrophic developments as sound, anti-trust legislation, TV, video and the massive decline in attendance that occurred first in the early 1950s and then in the late 1960s. Didnt happen: in each case, the industry recovered with new muscle and even deeper pockets. Take DVD, the first major incursion of digital technology within the distribution market. Thought as recently as just a few years ago to mark the coup de grâce of the theatrical market, it hasagainst all logicproven the opposite. Even with the price of the average DVD hovering within a few dollars of a multiplex ticket, people are still going to the show in droves. If anything DVD seems merely to have stoked the appetite for the theatrical experience, at the same time boosting Hollywood revenues for ancillary profits to heights that make the videocassette market (also thought to mark a death knell) look like small change.
While there is no doubt there are major changes afoot, and that these changes, whether they are based in digital production, distribution or exhibition technologies, represent seismic shifts for the movie industry, it is far from a done deal that they will incur Armageddon for Hollywood.
Like many forecasters of the cultural future, Fischer notes the mind-bending recent changes in movie consumption habitsDVD, downloading, pay-per-view, massive home theatre systemsto which he might now add iPods, cellphones and other handheld wireless gizmos. But does this really portend an end to Hollywood hegemony or a mere digital dispersal of its influence? Certainly it indicates that the theatrical experience is, more than ever, merely a kind of trailer for the multiplying ancillary markets, which in turn implies the inevitable deterioration of movie going as a collective event. As cheek moistening as this news might be for those dwindling numbers of us old enough to remember the ancient ritual of going to movies in sticky-floored single-screen palaces, it hardly marks the last gasp of the popcorn empire. On the contrary, there are more places than ever to dump the junk.
At best digital technologies will facilitate at least part of what Fischer is predicting: more movie theatres, more low-budget art movies and documentaries, and a return of something resembling repertory theatres, robust national cinemas and artist-driven productions. If anything, the future will force a compromise, a digitally driven market of more diversity and choice. And that, given the resoundingly multiplexed, monopolistic dreary mainstream recent state of things, is revolution enough. Better than nothing, its a start!
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Geoff Pevere has been writing, broadcasting and teaching about film, media and popular culture for more than 25 years. He is currently employed as a movie critic with the Toronto Star.
By this contributor:
The Post-Celluloid Era, a review of The Decline of the Hollywood Empire by Hervé Fischer, LRC July/August 2007
