Four out of four stars (Rated R for crude language) Running time: 122 minutes. Reviewed at Market Street Cinemark on December 31.
The late former President Richard M. Nixon and I go back a long time. I grew up in a Republican household and so revered was the former president by my parents that my father always called him “Mr. Nixon.” When the Watergate scandal was overwhelming the Nixon presidency, my mother cancelled her Time Magazine subscription for what she felt was its biased reporting.
I’ve read practically every book written by or about the thirty-seventh president, the nation’s only chief executive to resign from office. Nixon has also been the subject of several motion pictures, ranging from Oliver Stone’s 1995 “Nixon” to the 1999 comedy parody “Dick“ and the 1989 TV movie “The Final Days.”
Now there is “Frost/Nixon,” the cinematic version of Peter Morgan’s Tony Award-winning stage play. Directed by Ron Howard, this movie is nothing short of a masterpiece.
The first principal character is David Frost, the British talk show raconteur who I first saw on the Americanized version of “That Was The Week That Was,” or “TW3.” Frost had bounced around on the talk show circuit with a program in Sydney and London. But he was definitely an entertainment backbencher.
The other is Richard Milhous Nixon, the disgraced former president. Nixon got his pardon and ended up in seclusion at the posh oceanfront presidential compound in San Clemente, California. We didn’t see or hear much from Nixon in the three years after his resignation.
But Frost took it upon himself to get the scoop on CBS and Mike Wallace to have the first exclusive set of interviews with Nixon. It was all a question of who needed whom the most—Nixon sought a creditable return to the world stage, while Frost was trying to resuscitate his flagging career.
The result was a series of four 90-minute interviews that drew huge ratings in 1977.
It was a veritable chess match to bring the former president together with the interviewer, who was already being ridiculed for being too lightweight to do verbal battle with the always-tough ex-president.
Howard pulls it all off with plenty to spare. Michael Sheen, the actor who was Prime Minister Tony Blair in last year’s “The Queen,” plays Frost. But it is veteran character actor Frank Langella as Richard Nixon who walks off with the movie. I have dozens of hours of videotapes of Nixon interviews, so I know the man well. Langella has the Nixonian facial mannerisms—the occasional shifty eyes, the heavy jowls, and the heavily perspiring upper lip—down to a T.
“Frost/Nixon” is compelling viewing and I can’t recommend a movie more highly.
Footnote: In the movie, Nixon accepts a $600,000 payment for the taping sessions. In Nixon’s 1990 memoir “In the Arena,” he gives a half page mention of the Frost interviews. But Nixon states that he agreed to the interviews only for the money ($540,000)—“The entire amount I received from the broadcasts went to my lawyers.”
The movie gives the viewer a different impression that Nixon was a greedy old man out for the buck. After watching former President Bill Clinton amass millions of dollars of legal expenses for his impeachment defense and other legal foibles, on this one I side with Nixon. And I’ll remind both Morgan and Howard that there were five presidents at his funeral in 1994 and a 30-day national period of mourning. I well remember CBS veteran Bob Schieffer’s parting words: “Richard Nixon may have left the White House in disgrace but he left this Earth with his dignity intact.”
In spring 1972 my father took 20 year-old me to vote for the first time after ratification of the 26th Amendment the previous year. The event was the North Carolina Republican Primary and I must have been home for spring break. My father and I walked into the nearby precinct, which in Charlotte was the Rama Road Elementary School. It should be noted that only weeks before I had gotten my military draft notice to be inducted into the U.S. Army, so I wasn’t exactly enthralled with Tricky Dick Nixon.
It was classic–my father literally stood there, I could see his feet underneath the curtain in the voting booth, and beforehand he said to me, “Son, you’re going to vote for Mr. Nixon, aren’t you?” ”Yeah Dad, absolutely,” was my response.
Instead of voting for Nixon I pulled the lever for antiwar challenger Congressman Pete McCloskey of California, who was the only other name on the presidential ballot beside Nixon. When I pulled the lever that opened up the curtain and officially cast my vote, my Dad said again, “You voted for Mr. Nixon, right?” I mean, what could I say? I needed the ride back home.
The next night my father was looking at the primary results in the Charlotte Observer. He saw that at the Rama Road Elementary School precinct there was one vote for Congressman McCloskey. I was sitting nearby, probably watching TV, and my father’s head shifted back and forth a couple of times looking at me and then looking at the election results a second and third time to check to see that his eyes weren’t deceiving him. ”Gar, you voted for Mr. Nixon, right?” ”Oh yeah, Dad,” as I could see that answering to the contrary might have meant me sleeping in the garage for the rest of spring break. You never could put anything past my old man–he knew I was lying, but not another word on the matter was ever spoken.
As I noted in the first paragraph of the “Frost/Nixon” review, Tricky Dick and I go back a long way. As an eight year-old I got immersed in the JFK/Nixon campaign, an early trigger of my lifelong interest in politics and the study of government. In 1968, I went AWOL from New Canaan High School to run home across the street because the results of the Nixon/Humphrey/Wallace presidential election was not really determined until the early afternoon the day after. I went home to watch the results on TV and returned to school later only with the comfort of knowing that Nixon had won. No one at the high school noted that I was missing, which showed what a real popular guy I was in school.
But I’ve always been amused to read other journalists’ impressions of Nixon during his years before and during the White House. The veteran columnist Jack Germond noted in his autobiography that “the poor bastard wanted to be one of the boys, but he didn’t know how. That didn’t make him a bad president or, for that matter, a good one. But it does explain why people like me never liked him. It had nothing to do with ideology or a press conspiracy. It was entirely personal.”
In fall 2004 I spent the day with Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press political reporter Walter Mears, one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. We had breakfast at The Woodlands Marriott before his Lyceum presentation at then-Montgomery College. We talked at length about his years covering Nixon. Walter never made the Nixon “enemies list.” Instead, he was “FON,” or Friend of Nixon, which always earned him friendly brickbats from the boys on the bus who covered presidential campaigns. But Mears was quite candid when he described Nixon as “the schoolmate who always lugged around his overstuffed book bag.” ”Nixon,” he said, “would get on an airplane during the campaign stops and sit alone away from the reporters. He wanted a zone of isolation that no reporter was ever to violate.” That assessment speaks volumes about Richard Nixon that comes forward in Frank Langella’s portrayal in the brilliant “Frost/Nixon.”
Not to be outdone, my personal favorite the late, great David Brinkley–I’ll never forget him chatting to me at a book signing in Houston with hundreds of other people waiting in line, looking to me for answers to questions that several people were asking him–referred to Nixon as having a “stunted personality, ill-suited to be the nation’s leader.” Brinkley made the Nixon enemies list and listed it as one of his proudest achievements in broadcast journalism. The late actor Paul Newman likewise considered his inclusion as a proud event.
My feelings toward Richard Nixon are mixed. Yup, he had his shortcomings, but seeing the “Frost/Nixon” movie reminded me of how there was so much of my father in Nixon and vice versa. Every day going off to work as an executive at Exxon, my Dad would pass a sign he taped on the door saying, “Old age and treachery shall overcome youth and skill.” Nixon, I think, had the same outlook on life, and it was quite characteristic of many of the “Greatest Generation” as they were labeled by Tom Brokaw, products of the Great Depression and World War II military service. Long time Nixon antagonist Tom Wicker wrote a somewhat glowing tribute to Nixon titled “One of Us” in which he characterized the late president as one of those guys who overcame many obstacles to become a leader like so many of his other WWII counterparts. The country owes a great debt to these men, so that’s why I’ll never join the line shaking my fist in derision at Richard Nixon. I’ve got few if any complaints.
